Page 54 of The Vanished Sister

Mr. Gregory shook his head slowly but decisively. “Not that I can recall.”

“What did the two of you talk about, if you don’t mind my asking—and if you don’t mind me taking some notes? We will do our level best to make sure that your privacy is not disturbed by the investigation.”

“I’m grateful for your consideration but it’s quite all right. I shall be more than happy to tell you everything that I can remember.” Mr. Gregory poured tea for them and took a sip. “It was on the morning of our departure from Ludlow. My sister’s luggage was already loaded, but she remained in animated conversations with two of her friends. So I left our inn, told the cabbie where I could be found, and walked to the nearby stone bridge. At this point, a woman, who could very well be your Mrs. Whitehill, approached me and asked about the travel labels on my satchel.

“The labels were from the hotels I stayed at in Port Said, after I disembarked from the Provence, and later in Cairo and Alexandria. Mrs. Whitehill had a disarming manner and I did not mind reminiscing about the Great Pyramid of Giza or my subsequent trip up the Nile to the first cataract.

“I asked her if she was also interested in traveling. That was when she told me she lived only fifteen miles from Ludlow in an area sometimes referred to as Little Switzerland and wished her first destination abroad to be the real Alps, so she could gauge the difference with her own eyes.

“At that point a porter came running to fetch me. I bade the lady good-bye and left.”

“And the words Devon, Ilfracombe, Combe Martin—or even the South West Coast—they did not come up in your conversation?” Lord Ingram had to ask again.

“Not at all. My sister and I were indeed headed to the seaside—to Cromer, on the other side of the country from Devon. But even that never came up.”

But now Lord Ingram wished that it had. Had Mrs. Whitehill gone to Cromer, her romantic aspirations would have been dashed to pieces, perhaps, but she might have remained alive.

A stiff breeze billowed the curtains and flipped the first few pages of a magazine on a nearby occasion table. The sun must have gone behind a cloud; the parlor was suddenly much dimmer, almost twilight-like. “That was the last you saw of Mrs. Whitehill?”

“The first and the last. My sister and I journeyed to Cromer. We were there a week. I then escorted her home, stayed a day or two, and came back here only yesterday. I’m sure both she and her maid would be happy to testify to that.”

But that was never the question, was it?

If Mrs. Whitehill’s heart had been felled by Mr. Gregory, what had made her turn around and head for the South West Coast?

Or who, for that matter?

Livia had worn men’s attire before. Charlotte was a firm advocate: A convincing masculine disguise had been a necessity in her career. But more than that, sometimes it was simply safer being a man, if one must travel alone.

For that reason, Livia had a set of men’s clothes. But today was her first time in those clothes walking beside a man who wasn’t Charlotte in camouflage. Today she and Stephen were a pair of bespectacled dilettantes, ambling about London, loudly discussing Aristotle’s decades in Plato’s Academy whenever they neared a crowd.

But this was no mere outing for her to improve her disguise. Their first stop was St. Martin’s Le Grand, where they called for letters for a Mr. Tobias Hedge. That day at dinner Charlotte had not recited the entirety of the letter from “de Lacey” to Mrs. Carstairs. There had also been a postscript on how she could write him: You may reach me post restante at the General Post Office. Address your correspondence to Mr. Tobias Hedge.

The clerk did not have anything for them. Livia was still trying to decide whether she was more relieved or more disappointed when Stephen invited her for a trip on the underground railway. The experience, also her first time, was not entirely pleasant; it was noisy, dank, and much too smoky. But it was fun—doing anything with Stephen was fun. And they talked about the deep-level line that was soon to open, with electric trains that promised to be clean and quiet, with no exhaust fumes clinging to the clothes of riders.

And then he took her to a pub. After buying a pair of sandwiches, they slipped into the cellar and descended into a secret tunnel via a hidden trapdoor. Hands held, they scooted along for several minutes in pitch-dark before he opened another trapdoor and helped her up into another cellar.

This one was attached to a small house that looked onto a perfectly anonymous street. Inside, the slightly shabby furnishing and old-fashioned knickknacks could have belonged to a septuagenarian woman, living quietly in her widowhood. But on the upright piano protected by a large fringed shawl, there were three framed photographs. The first featured a park bench; the second, a different park bench; and the third, a simple picnic, only a few sandwiches and two water canteens on a cloth spread on rocky ground.

They’d met on the first park bench and been reunited on the second one after his imprisonment by Moriarty. And the picnic had taken place on the last day of her visit to Delos this spring, just the two of them and an entire hillside of much plundered classical civilization.

This was his place, another first for her. She caressed the frames of the photographs. “Nice pictures.”

“The best,” he murmured.

They ate their sandwiches on good plates, drank from bottles of mineral water he had on hand, and talked about the latest books they’d read. And when they were finished with their meal, he asked, with a gleam in his eyes, “I believe you’ve said before that you wouldn’t mind trying on my dresses. Would you like to take a look at my wardrobe?”

After she finished laughing, they did exactly that. It was nice to take off her jacket and trousers redolent of old steam engines, peel off the mustache on her upper lip, and slip into a white muslin frock that smelled faintly of jasmine. It was a bit loose and rather too long, but she didn’t mind. He changed into a muted olive-green dress, set a chignoned wig on his head, and instantly resembled a governess who knew just how to bring the most spoiled of boys to heel.

An idea struck her. “What do you say we go to Liberty’s and find a pattern we both like and make matching dresses?”

After he finished laughing, they left from the front door.

Livia and Stephen had just strolled onto Regent Street when Livia stopped. “But that’s Rebecca Wellesley.”

Across the street, Mrs. Wellesley cut through the pedestrians on the pavement, an Amazon in black silk, her walking gown almost too fashionable for mourning attire.

Taking advantage of a small break in the traffic—at least now, with the Season finished, the volume of carriages in the West End had reduced appreciably—Livia dashed across the thoroughfare, crying at the top of her lungs, “Mrs. Wellesley! Mrs. Wellesley!”