Page 25 of A Ruse of Shadows
Nine
Leaving Mrs. Claiborne’s town house, the two women went in separate directions. Mrs. Watson would join forces with Lawson, her groom and coachman who had not moved to Paris with the rest of the household, to look for Mr. Underwood’s boxing connections. Charlotte, newly acquired keys in hand, headed for Mrs. Claiborne’s original house, the villa on Prince’s Grove Close.
The location was suitably private, the last dwelling on a secluded cul-de-sac. The front gate opened to a rose garden in furious bloom, every single flower a perfect shade of sugarplum. The view was lovely, but Charlotte noticed the weeds pushing up everywhere, as well as the plethora of faded blossoms that hadn’t been trimmed.
The interior of the villa was dark—the windows had been shuttered and the gas lamps no longer supplied with fuel. Charlotte managed to find a candlestick and lit the taper.
Candlelight shone on muted gold wallpaper of Japanese six-point-star patterns. The upholstery was an ivory chintz printed with birds and stylized cherry trees. Had the windows been open and light flooding in, the room would have been airy and pretty.
Out of curiosity, Charlotte drew close to a wall and lifted the candlestick high to inspect the area above a sconce—near gas flames, it would have been difficult to keep such light wallpaper fromdiscoloration. But Mrs. Claiborne had anticipated the problem and installed a miniature shelf that held a blue ceramic plate with Japanese wave patterns—much easier to clean than silk wallpaper.
Charlotte descended to the basement and began her inspection there.
The domestic offices, completely emptied of all papers, did not yield so much as a receipt for coal.
In the kitchen, all the food had been disposed of, not a scrap of bread or potato peel left to collect mold. The stove, the inside of which had not been similarly cleaned out, showed an inch of ash mingled with charred bits of wood.
Charlotte climbed up one story to the ground floor and looked in on the morning room, the dining room, and the study. Unlike most studies Charlotte had encountered in her time, this one contained only sixty or so volumes that barely filled one lonely bookshelf to half capacity. She didn’t know about Mr. Underwood’s or Mrs. Claiborne’s tastes in written material, but once upon a time Lord Bancroft had mentioned in Charlotte’s hearing that he read deeply on the history of art and was fascinated by the development of the Italian city-states from the tenth to the fifteenth century.
Most of the books on hand appeared to have been acquired for his benefit.
She had already examined the table in the dining room and the mantelpiece in the morning room, and those surfaces held six weeks’ worth of accumulated dust.
The bookshelf, upon first glance, had collected dust for much longer, months rather than weeks. Presumably Mrs. Claiborne, shorn of all staff since the previous autumn and faced with a house that was too much for one person to maintain, had retreated from the study early on.
Charlotte stared at the rows of books for a while, then loosened a bookend and picked up a tome.
The dustunderthat book told a different story. The first half inch or so of the narrow strip of shelf surface exposed by the removal ofthe book, the part that had lain beneath the spine, bore noticeably thicker dust than the surface near the rear of the shelf. She lifted another book; the same pattern held. Another, still the same.
The books had once stood farther back on the shelf. But someone had moved them—possibly recently—and had set them down closer to the edge, so as to hide a disturbance in the dust.
She checked each volume but came across nothing unusual. Whoever had been here before her, a thorough soul, would have gone through all the books. The only question was whether the intruder had found anything worthwhile.
The study’s desk drawers did not seem to have been disturbed—if one looked only at the drawer pulls. But Charlotte, with a pencil from her handbag, was able to open and close those drawers without touching the dust on the drawer pulls or leaving fingermarks behind.
On the next floor she at last came across signs of a hasty departure: In Mrs. Claiborne’s bedroom, the wardrobe doors hung ajar; half of the drawers in her dressing room remained pulled out. Charlotte assumed, given the care the clandestine visitor had taken, that this part of the house had appeared just so in the wake of Mrs. Claiborne’s flight.
Up in the attic, however, that care flagged. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that here it was nigh on impossible to conceal all traces of one’s presence.
The door to the attic was secured with a padlock that had been wiped clean—about three days ago, Charlotte would say. The clandestine visitor, who had not come equipped with keys, had picked the lock, and he or she could not have accomplished that without disturbing the dust on the padlock.
The corridor in the attic, uncarpeted, was so dusty that footmarks could not be concealed. Still, the secret explorer had not been willing to leave actual shoe prints. The dust had been—not swept but rearranged, possibly with a piece of cloth or an outer garment the intruder had dragged behind as he or she left.
The attic, with its cramped quarters for servants, held no otherrevelations. Charlotte relocked the door, descended, and took one more round on each floor, making sure that she hadn’t overlooked anything.
After that, she opened the back door and went out into the rear garden.
And there she found something interesting.
?As Charlotte approached the street entrance of her hotel suite, she spied an old man striding in her direction.
When she last saw him, the old man had been deeply unstylish, liver-spotted, and reeking of too much eau de cologne. As he marched past her today, the overpowering miasma was gone, the liver spots nowhere to be seen, and the garments only a few years, instead of a few decades, behind the forefront of fashion. He was still an old man but a spry one, with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair and spectacles that gave him an air of quiet authority.
“Oh, sir! Sir, one moment, please!” she called out.
The most tempting old man this side of the English Channel stopped and turned around. He looked vaguely perplexed. “Yes?”
“I do apologize, but I found these on the pavement. They wouldn’t happen to belong to you, would they?” asked Charlotte, her eyes wide as she held out the pair of wire-rimmed glasses she used for her gentlemen characters.
