Page 29 of Miss Moriarty, I Presume?
That particular ploy, staged the previous summer, had failed. Mr. Finch had disappeared into the ether, not to be seen again. Soon even coded messages from him no longer appeared in the papers. Charlotte and Livia did not speak much of this brother, but Livia knew that Charlotte, too, had become increasingly uneasy about his prolonged silence.
Before Livia had met Mr. Finch, she had never wished to speak of him—the disgust she had felt toward her father for having sired a child out of wedlock had spread to Mr. Finch himself. But he had turned out to be one of the few people she could trust and his well-being was often on her mind.
Two streets away, Lord Ingram was already waiting in a hackney. Livia could not go to the Garden of Hermopolis, but this morning she and Lord Ingram were headed for Snowham, the country station named on Mr. Marbleton’s ticket stub.
After they exchanged greetings, Livia told him of the misgivings that had plagued her last night. “I have no concrete evidence that this is the case. But if Moriarty still hasn’t recovered what he sought from Mr. Finch, then we cannot eliminate that possibility.”
“A valid line of thinking,” said Lord Ingram.
Livia, habitually starved of approbation, felt the usual nervous fluttering in her stomach, from both pleasure at being praised and fear that ultimately she might not live up to that praise. “Thank you, my lord.”
“If it makes you more at ease, there was a message from Mr. Finch in the papers, at the beginning of the year,” said Lord Ingram. “I learned of this recently myself, from Holmes.”
Livia’s hand came to her lips. “So he was all right—at least as of then!”
Charlotte would probably have told her that in person as soon as they’d met, if yesterday hadn’t been what it was.
“And if it’s as you suspect, that Moriarty is still seeking Mr. Finch with all his might, then that, too, is good news of a sort. It would imply that as of this moment, Mr. Finch remains at large.”
The relief Livia felt, however, proved fleeting—Moriarty’s shadow loomed not only large but cold. “I hope he can continue to remain safe,” she murmured. “Do you not feel chilled every time you think about what Moriarty might be doing?”
“I do,” said Lord Ingram. “At times I feel dizzy.”
But he did not look light-headed with fear. In fact, as he knocked on the top of the hackney to signal the cabbie to stop, and then walked a short distance and handed her up into a different vehicle—maneuvers meant to confound anyone who might be following them—he appeared, for all that they were at a difficult, dangerous, and likely futile endeavor, to be... well, chirpy.
Not that he babbled or grinned or anything of the sort, but it was hard not to notice the spring in his step and the smile he occasionally wore as he glanced about.
At first she was wholly baffled, until insight landed with a thud: He was happy about Charlotte.
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?”
