Page 72 of A Ruse of Shadows
But if she didn’t, then what about Bernadine?
Mumble was not at work this day, but Jessie was. Charlotte, having visited the tea shop earlier in her old-woman disguise, returned shortly before four as herself, bought a few things, and exited in time to see Jessie leave from the alley in the back, a shopping basket in hand, and merge into the crowd of pedestrians.
The girl walked almost faster than an omnibus. Charlotte had not imagined, at the beginning of her career, that stamina would be such an important part of her work. Thankfully, she had become a fitter and stronger woman during the past yearandshe had invested in first-rate walking boots.
She was almost beginning to suspect that perhaps Miss Jessica Ferguson took no precautions about being followed when Jessie stopped at a cheesemonger’s shop. That gave Charlotte time to slip into a nearby alley and reemerge with the feathers on her hat removed, a dingy shawl covering much of her jacket, and her ratherstuffed handbag turned inside out and, with some folds released, transformed into a large shopping bag.
Jessie exited the cheesemonger’s with a round of hard cheese. She stuck it inside her shopping basket and looked about casually, as if deciding where to go next. Charlotte, bent over to examine a costermonger’s selection of wilted lettuces, saw out of the corner of her eye that Jessie continued down the street.
Two intersections later Jessie disappeared into a bakery. This gave Charlotte pause. Mrs. Hatfield was not generous, but according to the talkative waitress who had served Charlotte today, the proprietress did give reasonable discounts to her employees on her increasingly famous unadulterated breads. Therefore it made no sense for Jessie to visit another bakery on her way home.
Charlotte estimated where the back door of the bakery might be located, turned onto the intersecting street, and slipped behind an advertising column. There she dropped her shawl and her small toque into her bag and put on a long apron and a starched cap. Then she rounded to the other side of the advertising column to study all the handbills stuck to it, as if she were a serving maid stealing a moment of leisure.
She had her back to the street, but from the reflection of a nearby window, she caught sight of Jessie inching toward the opening of the back alley. Jessie turned left and hurried, heading west when earlier she’d been headed south. But then she turned left once more and was again going in her original direction, except on a different street.
She turned back to look a time or two. But Charlotte, now divested of the apron and holding out a large umbrella—it had conveniently begun to rain—blended into an entire pavement of foot traffic, a veritable river of black umbrellas.
Jessie did not go home or into the chemist’s, even though she passed close to both. Instead, she veered a few streets farther west and let herself into a house that had a pocket-sized yet deeply utilized front garden. Trellises placed all around the periphery supported peas,beans, and aubergine. A variety of herbs crowded a small raised bed to one side. To the other side, chard, chicory, and radishes grew in their own minuscule plots.
Not too far away, Charlotte found a school of industrial and commercial art and engaged the gregarious gate guard in a conversation about what sort of students were admitted to the school and where they could reasonably be expected to find posts after finishing their curriculum.
She was beginning to wonder how else she could linger nearby when Jessie emerged and solved the problem for her. Jessie went directly home. Charlotte, having followed in her wake, strolled around her neighborhood for some time, enough to assure herself that fifteen minutes later Jessie was still home, her person visible from the open window, wiping down walls and furniture in the front room.
Charlotte headed for the house Jessie had visited.
?Her knock was answered more swiftly than she’d anticipated.
“I was wondering when you’d remember your shawl, Jes—”
The woman who opened the door had one eye that was milky and blind, the other a deep periwinkle blue. Mrs. Farr.
Her welcoming expression congealed into wariness. “Who are you?”
She looked much frailer than Charlotte remembered, as if she’d been gravely ill and lingered at death’s door a good long while and was only now slowly recovering. Her voice was scratchy, her hair thin, her stark black dress loose and shapeless around her frame.
Yet at the sight of a stranger on her doorstep, her gaze sharpened into a dagger. The beautiful mystique that had so struck the Harcourt mother and daughter was nowhere in evidence, only the stone-hard defenses of a survivor facing fresh danger.
Before Charlotte could introduce herself, Mrs. Farr’s eyes narrowed—the misfortune that had taken the sight of her left eye had not affected the muscles that controlled the movements of her eyelids. “Where have I seen you before?”
Charlotte shoved back an irrational surge of fear. “You first sawme near the General Post Office last summer. I was wearing a jacket-and-skirt set in blue twill. You had a little girl with you, and I was so moved by your plight I gave her more money than I should, as well as my luncheon. But for my trouble, your daughter took the pound note I had in my pocket.”
Mrs. Farr frowned. “And you’re here for that pound?”
Charlotte moved past her into the foyer and closed the front door. Now she spoke with Sherrinford Holmes’s voice—or, as close as she could get to his slightly garbled enunciation without an orthodontic device in her mouth. “No need. I had my purser charge you an extra pound when I investigated your sister’s disappearance last autumn.”
“That was you?” Mrs. Farr’s voice now sounded like a saw dragged across a brick.
Charlotte had been highly helpful to her as Sherrinford Holmes—and highly solicitous. But there was no acknowledgment of any kind in Mrs. Farr’s question, only a heightened distrust.
“I am a woman of many faces—for work, that is.”
“What do you want?”
“Shall we discuss it over tea, like civilized people?” said Charlotte, wading deeper into the house.
Mrs. Farr’s parlor was cramped with a great many mismatched chairs. The floor sagged underfoot. The wallpaper’s pattern was hardly discernible. The place was clean, and more or less tidy, but it was clear that the hostess gave few thoughts to how her house might appear to a caller.
“Recently I’ve been working on a private inquiry concerning the unsolved murder of one Mr. Victor Meadows,” said Charlotte, from the middle of the room.
