Page 59 of A Ruse of Shadows
But Sir Henry had reneged on his word. And Charlotte, in an attempt to retain some control over her destiny, had made an unfortunate error in judgment that had resulted in her expulsion from Society.
Before her parents could escort her back to the country, there to lock her up for the rest of her life, she ran away from home. Life was not friendly to a young woman with no particular skills and very little money, but her worst moment had come at the hands of a mother-and-daughter pair of beggars.
The mother, blinded in one eye, an empty husk of a woman, had evoked in Charlotte such a stab of compassion that she’d given her child a sixpenny bitandher luncheon. Only to later realize that the child beggar had stolen the one-pound note Charlotte had stowed in a hidden pocket, reducing her already-meager reserves by a whopping 40 percent.
The incident had so shaken Charlotte that she had experienced an uncharacteristic surge of panic when she had come across the woman again a few months later.
But by then, she had been doing well as Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective. And the woman, going by the name of Mrs. Winnie Farr, had been desperately seeking to find her sister.
At the time, Lord Ingram had been the lead suspect in the death of his wife. Charlotte, investigating the case on his behalf, discovered that Lord Bancroft had attempted to frame him, using a body that bore a certain resemblance to Lady Ingram’s.
And the body had belonged to Mimi Duffin, Mrs. Farr’s sister, who had been of a similar height and build to Lady Ingram, with brunette hair and a very similar beauty mark by the corner of her lips. But because her face had otherwise looked nothing like Lady Ingram’s, her head had been bashed in, her features rendered unrecognizable except for the crucial mole.
Charlotte, as Sherrinford Holmes, had traveled with Mrs. Farr to identify the body. Mrs. Farr had barely spoken that entire day. Her face, a face that should have been immortalized on a coin, had seemed to be made of wood instead, wood that could only withstand so much wind and storm before cracking and crumbling altogether.
And that devastated, street-roughened woman had once been the genteel and beautiful Mrs. Meadows. Throughout the tumultuous changes in her life, the only constant had been the sister she had raised. Yet that sister she had kept safe all these years had met a violent end just so Lord Bancroft could mount his pernicious stratagems.
“Well, now we’ve found our vanished Mrs. Meadows.” Mrs. Watson paced back and forth, fanning herself vigorously. The painted lovers on her blue silk fan flirted on in a blur of powdered wigs and beribboned pannier dress. “I hate to say this, but that woman is certainly capable of killing a man who had wronged her.”
“We havenotfound our vanished Mrs. Meadows,” replied Charlotte slowly. “She wrote to Sherlock Holmes from a poste restante address.”
A poste restante address was not a residential address but the location of a post office where letters were held and called for.
Mrs. Watson massaged her forehead. “You’d think I’d remember—I was the one who wrote back to her.”
“But she also took her worries about her sister to Scotland Yard. There she spoke to our friend Sergeant MacDonald. Perhaps he would have a better address for us.”
Mrs. Watson stopped moving; even the lovers on her fan seemed to have pulled apart. “My goodness, what if you run into Inspector Treadles at the Yard and he asks you whether you’ve made any progress on the case he gave you to investigate?”
“I will tell him the truth: that Mrs. Meadows is the same Mrs. Farr who tried and failed to obtain help from the police concerning her missing sister.”
“But what will happen to Mrs. Farr?”
“There is no more evidence against her now than there was fifteen years ago. A woman whose husband died an unnatural death is perfectly at liberty to move to London and become poorer.”
Mrs. Watson snapped her fan shut. “Very well, then. Let me locate the letters that we received from her.”
The dear lady kept excellent records of all the correspondence Sherlock Holmes had ever received in her house near Regent’s Park.
They were putting on their hats and reaching for their parasols when Mrs. Watson suddenly gripped Charlotte by the arm. “I forgot to tell you this, my dear. When Miss Harcourt and I spoke, she said that there was a chance Victor Meadows had deliberately bankrupted Mrs. Meadows’s family so that she would have no choice but to marry him.
“Lord Bancroft and Mr. Underwood were responsible for Mimi Duffin’s death, were they not? If the woman Mrs. Farr had once been killed her husband for his nonlethal treachery, what are the chances that she hasn’t been seeking, all this while, to avenge her sister’s murder?”
Wordlessly Charlotte pulled on her gloves. With the photograph Mrs. Harcourt had taken all those years ago, had they, in fact, discovered the identity of Mr. Underwood’s killer?
Mrs. Farr, Mrs. Meadows—Charlotte still had trouble thinking of the two as the same person. The Christmas Eve Murder had seemed so remote in both time and effect, a purely intellectual exercise.
No longer. Now everything could hinge upon it.
Nineteen
Mimi Duffin, the Cousin Miriam whom the Harcourt ladies had once pampered with presents, had been a postcard girl at the time of her death: She’d posed in various stages of undress, and her images had been printed on postcards and disseminated as pornography.
Scotland Yard, therefore, had not taken her disappearance seriously. An anxious Mrs. Farr had visited repeatedly. Those visits had not led to an investigation but left multiple forms filled out and filed away.
The always helpful Sergeant MacDonald, after a quick search, produced two addresses for Charlotte. The first led her to a chemist’s in Lambeth, south of the river, where her inquiries about Mrs. Farr were met with a blank stare by the young clerk manning the counter. The second was Mimi Duffin’s lodging house in Bermondsey, farther to the east, an even shabbier district than the already-hardscrabble Lambeth.
To reach the address, Charlotte’s hansom cab drove past streets characterized not so much by crime and vice, or even poverty, but by listlessness: fruits wilting on the carts of the few mongers still on the pavement, maids fanning themselves on the front steps of little draper shops, pubs and taverns open and occupied but their mirrors dim, their patrons as silent and joyless as mourners at a funeral.
