Livia dared not think too deeply on what exactly they had done to delight him so. Perhaps it was simply that fact that they had been apart for months and were now together again.
She wondered whether Charlotte was as happy—she couldn’t quite imagine Charlotte being over the moon. Livia didn’t want Lord Ingram to be alone in his happiness, as he had been when he fell in love with his wife. But she could scarcely ask the man whether he wasn’t too giddy.
He secured a railway compartment for them. When the train left the station, he asked for the ticket stub Mr. Marbleton had left them. Livia produced the ticket. He spent a silent quarter hour scrutinizing it, holding it in a pair of tweezers with padded tips, turning it this way and that. She had done the same both the night before and this morning, staring at the once-light brown scrap of paper until she was cross-eyed, but the ticket had yielded no clues.
“Do you have any idea what we might find in Snowham?” she wondered aloud.
He put the ticket back in its box and handed the box back to her. “My first thought was that it might be another Moriarty holding, but the area around Snowham is not industrial. We are far more likely to come across rolling countryside and a modest manor or two than premises that would produce great wealth.”
“Maybe it’s not a mill or a factory, but something like Château Vaudrieu?” she ventured.
Château Vaudrieu, outside of Paris, was a Moriarty stronghold. It was also where he had been imprisoned for a while by his erstwhile lieutenants. Who was to say that he wouldn’t have a similar place in Britain? And who was to say that—
Her heart pounded. She turned the cloisonné jewelry box in her hands, faster and faster, the peach and pink flowers on the lid blurring into the cobalt enamel setting.
Lord Ingram looked at her. “You think Snowham might be where Mr. Marbleton is being kept?”
Her thoughts had indeed sprinted in that direction.
The next moment they shook their heads together.
Livia set down the jewelry box and rubbed her temples. “No. What was I thinking? He would not tell us such a thing even if he could.”
Because that would place the onus to free him on them and he would never put them in such danger.
Then what? What could he possibly hope to convey with a torn railway ticket that didn’t even have any handwriting on it?
She rubbed her temples some more. “Do you really believe we’ll find anything in Snowham?”
It seemed almost too obvious a clue.
“After Mr. Marbleton left London, it was more than possible that he went through Snowham,” mused Lord Ingram, “if he crossed the Channel from Dover. But I’m not optimistic about unearthing anything significant today. I can only hope that what he wishes to tell us isn’t hidden beneath a puzzle too byzantine for our aptitude.”
Livia was about to voice her agreement when a knock came at the door of their compartment.
“Your tickets please,” said the conductor.
They produced their tickets to be punched. The conductor nodded and left, closing the door behind himself. Livia put her punched ticket away. Lord Ingram, however, stared at his as if he’d never seen it before.
“What is it, my lord?”
“Mr. Marbleton’s ticket, please.”
The suppressed excitement in his voice made Livia’s pulse accelerate again. With unsteady fingers, she opened the jewelry box. Inside, the ticket stub lay nestled on a bed of black velvet. Lord Ingram placed his own ticket on the table next to the box. Livia did likewise.
Mr. Marbleton’s ticket was beige and the tickets they’d purchased today a muted green. But all three were issued by the same company and nearly identical in format, except that theirs was London to Snowham, and Mr. Marbleton’s Snowham to London.
“Do you see now?” asked Lord Ingram, his voice kept deliberately low.
Livia nodded hard. The part of Mr. Marbleton’s ticket that had been torn away was the portion where the date valid for travel had been stamped and also where the ticket would have been punched by a conductor.
“I can see why he wouldn’t want the date to be known,” she said. “A ticket stuck on the bottom of one’s boot is one thing. A ticket from two months ago stuck on the bottom of one’s boot is something else altogether.”
The former was a minor annoyance that could happen to anyone who had walked through a railway station of late. The latter could be explained only if the same boots had not been worn for an entire season. After all, railway platforms were swept and washed and there was no reason for a stub from Christmas still to be lying in wait.
“And it would also mean that it might be this ticket, rather than Snowham the locale, that is the most important.” But the light that had come into Lord Ingram’s eyes quickly dimmed. “We have looked over this ticket in excruciating detail and I don’t know what else can be gleaned by more examination.”
“Can we put it under a microscope?”
“We can, but the paper is opaque. For a microscope to work properly, light must be able to pass through the specimen. Otherwise all the details of the magnification would be lost.”
Livia grunted her frustration.
Lord Ingram examined the ticket some more, closed the box, and gave it back to her. “Patience, Miss Olivia, patience,” he said with a sunny smile. “We haven’t even started yet.”
* * *
At precisely five seconds past nine o’clock, the doorbell rang at 18 Upper Baker Street.
Charlotte adjusted the turban on her head. Late the year before she’d shorn off most of her hair to better wear wigs and pass herself off as a gentleman. Since then, her hair had grown back some, but was not yet long enough for her to go bareheaded before callers.
Her dress was a blue-and-green plaid trimmed in yellow and the turban a matching yellow with dark blue silk roses on the crown. She would have preferred the flowers to be purple or pink, but then the entire ensemble might be too much for dear Mrs. Watson, who shared Livia’s taste for elegant simplicity but, unlike Livia, was too reticent to point out that the surfeit of colors in Charlotte’s outfit constituted an assault on the eyes.
Although, to be sure, Mrs. Watson hadn’t paid any attention to Charlotte’s toilette today. She had been pacing, jaw clenched, for the past quarter hour, wearing a path in their lovely new carpet, which allowed Charlotte’s sporadic smiles, both uncharacteristic and unsuitable to the occasion, to go unnoticed.
It had been a marvelous night. Her lover had refused to do anything that could get her in the family way. But he’d been both naughty and creative and she’d been happy to explore the many ways two people could derive pleasure together while bypassing the elementary piston-and-cylinder route.
Yes, so very naughty.
She suppressed her smile just in time for Mrs. Watson to jump at the sound of the bell.
“I doubt it is Moriarty himself,” said Charlotte.
After all, the man had stated plainly that he would send someone. But she, too, tensed, flexing her fingers and expelling a long breath.
Mrs. Watson left and returned a minute later with a man in his early forties, average in height, unremarkable in features, yet wearing very well-made clothes—black frock coat, striped city trousers, boring, but of excellent material and impeccably cut. He seemed to aspire to looking like a lawyer and might have made a passable facsimile were it not for the scar on his face—not obvious at first glance but it caused a gash in his beard that took a fair amount of pomatum to conceal.