“It’s quite all right,” answered Mrs. Sullivan. She must have been in her late twenties, but her voice sounded girlish, almost childish. “They don’t let new widows do much. My sister has taken charge of my children, my mother handles the callers, and Mr. Sullivan’s cousins will be making all the arrangements for the funeral. Other than mourning—and being fitted for more mourning attire—I have no other duties in my moment of grief.”
Charlotte raised a brow—people who were this candid to strangers usually wished for a reaction. “I see,” she said, calibrating her tone to make it sound as if she was trying not to betray how taken aback she was.
Hers seemed to be the correct reaction. Mrs. Sullivan leaned forward. “So what can I do for you, Miss Holmes?”
“Ah . . . right. I am here as a representative of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, my brother, who has agreed to help Mrs. Treadles find out the truth of the case.”
“Yes, I know that. The note Mr. Holmes sent around made that very clear. I hope you will be more thorough in your work than the police. That Sergeant Howe who came barely asked any questions of anyone in the house, me least of all, as I didn’t attend the party.”
As Charlotte had thought, here was a woman who needed attention. And given her husband’s interest in other people’s wives, it seemed reasonable to assume that he hadn’t paid his own wife as much mind as she would have liked.
“Perhaps Sergeant Howe didn’t want to be indelicate at a time such as this.”
“Pfft.” Mrs. Sullivan waved a dismissive hand. “He wasn’t considerate. He was uninterested. And he only asked questions I couldn’t answer, such as when Mr. Sullivan left that night and whether he knew Inspector Treadles.”
Interesting. “You didn’t know when Mr. Sullivan left that night for the party?”
“He didn’t come home that evening, so he must have gone directly from work.”
“Was that a common occurence?”
Mrs. Sullivan shrugged. “It wasn’t unusual for him to socialize without me. He found me too gauche, I’d guess, not suitable for the kind of crowd he wanted to be associated with.”
Gauche was not exactly the word Charlotte would have used for Mrs. Sullivan, but she could see how Mr. Sullivan might have been disdainful of her need for attention, when she wasn’t beautiful enough to draw all eyes.
“Mrs. Sullivan, you said you didn’t know whether Mr. Sullivan had met Inspector Treadles?”
“He never mentioned meeting the man. But my husband didn’t tell me much,” said Mrs. Sullivan plaintively. “If I’m already gauche, you’d think he’d at least want me to be less ignorant, wouldn’t you?”
Charlotte was considering how she ought to respond when Mrs. Sullivan sighed dramatically. “Then again, maybe Sergeant Howe didn’t ask any questions because it was perfectly obvious my husband was killed for coveting another man’s wife.”
Charlotte had been generating varying expressions of astonishment and dismay at Mrs. Sullivan’s remarks. Now she let her jaw drop.
It was not so easy to hold other people’s attention. If Mrs. Sullivan meant to do so with personal confessions, then naturally she needed to give away details of an increasingly private nature. Still Charlotte was a little surprised at how quickly they had arrived at this point.
She made small noises of distress for Mrs. Sullivan to feel that her declaration had had its intended effect. “Surely—surely Mr. Sullivan didn’t tell you himself that he ‘coveted another man’s wife’?”
“Oh, yes, he did,” said Mrs. Sullivan, as unexceptionally as another woman would confirm that indeed her husband had brought home a bouquet of flowers the evening before. She picked up an embroidery frame and jabbed a needle through the white handkerchief it held. “He was a very sinful man, my husband. And extraordinarily proud of his sins, no less.”
Charlotte pulled at the cameo brooch at her collar and cleared her throat. “And by ‘another man’s wife,’ we are speaking of Mrs. Treadles, yes?”
“That is correct. But she didn’t want him, so he told her that he would bear false testimony before her husband.” From the other direction, Mrs. Sullivan again jabbed her needle through the handkerchief. “I always did tell him that he would get himself killed one of these days, because he wouldn’t leave well enough alone. Wouldn’t remain within the boundaries of holy matrimony, his or anyone else’s. I told him that God would punish him in the form of a wrathful husband that he had wronged.”
Despite the pathos of the scene, Charlotte did not believe that the relationship between the Sullivans was as simple as that of a helpless wife wringing her hands at her husband’s rapacious misdeeds. How was it that Mrs. Sullivan had not had her energy and sense of self destroyed by a man so skilled at preying on the vulnerability of others?
She cleared her throat again. “Did you not think, Mrs. Sullivan, that perhaps you ought to have warned Mrs. Treadles that your husband did not mean her well?”
“But he doesn’t mean anyone well. Should I have warned the whole world?”
Charlotte widened her eyes to what must have been a comical extent.
Satisfied, Mrs. Sullivan carried on. “Not to mention, he lied. Whenever he met an attractive married woman, he always told me that he was going to have an affair with her. It took me years to realize that it amused him to see my reaction. Sometimes he tried to have that affair; sometimes he didn’t. And seldom did he succeed. So whom should I have warned ahead of time, before I myself knew for certain whether he was acting in malice or only speaking so?”
Charlotte had seen her share of bad marriages, but none remotely similar to the Sullivans’, at once repellent and riveting.
She made her tone tentative. “Mrs. Sullivan, are you not concerned that what you say will damage Mr. Sullivan’s reputation?”
Mrs. Sullivan snorted. Her needle stabbed. “My husband did not have a wonderful reputation. I almost laughed out loud when I read what the papers wrote about him. Handsome and popular, eh? He might have been handsome once, when he was still in school. And he was popular only if you mean people disliked him but feared what he might do, so they didn’t dare cross him openly.”
Charlotte made another face, feeling the muscles of her cheeks tiring. “If I may ask, Mrs. Sullivan, was your ‘gaucheness’ the only reason your husband didn’t want you at the party?”
“He said that Mrs. Treadles would be there without her husband, so my presence would only hinder him in his quest to drive a wedge between Mrs. Treadles and her husband.”
A black geometric border was beginning to take shape on the white cloth in the embroidery frame—Mrs. Sullivan was making a mourning handkerchief.