A Study In Scarlet Women Page 5

  Is this your retaliation for my failure to keep my word?

  Or at least that was what Livia heard.

  Charlotte looked in Livia’s direction, as if she knew exactly who was on the other side of the door and what questions tumbled about in Livia’s head. “No. My plan involved no publicity whatsoever. Despite my longstanding wish to seek education and respectable employment, despite promises some in this room have made to me, in the end it became clear that I was not to be allowed any path except matrimony, which is an eminently unsuitable choice for me. So I decided to take the logical next step: remove my maidenhead and therefore nullify my marital eligibility.”

  Lady Holmes leaped to her feet. “But that is the most stupid, absurd, and—”

  “Lady Holmes, we have heard enough from you today,” Sir Henry growled. “Charlotte, continue.”

  “I needed a man. Moreover, I needed a man who cannot be compelled to marry me, therefore a married man. This presented some difficulty, as most married gentlemen I know would refuse me on grounds of either principle or caution. So I had to settle for someone who is both amoral and somewhat reckless.

  “Mr. Shrewsbury fit my criteria perfectly. Unfortunately, he is also an idiot. Yesterday evening he returned home roaring drunk from a birthday celebration, mistook his wife for his mistress, and proceeded to tell her all about our agreement, time and venue included.”

  Lady Holmes gasped loudly. “But that is reprehensible. Why did not Mrs. Shrewsbury or Lady Shrewsbury come to us then, so that we could prevent your execrably ill-considered plan from going forward?”

  “Why indeed? But you need not be so outraged, Mamma: You would have done the same thing, keeping the intelligence quiet until such a time when you could appear with a regular jury box of witnesses to catch the offending couple in flagrante delicto.”

  “I— You— It is—” Lady Holmes sputtered. “Oh, I see. You don’t think you did anything wrong, Miss Charlotte, do you? Are you so selfish that you cannot think beyond yourself? Who will marry Livia now, with the family’s reputation dragged through mud?”

  Livia had to restrain herself from throttling her mother. Charlotte’s life had been ruined. Would no one think of her? What would she do for the rest of her life?

  “Well, you will have plenty of time to contemplate it now!” Lady Holmes’s voice was once again climbing rapidly in pitch and volume. “You’ll spend the rest of your life in the back cottage at home. No one will call on you. No one will write you. No one will care in the least whether you live or die.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” said Charlotte softly, almost inaudibly.

  Livia couldn’t control herself anymore. She threw open the door. “Charlotte!”

  Charlotte rose, a wan smile on her face. “Livia.”

  Livia ran to her sister and embraced her. “Oh, Charlotte. What a horrible day.”

  “For her?” said Lady Holmes sharply. “It is you who will pay the price for her infamy.”

  “You think I give a farthing for that?” Livia took her sister by the elbow. “Come upstairs, Charlotte. I’ll ring for a tray of tea. You must be hungry.”

  “You won’t take her anywhere. I am not finished with her.”

  “Yes, you are. For the rest of the evening, at least.”

  Lady Holmes wore an almost comical look of surprise. Livia was the Holmes daughter most likely to scowl, but she was rarely openly disobedient.

  Taking advantage of her mother’s momentary stupefaction, Livia made off with Charlotte.

  Three

  Inspector Treadles had first heard of the name Sherlock Holmes two years earlier.

  The Treadleses had joined Lord Ingram for a dig on the Isles of Scilly—it never failed to surprise Treadles that he was affiliated with a man of such elevated circumstances, but their friendship was as warm as it was unlikely.

  The excursion had been an especially good one, the days balmy and clear, the landscape a heart-stopping green against a shallow sea that was almost turquoise at times. At each meal, the companions luxuriated in conversation and camaraderie. And late at night, conversation and camaraderie continued in private between the inspector and his wife in their tent, augmented by tender lovemaking.

  The pearls came up one evening.

  Not long before, at Easter dinner with his wife’s family, Mr. Barnaby Cousins, Treadles’s brother-in-law, had complained bitterly about a pair of expensive earrings he had bought for his wife and which had disappeared ten days prior, shortly before Mrs. Cousins dismissed her maid. Mr. Cousins simply could not understand why the matter hadn’t been handed to the police.

  “If a servant steals a spoon,” he had thundered, “you dismiss her without a letter of character. Those pearls cost a fortune! Of course one never wants one’s door darkened by a constable, but this one could have used the service entrance and the housekeeper could have taken care of the matter.”

  Remembering himself, Mr. Cousins had nodded stiffly at Treadles, then still only a sergeant. “Present company excepted, of course.”

  “Of course,” Treadles had replied.

  Mr. Cousins berated his wife for another five minutes. Treadles would have had more sympathy for Mrs. Cousins if she weren’t as disagreeable as her husband—and he’d have forgotten the matter if Alice, his wife, hadn’t commented later how odd it was that Mrs. Cousins hadn’t turned to the law.

  “She abhors any hint of criminality on the part of staff. I would have expected her to at least have said something to me, in order that word would reach your ear. And I did visit at the time—remember? She was so upset Barnaby demanded that I call on her.”

  Lord Ingram, as was his wont, listened carefully to their account. Two nights later, he asked Alice whether Mrs. Cousins frequently suspected wrongdoing on the part of her staff.

  “And how,” answered Alice. “I should hate to be in service in her house.”

  “You wouldn’t by any chance have noticed any strong odors when you visited her, shortly after the disappearance of the earrings?”

  Alice leaned back in surprise. “Now that you mention it, I do remember thinking that my sister-in-law’s rooms smelled pungently sour. But how did you know that, my lord?”

  “I hadn’t the least inkling, Mrs. Treadles,” replied Lord Ingram, a rather mysterious expression on his face. “But I know someone named Holmes, who enjoys such little puzzles. I sent a note—with all references to names and locales redacted of course—and a reply came today with these questions to ask.”

  “How interesting. Will you now write back to Mr. Holmes with the answers to his questions?”

  Lord Ingram’s eyes gleamed. “That will not be necessary. Holmes had instructed that should the answers to both questions be yes, I may go ahead and tell you that it is Holmes’s theory that Mrs. Cousins’s suspicions got the better of her sense. More specifically, she became convinced that her maid had stolen her precious pearls and replaced them with a pair of replicas, French imitations which are said to be able to fool the eyes of an expert. To prove that it was indeed the case, she dropped the earrings into a container filled with hot vinegar—ergo the odor in her rooms—because paste pearls would not dissolve in vinegar.”

  Alice gasped. “And the pearls must have dissolved, fully or partially, which proved her maid’s innocence but destroyed the expensive earrings!”

  “No wonder she needed to take to her bed!” exclaimed Treadles. “And no wonder she couldn’t have her maid charged with any crime when her own stupidity was her undoing.”

  “Oh but she did dismiss the poor woman without a letter of character. After seven years of service!” Alice set her hand on her husband’s sleeve. “We must find her so that I may provide a letter of character for her—and to amend for my sister-in-law’s unkindness.”

  “Consider it done, my dear.” Treadles turned back to Lord Ingram. “But this Holmes fe
llow is marvelous.”

  “Holmes’s mind has always been a thing of beauty,” said Lord Ingram with a slight smile.

  Two months later, while dining out with Lord Ingram in town, Alice related a tragic but curious case that came to her via her physician, Dr. Motley, who had learned of it many years ago from a colleague. The colleague had attended a prominent family. The daughter of the house, who was about fourteen at the time, had suffered for a while from a deep melancholia. One morning, by all appearances, she passed away peacefully in her sleep. The parents, though devastated, believed it to have been an act of God, that their child was now in a much better place. The family physician, however, could not bring himself to put faith in such a fairytale.

  He dared not voice his thoughts aloud to the parents, but did confide in Motley his suspicion that the girl had committed suicide, even though he couldn’t find any evidence to that effect. She had on occasion taken a sip of her mother’s laudanum to help her sleep, but the draught was always measured out carefully by the mother, drop by drop. No empty bottles of morphine or chloral lay by the girl’s bedside. No signs of suffering or struggle that would have betrayed the involvement of arsenic or cyanide. She had said good night to her parents a perfectly healthy young woman and in the morning they had found themselves sobbing over her inert body.

  “Perhaps your friend Holmes can solve this terrible riddle, my lord,” Alice had said to Lord Ingram.

  The next evening Inspector Treadles received a note from Lord Ingram. He had a question from Holmes. Was soda water made on the premises for the consumption of the household?

  As it so happened, Alice, calling on her father, whose health was deteriorating, had run into Motley the following day. She took the opportunity to pose the question. A surprised Motley had answered in the affirmative: Yes, he believed that the staff at the house did procure canisters of liquid carbon dioxide to make soda water.

  Treadles passed on the intelligence to Lord Ingram. An answer came in due time. According to Holmes, as relayed by Lord Ingram, the girl had died of self-inflicted hypercapnia. When liquid carbon dioxide evaporated, the process dramatically lowered the surrounding temperature, so that some of the liquid carbon dioxide froze into a solid—a phenomenon someone in the house might have shown her.

  On the night of her death she could have replicated that process, smuggled the resulting solid pieces to her room, and then, when she was drowsy from the laudanum, set the frozen carbon dioxide on her bed and drawn the bed curtains. In the morning there would have been no trace of the frozen gas, which would have sublimated completely in the intervening hours, suffocating her in the process. And if any excess carbon dioxide had been in the air, it would have dissipated by the maid opening the door, the windows, and the bed curtains.

  “But why?” Treadles exclaimed after he’d read the note. “Why go to such extraordinary lengths?”

  “So that her parents would think exactly as they did, that their daughter perished by the will of God, and not her own hand,” said his wife sadly.

  They held on to each other for a while. At the end of this silence, Alice murmured, “Do you think, my dear, that Holmes is perhaps not a real person, but an entity Lord Ingram made up so that he wouldn’t intimidate us with his vastly superior intelligence?”

  “That is brilliant, my dear. Why have I not thought of it before?”

  “Oh, because it’s brilliant?” She laughed. He pulled her to him for an affectionate kiss.

  Mere weeks after that Treadles plucked up his courage and wrote to Lord Ingram to request help from “Holmes.” His career was on a healthy path. Had he married a woman of his own social class, he would have been content to let promotions come in time. But Alice had given up a life of luxury to become his wife. He was never going to be a rich man; the least he could do was to become highly successful and respected in his profession—in as little time as possible—and make her proud.

  The case in question concerned a body discovered aboard a P&O liner that had set sail from Port Said. The passenger was identified as an Egyptologist named Rendell. He had been dead at least a day and by his side was a note that, according to his family and friends, was most certainly written in his own hand.

  The note read,

  The curse of the pharaohs is real. Wilkinson has leapt overboard in a fit of madness and now I feel its grip on me. A darkness descends. I can’t breathe. Can no one help me?

  The mummies that had been brought back in the cargo did not look particularly menacing to Treadles, as far as mummies went. And the sarcophagi that contained them seemed pedestrian, remarkable in neither beauty nor worth.

  One of the ship’s officers recalled that approximately thirty-six hours before the steamer’s arrival in Southampton, an agitated Rendell had demanded that the vessel be turned around to search for his friend. He declared that Wilkinson had been in a state ever since Gibraltar and had remained confined to his room, shaking in terror at the mummies’ specters. But now he was nowhere to be found and Rendell was convinced he was bobbing in the Atlantic.

  The officer had pointed out that Wilkinson might have been nothing more than seasick. And perhaps, having recovered, he had taken to shipboard society with fervor, to make up for lost time. It was scarcely unheard of for passengers to be found inebriated in nooks and crannies—or in the company of friendly widows. Rendell, miffed that his concern wasn’t taken seriously, stormed off. And the officer was now experiencing remorse. Perhaps he ought to have believed the poor man.

  Treadles was not one to dismiss the supernatural out of hand, but neither was he convinced that malevolent spirits lingered for millennia, waiting to ambush hapless Egyptologists.

  He sent Rendell’s body to the coroner and laid out the facts of the case for Lord Ingram to pass on to Holmes. A response came the next day.

  Dear Inspector,

  I have received the following from Holmes, quoted verbatim.

  It is possible there is more than one intrigue at play.

  The first involves a deception. Two young men set out for Egypt with high hopes of a tremendous find. They returned with sadly ordinary artifacts. There would be no fame and fortune waiting in England, only the disappointment of fathers who had financed the expedition. What to do? Ah, yes, the curse of the pharaohs. If they could stage something dramatic—Rendell comatose and Wilkinson missing—the public might be intrigued enough to pay to see those objects, the removal of which incited the wrath of the spirits.

  Rendell’s conversation with the ship’s officer was clearly meant to give the impression that Wilkinson had leapt overboard. Since no one saw that happen, the possibilities are twofold: One, Wilkinson disembarked in Gibraltar; two, he did so at Southampton.

  The likelihood is that Wilkinson remained on the ship to tamper with the draught Rendell was to take. Rendell went to his death in blithe ignorance of his friend’s treachery. Wilkinson then disembarked with the rest of the crowd, before Rendell was found dead.

  As for why Wilkinson cooked up this entire elaborate scheme to do away with Rendell, since no financial trouble or professional jealousy has been mentioned, let us say, Cherchez la femme.

  Wish you success in your endeavor,

  Ashburton

  The dead man’s fiancée turned out to be a very beautiful young woman. Wilkinson was found in Southampton, waiting for an opportune moment to pretend to have lately reached England. And Holmes was almost exactly right about how it had been done, except that the curse of the pharaoh had been Rendell’s idea, which Wilkinson co-opted for his own purpose.

  The case had firmly secured the favor of his superiors for Treadles and he had very much wished to thank Holmes. But Lord Ingram had refused all offers of gratitude on Holmes’s behalf. “Holmes wants only an occupied mind. Everything else is secondary.”

  “What does Holmes do then, when there aren’t perplexing riddles to be solved?” />
  “You do not wish to know,” said Lord Ingram. And then, after a moment, “Perhaps I should have said, ‘I do not wish to know.’”

  An answer that did nothing to dispel Inspector Treadles’s conviction that Lord Ingram and Holmes were most likely one and the same.

  Since then, he had consulted Holmes, via Lord Ingram, two more times, still surprised on each occasion by the resolute agility of the mind on the other end of the correspondence. Holmes was becoming—had become, if Treadles were entirely honest with himself—an institution in his life.

  A venerated institution.

  And now that institution had crumbled.

  Treadles pushed aside the evening newspapers littering his desk and pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d found no article about any Holmes suffering from a carriage mishap, a tumble into the Thames, or a botched medical procedure. A discreet inquiry to his colleagues had yielded similarly barren results: no dispute taken too far, robbery gone wrong, or attempted murder that left a man in a deep coma.

  For that had to be it, hadn’t it, a deep coma? What else could Lord Ingram possibly mean by Holmes being alive, yet completely beyond his reach?

  His wife, in a lilac dressing gown printed with a paisley pattern, came into the room. “Nothing, eh?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Alice sighed. “Poor Mr. Holmes. Whatever could the matter be?”

  Treadles could only continue to shake his head. As an investigator, he had decent instincts. And his instincts told him that he was in the wilderness with regard to the misfortunes of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, not even near the right track, let alone following it.

  “And I’ve certainly been put into my place,” Alice went on, “given that Lord Ingram and Mr. Holmes aren’t remotely the same person.”

  “Well, I for one thought your hypothesis was remarkably elegant. It really is too bad that sometimes inconvenient facts surface to thumb their noses at remarkably elegant hypotheses.”