Livia remembered what Mrs. Watson had told her, that in the predawn hours of the dramatic night, Mr. Peters and Mrs. Crosby had driven out of the Garden together, but as far as they knew, only Mr. Peters had later returned.
“To the father?” murmured Mrs. Watson. She gasped. “Remember that story Miss Baxter told, about the lover she saw once a year before the statue of Achilles at Hyde Park Corner? You think it’s the same man?”
Charlotte reached for another biscuit. “I have no way of knowing, not at the moment in any case.”
Lord Ingram, as if sensing that the other two women in the room required something stronger than biscuit, decanted whisky.
Gratefully, Livia accepted the offered glass and took a sip. “So what do we do now?”
To head back to the Garden of Hermopolis was to enter a storm of knives, but not to go—if Charlotte could have refused, she would not have gone the first time.
Mrs. Watson rubbed her own arm, a disquieted gesture. “We don’t need to return to Cornwall this moment, do we?”
“Unless de Lacey is prepared to physically shoved me onto a train, I am not leaving London tonight—certainly not before we have a look at what Mr. Marbleton brought us.” Charlotte pointed toward Sherlock Holmes’s bedroom. “Now shall we?”
* * *
On the slide, there was nothing.
A scream lodged in Livia’s throat. While they’d been in the parlor discussing Miss Baxter’s possible pregnancy, had Moriarty’s minions slipped into the bedroom and stolen the dot of film from right underneath their—
“For a moment I thought we’d lost it,” said Lord Ingram, his voice heavy with relief. “It’s just too small to see.”
Livia clutched at her bodice. The microscope had been set on the window seat, the brightest spot in the parlor. Lanterns had been placed to either side, to supplement the pallid light of a winter afternoon. Livia, standing beyond the lanterns and craning her head, still could not see anything on the slide.
Charlotte sank to her knees on a footstool placed before the window seat, looked into the eyepiece, adjusted the position of the slide, and then twisted several knobs.
“Is it still there?” asked Livia, her fingers gripping her skirts.
“Yes.”
Thank goodness. “What’s on it?”
Charlotte rose and indicated that Livia should take her place. “Take a look.”
Livia had never looked into a microscope and had not anticipated the brightly lit spread that filled her entire vision. She blinked and looked again.
The dot had been magnified so much that only a portion could be seen: a sketch of a park bench, with an opened book resting on it. The book was blank, but at its right-bottom corner was written the number 1.
Charlotte placed her hand on a knob. “Turn the knob if you want to see the rest.”
Livia turned the knob, but the image moved in the opposite direction of what she’d intended and displayed the dot’s edge, so jagged that it looked as if it had been hacked with a poleaxe. She turned the knob the other way. Underneath the sketch were a block of unintelligible, typewritten letters and a photograph of half a dozen strangers, four men and two women, in what appeared to be a mountainous region.
Since neither meant anything to her, she scrolled back to the sketch.
The very first meeting between Mr. Marbleton and herself had taken place in a park. And she had been reading on a bench. Later he had immortalized the scene, as well as the book she had been reading, with the gift of a hand-painted bookmark showing a woman in white sitting on a park bench.
This sketch was a hint, wasn’t it, at the key to deciphering the block of letters?
She stared at the sketch a few more seconds before reluctantly yielding her place to Mrs. Watson. Mrs. Watson donned her glasses to study the contents of the slide, only to rise again with an expression of incomprehension.
Lord Ingram, on the other hand, glanced up in astonishment almost as soon as he peered through the eyepiece. He looked at Charlotte, who said nothing.
“What is it, my dear?” asked Mrs. Watson, with a hand on his shoulder.
“You have a better memory for such things, Holmes, but I believe this photograph was among the images we seized from Moriarty’s château last December.”
On that night, Charlotte had entered the château disguised as a man with a great big paunch. Unbeknownst to all except a few, the paunch was hollow. Later, when Livia had seen it again, it had become quite heavy, filled with loot from Moriarty’s hidden safe.
Neither Livia nor Mrs. Watson had been interested in its contents—they wanted as little to do with Moriarty as possible and felt safer not knowing his secrets. Lord Ingram must have felt differently.
Charlotte, however, raised a brow. “I thought you didn’t want to know Moriarty’s dark deeds.”
“At the time I didn’t, but before I put the lot away in Hôtel Papillon’s safe I decided that willful ignorance was not the policy. I had a look at the negatives.”
Hôtel Papillon was the name of the private mansion in Paris where they had stayed.
Livia’s hand balled into a fist; her thumb rubbed nervously over the side of her index finger. “Did—did Mr. Marbleton also have a look at them?”
It did not sound as if he’d been invited to a perusal.
Lord Ingram rose from the footstool but offered no answer.
“It would seem that Mr. Marbleton had a look at the lot of them overnight and—took this one with him when he left,” said Charlotte. Her tone turned wistful. “Had I known that he excelled at safe-cracking, I’d have asked for his assistance at Château Vaudrieu.”
She patted Livia on the arm. “I’m sure Mr. Marbleton had very good reasons. Besides, it was our oversight. We should have invited him to sift through everything with us—Moriarty’s doings concerned him more than they concerned us.”
Livia exhaled. Strictly speaking, what Mr. Marbleton had done was theft; she was grateful that Charlotte chose to be understanding.
“Miss Olivia,” said Mrs. Watson, also looking at her with an encouraging smile, “you would know the book referred to in the sketch, I believe?”
Livia’s face heated. “It is either The Moonstone or The Woman in White, both by Wilkie Collins.”
Mrs. Watson tapped a fingertip against her chin. “We shall need to acquire copies of these books.”
“Well, if Mr. Marbleton means the opening sentences of these books, then I have them memorized,” said Livia, both proud and embarrassed.
At their first meeting, they had spoken of those two books and it had been the first conversation Livia ever held with someone who read and enjoyed the same sort of books she did.
“If you are sure you know the opening sentences in their entirety we will begin deciphering the passage,” said Charlotte decisively. “My lord, will you read aloud the block of letters? We will write them down.”
“Certainly,” said Lord Ingram. “Although now I do wish we had a megascope, to project the image on the wall.”
The microscope and the lanterns were transferred to the desk. Lord Ingram sat down and read the letters row by row. And then he read the same letters column by column, while the ladies checked their copies.