Page 23 of A Ruse of Shadows
Miss Charlotte took a slice of cake. “The two of you got along well then, I take it?”
“We did.” Mrs. Claiborne had not looked anyone in the eye while she made confessions about her personal finance, but now she slowly raised her face, her expression dreamy. “With Lord Bancroft, I was always nervous. He wanted the best in everything, and I was convinced that I didn’t measure up. But Mr. Underwood wasn’t shy in telling me that he felt downright fortunate that I accepted him.
“Otherwise, he didn’t talk much, which suited me just fine. He washappy to study the papers while I played the pianoforte. And he liked to hear me read aloud from books and magazines while he nursed a drink.”
She patted her blouse, near the third closely spaced button from the top. Mrs. Watson, who had once worn a locket with her wedding photograph inside, wondered whether Mrs. Claiborne didn’t have a locket, too, under the blouse.
“Last September, he asked me to marry him. I said yes. I wanted to post banns, but he said a special license would be better—he didn’t want it known to people who might not be kindly disposed toward him that he would soon have a wife. He thought it could be dangerous for me, and that, in turn, would be dangerous for him, too.”
“Did that concern you, his fear?”
Mrs. Claiborne covered the diamond ring on her left hand—her engagement ring, probably—as if to protect it. “Miss Holmes, Mrs. Hudson, you must understand, my mother, she, too, was a courtesan. That’s what we are sometimes called in Paris, women destined to be wealthy men’s mistresses. And that was what she trained me to be, except I was never that good at it.
“Marriage would at last halt my progress toward life as a failed old cyprian—I was jubilant about never having to reel in another protector. That relief was real, whereas the danger Mr. Underwood mentioned seemed hypothetical.
“But I was wrong, of course. One dreadful day, Mr. Underwood didn’t come home. Instead, he sent a message saying that Lord Bancroft had been arrested and he himself must go into hiding for a while.”
Mrs. Claiborne riffled the edges of the magazine’s pages, deaf to the sibilant susurration produced by her nervous tic. “He had always instructed me not to keep any correspondence from him, but I’d kept them in secret. That night I burned everything—letters, bills, photographs, anything with his name or face on it. The next day I dismissed everyone from my already-reduced household staff.
“Mr. Underwood slipped into the house one night and told methat he might flee to America or Australia at some point but he couldn’t abandon Lord Bancroft just yet. From that point onward, he wrote me twice a week. Sometimes he didn’t send letters, only an empty envelope, so that I could tell by the postmark where he’d been. But I burned even those.
“The regularity of those letters lulled me into a false sense of security. I began to dream of our future in a distant land, where no one would know anything about us and we’d have that ordinary life I’d always wished for. And then his letters stopped.”
Abruptly Mrs. Claiborne rose, went to the window, and peered around the edge of the curtain. Mrs. Watson came half out of her own chair.
Mrs. Claiborne turned around. “I’m sorry. There was nothing, but I’m jumpy these days.”
Mrs. Watson slowly sat back down, the room’s stuffy warmth an abrading heat just inside her collar.
“You are sure everything is all right?” asked Miss Charlotte.
“Yes, I’m sure.” Mrs. Claiborne smiled tightly. She tugged at a few tassels on the fringe of the red velvet curtain. “When Mr. Underwood’s letters stopped, I tried to bide my time, because he’d asked me not to panic if a single letter went astray. But after a week went by, I couldn’t wait any longer.
“I went to see Lord Bancroft, worried sick that he would tell me it was nothing to lose sleep over. Fortunately his lordship was as alarmed as I was—I mean, he was calm and not in tears, but you could tell the news did not please him at all.
“He said he’d get me help. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but here you are, beyond all expectations.” She gazed at Miss Charlotte, her expression that of a believer near the end of her pilgrimage, desperate to witness a miracle. “Miss Holmes, your brother is a legend in the making—I read all about the double murder last December. I’m thrilled to have his assistance, especially since Lord Bancroft told me that he excels at finding missing persons.”
Did she not know that one such missing person had been killedby perhaps none other than Mr. Underwood himself, on Lord Bancroft’s orders? And had no one told her that Sherlock Holmes was responsible for Lord Bancroft’s current incarceration, however bucolic and genteel?
But perhaps Mrs. Claiborne, with her ardent desire for a calm and stable domestic life, was the kind of woman from whom men who did awful things kept those things hidden, so that they, too, could enjoy a pretense of normalcy, a cocoon in which their hands did not drip with blood.
After all, did Mrs. Watson not sense a desire in herself to shield Mrs. Claiborne from the knowledge that representatives of Sherlock Holmes were here against their will, their “assistance” secured by loathsome means?
Mrs. Claiborne must not have expected a profound silence to greet her account of events. She glanced uneasily from Miss Holmes to Mrs. Watson, then back again.
Miss Charlotte set down her biscuit plate and rearranged her already beautifully draped skirt. “Lord Bancroft seems to think that Mr. Underwood might have enemies stemming from his sponsorship of some boxers who compete in fights that are not precisely legal.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” said Mrs. Claiborne hesitantly. “Mr. Underwood spoke very little about boxing—he was glad that I didn’t like the sport.”
“Did he say anything about the boxers he sponsored?”
“Only that there were three of them, somewhere near New Cross—I think, but I’m not sure. I rarely venture farther afield than Oxford Street.”
“Anything else you can tell us that might lead us to find Mr. Underwood?”
“But I know so little of the rest of Mr. Underwood’s life.” Mrs. Claiborne blinked rapidly. Judging by the sudden brilliance of her eyes, she was trying to hold back tears.
Miss Charlotte folded her hands in her lap and leveled her inscrutable regard at Mrs. Claiborne. “Is this really all that you can tell me?”
