“Das Phantomschloss,” said Charlotte. “Mr. Marbleton went through great pains to get a photograph to me, for me to give Mr. Finch. Perhaps we can have a little more light.”
Miss Baxter rose—then fell back into her chair. “But photography is not allowed at or near das Phantomschloss.”
Charlotte opened the shutter more fully on Miss Baxter’s pocket lantern. “I’m under the impression that this picture is notable more for its human subjects than for its locale.”
Mr. Finch emerged from the shadows. He looked a little worse for wear, but was in decent shape for someone who had been living in fear of his life for nearly a year.
He glanced at Miss Baxter. Charlotte was well-acquainted with how men in love gazed upon the objects of their affection. This look was—different. Every instance of bright, fiery young love must be tossed into the crucible of life, but these two had had to endure the unendurable. Did it make them hold on all the more tightly to memories of the past? And did that, in turn, make it more disconcerting to realize how much they had changed during these long years spent apart?
Yet she did not sense disillusionment in him, only a sense of resignation: This woman, whose fate was thoroughly intertwined with his, had become something of a stranger.
“By the way, was that you, Mr. Finch, in the cottage next to ours, observing us?” she asked.
He nodded.
She handed to Miss Baxter the Stanhope in which had been affixed Mr. Marbleton’s microphotography and lifted the pocket lantern to better illuminate it.
Miss Baxter gasped as soon as she looked. She gave the optical device to Mr. Finch and took the pocket lantern from Charlotte to hold it for him herself. “Look. Look.”
After one look, he enfolded her in a hard embrace.
Miss Baxter laughed, sobbing. “Finally. Finally. After all these years!”
“Yes, finally,” mumbled Mr. Finch—and made a sound that sounded suspiciously like a sniffle.
Charlotte gave them a minute. “But you can only take advantage of your new knowledge after Miss Baxter and I extricate ourselves from our current morass, being pitted against each other. I have discussed this with my friends, and we all agree that it would be ideal if Moriarty came to believe that he succeeded in getting rid of me permanently.”
“That would be ideal indeed,” said Miss Baxter.
“But would he believe it?”
“No.”
Charlotte had braced herself for an unfavorable answer. Still, her heart sank at Miss Baxter’s unequivocal answer.
“For this we have Mrs. Marbleton to blame, partly. If you were already a suspicious man by nature, and your wife counterfeited her own death to get away from you, you probably wouldn’t believe any death to be real unless you watched it happen with your own eyes.”
Charlotte shook her head. Alas. “You said Mrs. Marbleton is only partly to blame?”
“The other part of the blame lies with me,” answered Miss Baxter with a pulling of her lips. “I don’t know whether Madame Desrosiers has been captured, but I believe you are right about my father having discovered my involvement in the coup. Even behind these walls, I will not be safe for long. Therefore, it’s not only ideal but also urgent that he should believe I’ve met an untimely end.
“If we stage only your death, there is a higher probability that my father would believe it—after all, it is his goal that I should get rid of you for him. But if we both end up dead as a result of our contest—that would strike him as too good to be true.”
Charlotte sucked in a breath through her teeth.
Miss Baxter’s eyes glittered. “However, we do have one or two factors in our favor. First, the current state of my father’s organization. It is not in shambles, unfortunately, but the coup did deal a blow. My father’s subsequent cleansing of everyone he suspected to have been sympathetic to the coup likely dealt a worse blow.”
“I see,” said Charlotte slowly. “He is severely shorthanded.”
“Correct. Two, as women, we are not that important to him. He is pursuing Madame Desrosiers hard not because she is the mastermind behind his ouster, but because she was his mistress and her betrayal is personal. I would be surprised if he didn’t believe her brother, Monsieur Plantier, to be her puppet master.
“He thinks of me as a willful girl with more arrogance than intelligence—if he had a better idea of my capabilities he would have groomed me to be his heir. But no, he only wanted me to be the kind of daughter whose appearance and conduct signaled her father’s importance.
“He probably considers you a more substantial threat, but still a woman, subject to all the frailties of our sex. The way I see it, he wants to be rid of you less because of your deeds, and more to eliminate someone who might provide safe harbor to Myron.”
“So by counterfeiting our deaths, we will be doing him a favor. We will allow him to better allocate his men and no longer waste his resources on the likes of us,” said Charlotte.
Mr. Finch, who had sat down on a footstool next to Miss Baxter’s chair, snickered.
Miss Baxter chortled a little too. “There is a third factor in our favor. You have probably never been on the run before, Miss Holmes. But I am surrounded by people who have. As long as fugitives do not go back to their old haunts or old acquaintances, it is in fact very difficult to find them, once they have disappeared. So what I need, right now, isn’t for my father to believe that I’ve really died, but only enough time in which to disappear.
“For that I have prepared a surprise or two for my father. What do you think he would do if he was to hear that Myron has entered the orbit of his paymaster?”
“Ahhh.”
“Exactly. I will quickly become a secondary concern as he intensifies his hunt for Myron, preferably in the wrong part of the world.” Miss Baxter allowed herself a small smile. “And with my father preoccupied with his own survival, the person we really need to convince becomes de Lacey—and the men under de Lacey. And here again luck is in our favor—the previous de Lacey was a wily fox. This one, not so much. So should we succeed, we would have bought ourselves some valuable time.”
Time for Miss Baxter and Mr. Finch to find their son. Time for Charlotte and her friends to free Mr. Marbleton. Time to formulate a plan to dethrone Moriarty, this time permanently.
“Good enough for me,” said Charlotte. “Now we’ve just had a tremendous row, witnessed by Mrs. Steele, which should make it appear that we have become enemies. Next I should dig up Mr. Craddock’s body—is it in one of the graves on the headlands?”
“Yes.” Miss Baxter placed her hand on Mr. Finch’s shoulder. “Only one of our people died of pneumonia, but two others wished to take that opportunity to ‘pass away,’ in case Moriarty traced their footsteps here. We put Craddock in one of the empty coffins.”
Mr. Finch placed his hand briefly over Miss Baxter’s. Charlotte must still be feeling somewhat emotional: The sight made her want to smile—and sigh. “Did Mr. Craddock see you in an advanced state of pregnancy, by the way?”
Miss Baxter rolled her eyes. “Would I be so careless? No, he was the kind of man who would abuse any little power he had. He didn’t dare approach me, but he set his sights on Miss Stoppard and cornered her on the walls one night. Little did he know she’s handy with a knife.