Page 46 of The Vanished Sister

In other areas they relied on their great mutual goodwill to cushion their differences.

He patted the cotton ball along her jawline, where her skin had become splotchy from the beard glue. At least in Shropshire she’d no longer need to disguise herself as Sherrinford Holmes. “Are you sure Mrs. Watson made the right decision in leaving the Carstairses alone?”

He still felt uneasy about Justina Carstairs’s disappearance. Mrs. Watson must be ten times as troubled.

“She has no cause to probe further—no testimony, no evidence.”

He set aside the cotton ball. “The husband is too clever by half.”

“You think that cleverness is enough to signal a murderer?” She gazed up at him, resting her cheek against one raised palm. “I’m an extremely clever woman, if I may say so myself.”

His favorite extremely clever woman—leaving on the morrow, their time together always so brief.

He climbed into bed, buried his face in the crook of her shoulder, and inhaled the clean scent of her skin. “And they haven’t caught you committing murders, have they?”

The single lit window went dark. Now the silhouette of High Burrow was just visible in the moonlight, a spiky lair.

Mrs. Watson rested one hand on the limestone balustrade at the edge of the terrace. Her other hand pulled at the closure of her dressing gown—the breeze had an unexpected bite.

“Hot cocoa?” came Miss Charlotte’s voice.

Mrs. Watson spun around. “My dear, it’s late!”

And the young woman’s braid looked rumpled, a nimbus of wisps catching moonlight, as if she’d already been abed.

Miss Charlotte handed Mrs. Watson a brimming mug and began sipping from her own. Mrs. Watson wrapped her hands around the warm ceramic and sighed. She should be the one getting up to check on the young people, not the other way around, but how nice not to be forgotten in the middle of the night.

The cocoa, rich, sweet, and piping hot, went down her throat with a welcome burst of warmth. “Do you remember,” she said rather impulsively, “that when we first met you told me I was a grieving widow, even though I wasn’t in mourning attire?”

Miss Charlotte nodded.

“It was part of the reason I asked you to join my household, because I thought that at least with you, I’d no longer need to hide that grief. But you know what brought me out of my grief?” She couldn’t help smiling at the memories of that heady summer during which everything came together so readily. “When we established Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, suddenly I had a business and a partner to look after. I no longer had time to lament the life I’d lost when Dr. Watson died because I was too busy building a new one.”

And now, left in the lurch by Justina, her sisterly sentiments having nowhere to go, her anxieties multiplying like gnats in a stable…

“I need to find an occupation for myself.” She tilted back her mug again, drowning her sorrow in milk and chocolate. “You had to be Sherrinford Holmes here, my dear, because the Stanmore Newells and Philana Newell have all met you, and the Carstairs could have seen you, too, during your London Seasons. But in Shropshire, you can put aside that accursed beard and be Miss Holmes, Sherlock Holmes’s sister, as long as you have a chaperone.”

A role that Mrs. Watson had taken on many times in the past four years.

“Are you sure, ma’am?” asked Miss Charlotte. “We’ll likely travel a good deal and call on a great many people.”

There was no insinuation of doubt in the young woman’s tone. Hers was a straightforward question. Could Mrs. Watson, in her current state of mind, brave constant displacement and a kaleidoscopic parade of Mrs. Whitehill’s friends and neighbors?

Mrs. Watson’s courage almost failed—perhaps locking herself in a room to ruminate over Justina’s fate and her own shortcomings wouldn’t be so terrible after all. “I’m sure I’ll be of very little help to you. But I can sit on a train and I can sit in a parlor, if that’s all that will be required of me.”

Somewhere behind the cottage, an owl hooted softly. The leaves of the large whitebeam that grew on the terrace rustled. The sea, one hundred feet below, lapped against the rocky coast, squiggles of moonlight undulating upon its surface.

“Very good, ma’am,” said Miss Charlotte. She settled a warm hand over Mrs. Watson’s, still wrapped around her mug. “We leave on the first train.”

Fifteen

In the past few years, Inspector Robert Treadles had come to know Mrs. Watson rather well: not through Miss Charlotte Holmes, with whom he’d worked on a number of cases, but through his wife Alice, a staunch admirer of Mrs. Watson.

The friendship between the two women first blossomed when Mrs. Watson took Alice under her wing in Alice’s most desperate hour, with Treadles detained on suspicion of a double murder and Alice about to lose control of the great manufacturing enterprise she had inherited.

Afterward Alice called on Mrs. Watson regularly for advice, and sometimes simply for the pleasure of the latter’s company. And when Mrs. Watson was in London by herself, either because Miss Holmes had traveled somewhere at Lord Remington’s behest or because they were both abroad and Mrs. Watson had come back to London to look after her own affairs, Alice almost always invited Mrs. Watson to dinner.

It was difficult to spend time with Mrs. Watson without arriving at a deep appreciation for her warmth, generosity, and good humor. It had rather struck Treadles when he realized that she was a habitual worrier, but her private misgivings had never dampened her spirits to a noticeable degree.