Page 45 of The Vanished Sister

“I begged for Mr. Holmes to lend a hand because I needed to know what happened to my sister,” said Mrs. Watson slowly, her voice scratchy. “But now it seems that she has disappeared for very private reasons and is alive and well—or at least alive and well enough…”

She hesitated. It felt as if she were abandoning Justina to the vagaries of fate. “But from this point onward it may be best to curtail our involvement.”

She waited for Miss Charlotte, still dressed as Sherrinford Holmes, to say something. Or at least to indicate that what Mrs. Watson thought of as the only reasonable choice going forward was, in fact, the correct one.

“You’re right,” said Miss Charlotte. “At this point, without any tangible evidence that Mrs. Carstairs is in harm’s way, it would be unseemly for outsiders to insist that they must know more.”

Her answer was unequivocal. Yet even her great authority could not confer upon Mrs. Watson the absolution she sought. Why wasn’t she digging up every inch of High Burrow—and then Noble House, if the former didn’t yield the results she sought?

Behind Miss Charlotte, outside the windows, the night was heavy and dense. The dining room felt like a single buoy upon a vast sea, a tiny radius of safety against the raging currents of the world.

“Mr. Holmes, you—” began Inspector MacDonald hesitantly. “You aren’t quitting the case altogether, are you?”

Miss Charlotte replenished Inspector MacDonald’s water glass and her own. “What are your plans, Inspector? And how can I be of use?”

At her willingness for further cooperation, the young policeman sat up straighter, his hands on the edge of the table. “Locally, I’ll have men search for anyone who might have seen the victim—she couldn’t have leaped from her train directly into the sea. In Shropshire, I’ve asked Inspector Treadles to act for me, and he has kindly agreed.”

The discussion moved on from Justina. Mrs. Watson felt a renewed pang of loss. She caught Lord Ingram and Penelope peering at her. They’d gladly listen to her unburden herself after dinner. But she’d already talked the girl’s ear off in the last day and a half, reminiscences interspersed with increasingly outlandish theories as they sat huddled in one railway compartment after another.

And while Lord Ingram hadn’t yet heard all the stories she could recall about the Redmayne sisters, was it really helpful to go on miring herself in either the past or Justina’s marital woes? If she’d learned anything in at last emerging from the shadow of her dear John’s death, it was that she could cling too long and too hard onto grief as a way of holding on to what had already disappeared.

She could mourn endlessly, if she allowed herself.

In the distance, a single window was lit in High Burrow, its sharp-angled contours melding into the night. Lord Ingram thought of his former wife’s disappearance years ago. He had known the truth about it but his children hadn’t. Could it be the same for the Carstairses?

“Ash, have you ever imagined what it would have been like for us had we married when we were young?”

The question so astonished him it was a moment before he set the casement stay in the right position and turned around from the window, now open a perfect inch. Holmes, in a nightgown that bared her arms, her hair loose, sat cross-legged on the bed, an atlas of Britain open on her lap.

“How would we have married when we were young? You’d have said yes had I asked?” He shivered. “My goodness, would you have?”

The thought astounded even today. Back then it would have given him an aneurism, he who had feared her as an agent of chaos, a likely saboteur of all that he was trying to make of himself.

She batted her eyelashes, her eyes as transparent and guileless as ever. “Let’s say we were caught in a compromising position and had to get married.”

His hands clutched at the edge of the windowsill. “Don’t tell me you’d schemed about it.”

She braided her hair into a thick plait. “Not seriously. But mine was a mind in want of an occupation, so of course I’d thought about it—to pass time, if nothing else.”

“My God,” he murmured. “I would have died.”

Of mortification, if he’d ever been caught in flagrante delicto. But also, of pleasure, the two of them setting London on fire.

“And you would have been wasted as the mistress of Stern Hollow.” He left the window, walked to her dressing table, and soaked a cotton ball in witch hazel. “Why the questions on what it would have been like for us? Because you spent the day hearing about the Carstairses’ marriage?”

He would have preferred that the questions had arisen because she had been thinking about their future, but that seemed unlikely under the circumstances.

“Possibly,” she said, tying a powder-blue ribbon around the end of her plait. “Good or bad, some marriages are instructive. But I’m not sure what to think of the Carstairses’. What is your take, having seen them up close?”

He walked to the bed and wrapped a hand behind her nape. “Well-matched.”

Not exactly an original view—possibly everyone who had ever seen Everett and Justina Carstairs together had had the same thought.

They were not only the union of two magnificent specimens. Their elegance was of a similar tenor, their perfection, a like granularity. Even the way they answered questions about their marriage and their attitude toward each other evinced a comparable sharp-edged vulnerability that was far from defenseless.

“Are we well-matched, Ash?” she asked, rather seriously.

“In bed, maybe,” he said, also rather seriously.