“If everything happened as you claimed, Chief Inspector, then why would I put back the original lock on the icehouse, with an estate full of guests and a kitchen that was certain to require ice?”
Lord Ingram’s tone was calm, far calmer than Treadles’s would have been, under the circumstances.
“Sir, with all due respect, we have no evidence at all that you are the one who put the original lock back. It could very well have been someone else who discovered that the wrong lock was on the door and rectified the situation.”
“Ridiculous,” said Lord Bancroft. “You are saying that my brother did all this while the estate swarmed with guests?”
“It is a great deal less ridiculous than the version of events peddled by Mr. Sherrinford Holmes, which would have me believe thatoutsidersdid all this while the estate swarmed with guests.”
Against that, even Lord Bancroft had no proper retort.
Treadles glanced toward the door of the library. Why was Charlotte Holmes not marching in, the true culprit following meekly in her wake? He would declare Sherrinford Holmes’s stupid mustache the most beautiful sight he’d ever beheld if the damned thing would only materialize.
This very moment.
Lord Ingram, too, gazed at the door. Then he looked back at his nemesis. “Are you here to arrest me, Chief Inspector?”
“No, not yet, my lord,” said Fowler, the barest trace of smugness to his voice. “But I ask that you will please remain in the manor, pending further notice.”
Mrs. Watson readMiss Holmes’s telegram, changed in record time, and rushed out of her house. Luck was with her. She encountered no congestion of carriages on the way to Somerset House, where she employed every last ounce of her charm and finished her search in what must also be record time.
She next traveled with breakneck speed to Paddington station, where Miss Holmes was already waiting on the platform.
With her Sherrinford beard on, it was difficult to gauge how close—or far away—she was from Maximum Tolerable Chins, the hypothetical limit at which Miss Holmes began to watch how much she ate. But Mrs. Watson very much suspected that her appetite had not recovered. She didn’t look very different, but she felt slighter—and very, very weary.
They clasped hands briefly.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” murmured Miss Holmes.
Mrs. Watson, who tended to fret even in the normal course of events, had been lying awake every night, well into the small hours, trying to wrestle her mind into some semblance of tranquility. Alas, every time she succeeded, a few minutes later she would find that she had but started down a different path of contemplating how everything could go horribly, irrevocably wrong.
“Well enough,” she said. And that was a truthful answer. Compared to Lord Ingram, they were all faring spectacularly well, cocooned in good luck and blessings.
But perhaps the tide was about to turn for him as well. Certainly the work Mrs. Watson had put in this day must rank among some of the most worthwhile of her life.
“How did you know?” she asked Miss Holmes. “How did you know what I would find at the General Register Office?”
“I didn’t. I didn’t think in that direction until this morning, after I learned that the pathologist, in the course of the autopsy, discovered that Lady Ingram was with child.”
Mrs. Watson gasped. “What—what doesthatmean?”
“That’s what I hope to find out in Oxfordshire.”
As if on cue, the waiting train whistled.
Mrs. Watson was still reeling. “Does Lord Ingram know? What does he think of it?”
“I imagine he must, by now—Lord Bancroft attended the autopsy. But I have not met him since I heard the news from Scotland Yard.”
“Oh, the poor boy. What an intolerable situation.”
“Well,” said Miss Holmes. “That situation will change soon.”
“I hope so!” Mrs. Watson said fervently.
“Be careful what you wish for, ma’am,” said Miss Holmes, a hint of apology to her voice. “It could change for the worse.”
The past summer,while in Oxfordshire trying to find the whereabouts of one Mr. Myron Finch, Charlotte had passed by Lady Ingram’s ancestral estate. At the time, she and Mrs. Watson had peered in at the gate but not called upon the inhabitants.
