Page 4 of A Ruse of Shadows
I have since been fitted with a plaster cast and two proper crutches. The pain has become tolerable even without morphine. Instead, I take a few tablets daily of a new synthetic substance called phenacetin, and I must say its effects are remarkable. I am in no particular discomfort, and my mind is unclouded.
Pray do not worry about me. My overall health remains robust, and the physician expects the limb to be good as new in due time.
Your faithful if hobbling servant,
Ash
P.S. You are probably wondering why I chose not to keep this news to myself. Indeed, I would have, but I was to attend a dinner at a neighbor’s estate, where a gaggle of houseguests had just come from London, on their way to Cowes. My staff, in conveying my regrets, let slip the truth, and now there is no point concealing it from you.
?The day was fading, the sun dropping below the tops of the trees. Yet the gentler illumination of early evening saturated every vista with a rich golden tint—a wall of pink and white rhododendrons, a slope of lavender in bloom, a family of swans gliding across a small lake, passing in front of a slender marble pavilion that seemed to float above its own reflection.
The last time Mrs. Watson had visited the grounds of Stern Hollow, she had been in raptures. Today, however, its beauty failed to ease her apprehension. The solitude and vastness of the estate did not feel sanctuary-like, only faintly sinister, an area too large to patrol and too easy to infiltrate.
The silence also did not help. Who knew that birdsong, the rustling of leaves, and the rotation of steel wheels upon well-packed gravel could produce, after a while, a palpitation in the heart, a tense expectation that this tranquillity would be brutally shattered?
All this uneasiness, with Lord Ingram perfectly sound and whole!
Yes, his letter was a ruse. Mrs. Watson, Miss Charlotte, and Penelope’s hasty trip, traveling overnight from Paris to England, so that they could see this beloved young man with their own eyes and make sure that he was all right—that, too, was part of the ruse.
But ruses would not be necessary if they didn’t find themselves inperilous circumstances. They already had their hands full with Moriarty and his minions. This new wrinkle from Lord Bancroft—what in the world didhewant?
“I, for one, am looking forward to an excellent dinner,” said Miss Charlotte.
She was dressed as Mr. Sherrinford Holmes, brother to the fictional Sherlock Holmes. Her seafoam-colored jacket was cut to show a large expanse of anchor-printed waistcoat. Instead of a tie, she wore an elaborate cravat, secured by a jeweled shell brooch below the knot. And to complete the nautical theme, for her boutonniere, an actual—if deceased and long-desiccated—starfish, three inches across in diameter, which remarkably looked nottooout of place on the lapel.
“I volunteer to brush your beard afterwards!” said Penelope.
Overly enthusiastic combing might damage the costly hairpiece, but the last thing they wanted was to put a prosthetic beard into storage with food crumbs trapped inside.
“Thank you,” said Miss Charlotte in all seriousness. “It would have been better if Sherrinford Holmes had no stomach. Alas, mine is always in need of sustenance. I wonder what marvels Stern Hollow’s pastry sous-chef has prepared for us—I hope there will be a charlotte russe.”
The carriage emerged from a tunnel of green bough, and before them unfurled acres upon acres of gardens in lavish bloom, as if all the annuals knew that the peak of summer was about to pass them by and there was no time to waste in luring one more honeybee into that eternal dance of pollination.
Beyond the gardens, a reflecting pool glittered. The plume of water at its center, jetting up twenty feet in the air, glittered. The windows of the house, lit just so by the setting sun, also glittered. So beautiful, so serene, so normal—when what they were about to attempt was anything but.
The majordomo himself, the stately Mr. Walsh, awaited by the granite steps that led up to the house. He seemed especially glad tosee Sherrinford Holmes—that gentleman had been, after all, instrumental in clearing Lord Ingram’s name following a particularly unfortunate turn of events at the estate—but he was also highly solicitous of Mrs. Watson and Penelope. “Had you arrived under different circumstances, ladies, I would have arranged for a tour of the house. But I imagine today you will wish to see his lordship first?”
“Indeed, that is so,” answered Mrs. Watson gravely. “His lordship first, everything else later.”
She had visited the grounds of Stern Hollow but never the manor, and she had long wished to wallow in its spectacular interior. But as Mr. Walsh led them down the avenue of statues at the center of the grand entrance hall and up the double-returned staircase to his lordship’s apartment, she did not need to pretend that she was too worried to gawk.
She sincerely paid little mind to the old-master paintings that littered halls and galleries. All she wanted was to see her dear boy.
Yet his brilliant, delighted smiles weren’t enough to put her mind at ease. Or even his whispered reassurances that everything had gone according to plan. With the footmen off to fetch tea, all the curtains drawn, and his valet, Cummings, guarding the door—Cummings, along with Mr. Walsh and the housekeeper, Mrs. Sanborn, took part in the ruse—Lord Ingram rose and hopped a few times on his “broken” limb to show Mrs. Watson that indeed all was well.
They returned him to his chair, his plaster-entombed left limb placed in the exact same spot on the leather ottoman, just in time for the staff to parade in with enough tea things to host a garden party.
“I am very sorry to have put you to so much trouble with my carelessness,” he said for the benefit of their audience with a perfect degree of ruefulness. “Could I at least propose tea and jam tarts? We’ve some excellent strawberry and raspberry jams made only days ago.”
His eyes were on Sherrinford Holmes as he made his offer, his lips softening into the beginning of another smile.
“Sir, our haste was assuredly motivated by concern for your well-being,” replied Sherrinford Holmes. “But I cannot deny that my mad dash to Stern Hollow was also spurred on by the anticipation of your legendary hospitality. I am ready for jam tarts—and all other acts of generosity you choose to bestow upon us.”
?“Now this is an act of generosity I had not anticipated,” said Holmes.
Following dinner, also in Lord Ingram’s apartment, Mrs. Watson and Miss Redmayne, citing fatigue, had left, leaving the “gentlemen” to their glass of postprandial port. And Holmes had wasted no time in ripping off her beard and climbing atop Lord Ingram.
Even men with actual broken limbs could probably cope with the amatory act just fine, and Lord Ingram was only somewhat inconvenienced by the large cast.
