Page 8 of The Vanished Sister

“And she would have been of help to me during the worst of my dissection classes?” Penelope laughed, a cascade of bell-clear sounds. “Aunt Jo, you’re still such a worrywart.”

She rounded the stool, settled her hands on Mrs. Watson’s shoulders, and met her eyes in the mirror. “Now, how can we make you even more beautiful tonight?”

The proof of Justina’s sincerity arrived shortly before dinner, a seven-piece diamond parure: a triple-tier necklace the size of a breastplate, two bracelets, a brooch, a pair of earrings, and a diadem worthy of a princess royale.

Justina’s gift to baby Penelope all those years ago, a substantial gold pendant, had been sold the next day, the money given to a home for indigent women. What was she to do with all these?

“They’re not paste, are they?” asked Miss Olivia, her fingers hovering in midair, not quite touching the costly jewelry.

Mrs. Watson, hands shaking only a little, gave her Miss Charlotte’s magnifying glass. “If they’re paste, you’ll find bubbles and swirls—and maybe marks left by the molds used in their manufacture.”

Miss Olivia searched the diadem. But Mrs. Watson knew that she would only see adamantine facets, gems that burned from within.

“The large stones on the earrings can cut glass,” said Miss Charlotte. “And the necklace comes apart.”

She flipped the necklace around, found the mechanism, released a whole central section, and pinned it on Penelope as a hair ornament. The strands of diamonds glittered prodigiously. For a moment, fireworks went off in Mrs. Watson’s head—until all the sparks extinguished and fell from the sky.

This was too extravagant. Ominously so. Why would Justina care this much whether Mrs. Watson attended her party?

“Shall we continue our discussion at table?” suggested Lord Ingram. “The food will be cold if we stand around for much longer.”

Mrs. Watson did not fail to notice that he placed a decanter of whisky on the table as he spoke, next to a bud vase holding a handful of pink dahlias. Everyone sat down and served themselves. Mrs. Watson poured some wine into her glass—there was no need to start with whisky—and went directly for the crux of the matter. “Miss Charlotte, you can tell me the reason my sister is willing to part with a queen’s ransom for my attendance at her party.”

There came a slight collective scrape of chairs as Penelope and Miss Olivia moved closer to the table. Miss Charlotte, clad in an oxblood dress with a profusion of large pink silk flowers along the neckline, smoothed the napkin on her lap.

For a moment the dinner appeared terribly normal, nothing but lambent light on soft shoulders and an occasional clink of silver serving spoon against Limoges platter. Behind Miss Charlotte, the window looked north toward the coastline. The sun had yet to set, but the sea was already shrouded in shadows.

“When Mrs. Watson and I are both in London,” began Miss Charlotte, “she is the first reader of the correspondence addressed to Sherlock Holmes. But from time to time, I’m in London by myself. You’ll recall, ma’am, that after the business with Lord Bancroft three summers ago, we both went to Paris but I came back after a few days.”

Mrs. Watson nodded.

“I then visited France again,” continued Charlotte, “including a holiday in Lord Ingram’s vineyard in Bordeaux. But between those two trips, I was in London on my own and it was during that time that I, or Sherlock Holmes, rather, received an anonymous letter. The letter informed Sherlock Holmes that 18 Upper Baker Street was owned by a former actress and exhorted him to spurn women of questionable character, lest his own reputation suffer by association.”

The fluted stem of the wineglass dug into the pad of Mrs. Watson’s thumb. She’d dealt with such nuisance before, but what did it have to do with—

“Needless to say,” Miss Charlotte continued, “I, a woman of considerable infamy, was not going to throw stones in my own glass house. But I was intrigued by the letter sender. Whom could it be? An erstwhile colleague from Mrs. Watson’s days on the stage, disgruntled about her subsequent success? A resentful former protector? Members of the domestic staff who had been let go?

“The letter was typed on excellent linen paper, the top of which was cut off in a neat line. It stood to reason that the paper came from a supply printed with the letter writer’s name or address, possibly both. The stationery of a wealthy, or at least well-to-do, household.

“The postmark was from a village in Lincolnshire. I traveled there and made inquiries but uncovered nothing of note.

“At that point, I had no other leads except for Mrs. Watson’s own connections to Lincolnshire. So I bought a ticket to the village where she’d lived as an adolescent and quickly discovered that while Miss Joanna Redmayne had been largely forgotten in the thirty-odd years since she left, everyone knew of a Miss Justina Redmayne, now Mrs. Carstairs of Noble House. And Noble House, as it turned out, was only two railway stops from the village where the letter had been postmarked.”

From the moment the diamond parure arrived it had been obvious everything Miss Charlotte would reveal tonight would be about Justina. Yet Mrs. Watson felt no less blindsided. She glanced at the claret in her glass. She didn’t want it. She didn’t want whisky either. She didn’t need to be fortified; she needed her heart to be made of the same stuff as Justina’s bribe, all bright, hard edges and glass-cutting brutality.

Miss Charlotte ladled herself a bowl of soup. “I visited Noble House the next day—the grounds were open to the public. That evening I stayed at a nearby inn. The day after was Sunday and I attended church.

“The entire Carstairs family came to the service. The moment I saw Mrs. Carstairs, I understood that I was most likely looking at Mrs. Watson’s sister. But how would I know whether Mrs. Carstairs had anything to do with the letter? Just because she happened to live within thirty miles of the post office in question? I did another tour of the grounds of Noble House, talked to the gatekeeper, and learned that guests would be coming that evening for a house party that would last a week—not the best time for me to break in.

“So I broke into their minimally staffed London town house instead. And when I did that, I found the typewriter on which the letter had been composed.”

Miss Olivia emitted a gasp. Alphabetical characters produced by a typewriter could be nearly as distinct and recognizable as handwriting, be it an l that was slightly askew, a d dented on the bowl, or a t with one terminal that was always darker than the other. Mrs. Watson chewed the inside of her cheek and said nothing.

Miss Charlotte spread butter on a tranche of bread Lord Ingram had sliced for her from the loaf on the table. “At this point I had to think about how to proceed. If Mrs. Watson will forgive me, my first thought was not whether I ought to inform her right away but how to neutralize Mrs. Carstairs as a potential threat.

“To that effect, Sherlock Holmes wrote directly to Mrs. Carstairs at Noble House. He stated that while he appreciated her concern for his standing in the world, 18 Upper Baker Street served his purposes admirably. As long as Mrs. Watson remained honest and reasonable in her business dealings, he did not propose to inquire into what else she had or hadn’t done with her life.”

Mrs. Watson felt a perverse pleasure at the frisson of fright Justina must have experienced—a pleasure that turned to dust in the next instant. A stranger’s judgment she could understand, but Justina ought to know that her sister was more than a demi-mondaine, more than a mere moral stain on the fabric of society.