Page 19 of The Vanished Sister

Mrs. Watson grew visibly more distressed as the day wore on, which made me feel anxious, too: Mrs. Carstairs didn’t need to do anything to hurt Mrs. Watson; her husband did that for her.

And as for Mrs. Carstairs’s children, Mrs. Wellesley, her daughter, did not witness her stepfather fawning over another woman: She spent most of the picnic walking about, rather than staying inside the tent. And Charles Carstairs was busy looking after his fiancée and future in-laws. From time to time he’d glance from his father to his mother to Mrs. Albright and back, and then the Stanmore Newells would say something to him and his attention would be pulled away.

Only Reginald Carstairs, her stepson in attendance without his wife, reacted the way I’d hope a child of mine would. He brought her bits of nibbles and cups of lemonade, and in general made sure that she was never alone or unattended. For a brief minute he sat at her feet, and the two of them looked remarkably like an actual pair of mother and son.

I felt subdued when I returned to High Burrow.

One encounters so many pampering details here: sprigs of fresh lavender on pillows, bowls of rose petals by the tub, potted peppermint and lemon verbena in the conservatory for the making of fresh tisanes, etc., etc. Earlier they’d felt a little perilous, sybaritic pleasures to distract me from my goal of helping Mrs. Watson and Lord Ingram discover the truth. But now?

Now I wonder whether beautiful homemaking is all Mrs. Carstairs has. I don’t know how reliable she finds her husband, she does not appear particularly close to her children, and she is estranged from her only sister.

I fear, dear Charlotte, that I might go the way of Mrs. Watson: I might start to see Mrs. Carstairs as a person, rather than merely a likely enemy.

Yours,

Livia

P.S. Strangely enough, in spite of everything, I still feel that Mr. Carstairs is more interested in his wife than in Mrs. Albright.

P.P.S. I realize I’ve said nothing about the seeming love triangle among the Reginald Carstairses and Mrs. Rebecca Wellesley—a rather limp story, if you want my uncharitable opinion. For a moment I thought the wife was the woman Mrs. Wellesley had railed against in the library the other night. But now I no longer think so. Mrs. Wellesley feels more direct than that. If she had such strong grievances against Emaline Carstairs, we’d all know about them by now.

P.P.P.S. That might be Lord Ingram knocking on my door, to take this note to you. Ask him about it.

High Burrow’s proximity to Sans Souci made it easy for Lord Ingram to return on horseback. Penelope had gone for a walk, but he found Holmes behind the house, on a cushioned bench. She wore a printed dress, red poppies and blue parrots against leafy green ferns; he was sure he’d seen the exact pattern on a wallpaper somewhere—and that made him grin to himself.

He saw the small album in her hands only as he rounded the bench. “Whose is it?”

His unsentimental Holmes rarely carted around mementos.

“Livia’s—I’m keeping it for her while she’s at High Burrow.”

He sat down beside her. She flipped through leaves of black backing paper, the photographs on them secured by carefully positioned mounting corners. Most of the images had been captured on the island of Delos, where he had supervised excavations for the French School of Athens this past spring. Mr. Marbleton had joined him for a solid three months as his assistant. Mrs. Newell and Miss Olivia had visited during that time; and later, so had Mrs. Watson and Holmes.

Mr. Marbleton was conspicuously absent from the photographs—or rather, the ones that included him showed him either distantly or from the back. Another omission also leaped out at Lord Ingram, but for this one he had only himself to blame: There were no photographs that featured both Holmes and his children because they had been away at the time, spending time with their mother, his former wife.

Lucinda and Carlisle had met Holmes once, before a display of stuffed narwhals in the Natural History Museum, when she had been still a respectable participant of London’s Marriage Mart and they mere tots, Lucinda four years of age and Carlisle barely three. Since Holmes’s exile from Society, except for the one time she’d surprised them at Sans Souci, in the days before the cottage bore that name, he’d made sure that his children were absent when he met with her. But now he wondered at the rationale. He had been friends with Mrs. Watson—Miss Joanna Redmayne, then—when he was their age. Why couldn’t they be in the same room as Holmes?

Holmes closed the album of photographs. Lord Ingram handed her the rubbings of the embroidered borders they’d found in the library at High Burrow. The fabric had been one-inch wide silk organza ribbons, each strip cut to somewhere between twelve and thirteen inches in length. The other drawers of the library held only eight-inch by six-and-a-half-inch sixmo-sized writing paper and he’d needed to use two pieces of paper put end-to-end to best capture the designs on the ribbons.

Holmes glanced at the whole thing and then examined each line of rubbing more closely, her gaze attentive, her lips very slightly puckered.

“Four ribbons, each with a different set of motifs,” she said after a while. “And each motif with twenty-three small designs, repeated three times in identical sequence. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Ash?”

“I pride myself on knowing that I rarely know what you’re thinking, Holmes,” he answered, smiling again to himself. “But I wondered whether the twenty-three designs in each motif didn’t represent the letters of the alphabet, minus, say, z, x, and q.”

“And for once, our unknowable minds think alike,” she murmured and lay down so that her head was on his lap, her booted feet extending beyond the padded armrest of the bench. “You’ve already looked around High Burrow, I take it.”

“In our rooms and in all the public areas. I didn’t see anything remotely resembling these ciphers.”

He gave her Miss Olivia’s letter. While she read, he gazed into the distance: The bench looked not east toward the Hangman Cliffs and High Burrow but north toward the Bristol Channel, rippling gold as the sun sank toward the horizon.

After a minute or two, Holmes asked, “Do you agree with my sister’s assessment that Mr. Carstairs might be more interested in his wife than in Mrs. Albright, despite his obvious and public courtesies toward the latter?”

He briefly caressed the shell of her ear. “On the main, yes, which is why I’m slightly perplexed. It’s crossed my mind that perhaps the husband knows of Justina Carstairs’s association with Moriarty and that this is his way of warning her of everything she stands to lose.”

The former Lady Ingram’s involvement with Moriarty was eventually made public, its nature altered to safeguard the true significance of her betrayal. Mr. Carstairs, if he had any inkling that his wife might be treading the same path, would no doubt be alarmed.

“Did you observe any tension between the spouses?”