“Miss Holmes, what are you doing?”
Miss Baxter.
Charlotte Holmes, crouched over the coffin, turned around. “Ah, Miss Baxter, Mr. Peters, out for a midnight stroll?”
De Lacey’s heart thumped. Oh, this would not end well.
“Indeed, Miss Holmes. We are enjoying this fine night, Mr. Peters and I,” said Miss Baxter. “What are you doing?”
“I have an interview with Mr. Craddock,” said Miss Holmes.
She knelt at the edge of the grave and lifted the coffin’s lid. “Mr. Craddock?”
No one answered.
Miss Holmes rose. “Would you care to identify him, Miss Baxter? Granted, the man’s face is somewhat decomposed, but perhaps you remember his clothes?”
“That is Mr. Kaplan’s eternal resting place. I doubt he appreciates being disturbed.”
“Mr. Kaplan, who contributed all the skulls to the library at the Garden? The one who passed away years ago? I dare say he’s accustomed to being disturbed now, after sharing his casket with a newcomer since December.”
Miss Baxter’s voice, already cold, turned icy. “Don’t press your luck, Miss Holmes.”
“You are a woman shut in by the walls of the Garden, Miss Baxter. Your father is . . . your father. I would be a fool to ignore his directive simply because it would inconvenience you.”
“You are already a fool, Miss Holmes. You might need to worry about my father after you leave the Garden of Hermopolis, but if you never leave, he’ll be immaterial to your well-being.”
She lifted a pistol.
Charlotte Holmes picked up her umbrella.
Miss Baxter laughed with derision. “Is your rain gear bulletproof these days?”
“It’s better than that. It’s—”
A loud bang. A sudden burst of light. De Lacey blinked. Miss Holmes’s umbrella had caught on fire.
Miss Baxter and Peters glanced at each other.
Peters cried, “I think the umbrella is a—”
Another bang.
Miss Baxter laughed wildly. “Oh, Miss Holmes, what use is your clever new invention if you have no aim?”
With a cry Charlotte Holmes threw the umbrella aside. It knocked the pocket lantern, which had been standing at the edge of the grave, into the pit. The fire on the umbrella and the light from the lantern went out at nearly the same moment. In their final glow, de Lacey saw Miss Holmes whip out a derringer.
Darkness. Gunshots. A shrill feminine scream. A thud. Then silence, except the wind, the waves, and loud, harsh breaths.
Which emerged from the man by de Lacey’s side. He elbowed the man. The man quieted.
Several minutes passed before someone struck a match—Miss Baxter, lying in the grass but up on her elbows. She looked to the figure to her right. Peters rose from a prone position into a crouch. Farther away, the soles of Charlotte Holmes’s boots stuck out from the grave.
Darkness again.
“Light your pocket lantern,” said Miss Baxter. “Let’s go take a look.”
Peters complied, but said, “I’ll look. You stay where you are. It could be a trick.”
The pocket lantern’s handle between his teeth, a revolver in his hand, he crawled forward, hid himself behind the mound of earth that had been dug up, and peered over it.
He then threw a clump of dirt into the grave.
“I think she really is dead,” he said after a while.
Miss Baxter crawled forward and put a hand inside the grave, presumably to check for a pulse. “I think you’re right.”
She laughed, a slightly unhinged sound. “Go bring the charabanc, Mr. Peters. We’ll take her body back—Craddock’s too—and put them in perchloric acid. It’s what we should have done with him in the first place.”
“Why don’t we go together? I don’t want to leave you here by yourself.”
“Leave me your revolver and go. Otherwise my father’s minions could come along and stumble upon the bodies.”
She also ordered him to take the pocket lantern to hasten his progress. Soon the tombstones and the women, one dead, one still alive, fell into darkness.
It took de Lacey a while to be able to see again by starlight, and then it was only to make out the vaguest outline of Miss Baxter’s standing figure.
“My apologies, Miss Holmes,” she said slowly. “But I cannot allow anyone to bring murder charges against my friends and allies here at the Garden. They are all I have. The Garden is all I have. My father has been looking to destroy it for years and you would have handed him the perfect cudgel.”
She began to sing. After two phrases de Lacey recognized it as “The Lost Chord,” a song played in almost every parlor he’d stepped into in the past few years.
He had killed, too, but never sang afterward, and certainly not of his longing for a moment of perfection never to be regained, as if this were any other starry night, just right for a bout of melancholy nostalgia.
As her final note fell away, he shivered.
* * *
Peters came back with the charabanc and another man. They wrapped the bodies in sheets and heaved them onto the open conveyance, swearing copiously at having to deal with the heavily decomposed Craddock.
Then they shoveled back the soil, righted the tombstone, tamped down everything, and left with Miss Baxter humming another song. De Lacey did his best not to hear what it was.
He went to sleep near dawn. When he woke up a few hours later, it was to the sight of Mrs. Watson and her manservant ranging the headlands, in search of Charlotte Holmes. Several times they stood together, Mrs. Watson wiping at the corners of her eyes, her manservant speaking earnestly, probably offering words of comfort and encouragement.
De Lacey massaged his stiff neck. If they only knew.
Of course, when they approached the tents to ask him, he stately flatly that from sunset the evening before until now, the only people who had left the compound, besides Mrs. Watson herself, had been the Garden’s cook and her kitchen maid.
The underling he’d sent to the nearest telegraph office to relay news of Charlotte Holmes’s demise returned at noon with Mr. Baxter’s response: Mr. Baxter would arrive on the morrow.
De Lacey pulled his overcoat tighter around himself. He hoped that Mr. Baxter was pleased—about Charlotte Holmes, that is. He didn’t believe Mr. Baxter would ever again be pleased about his daughter. But with Charlotte Holmes gone, at least de Lacey would be safe, wouldn’t he? He only needed to make sure that Miss Baxter remained in place until her father came. And then whatever happened after that would be a family matter, none of his concern.
More residents left the Garden, looking bewildered and afraid. News from inside the compound told of a distraught Mrs. Watson begging to search all the dwellings for a sign of Miss Holmes. She was granted that grace, and even “Craddock” decamped to the meditation cabin so that she could see for herself that Charlotte Holmes was not in his home.
Her manservant organized search parties that set out from Porthangan and combed nearby areas. Near sunset he came again. She’d been standing atop the wall, waiting for him. At his appearance, she descended and met him outside the gate. She seemed calm enough, listening to him speak. But when De Lacey looked through a field glass, he saw tears rolling down her face and disappearing into the fur collar of her cloak.