Page 89 of The Vanished Sister

Behind her, more footsteps pounded—everyone else catching up en masse. But no one passed her, and certainly no one overtook Everett Carstairs.

She dashed out of the front door, her lungs burning. Everett Carstairs was closing the door of a hired trap, the vehicle that must have brought him to the estate.

The cabbie raised his whip and was about to flick it.

“Stop! Stop!” Mrs. Watson screamed.

The driver glanced at her, his raised hand stilled.

“Go! Fast as you can!” shouted Everett Carstairs from the half-open window of the trap.

The cabbie looked about. In the wobbly light of the entry lamps, his face had only the sparsest of growth, a young man untested and unsure.

Mrs. Watson yanked her pistol out of the hidden pocket of her dress and fired it into the air. “Stay right where you are if you don’t want to be shot,” she cried. “And if you don’t want to be arrested for being an accomplice to a fugitive of the law.”

The cabbie’s mouth fell open.

Mrs. Watson approached the trap. Blood pulsed in her ear; a stitch in her side stabbed under the lower edge of her rib cage. “Mr. Carstairs, I understand your haste,” she said hoarsely. “I am also in the greatest hurry to reach London and see for myself whether there’s any truth to the telegram. But sir, I’m afraid you will either travel under a police escort or not at all.”

Twenty-Eight

They spent the night in a railway hotel in Lincoln. Mrs. Watson passed most of the hours in a chair outside Everett Carstairs’s room, while being convinced he would escape out of his window and somehow safely reach the ground three floors below.

But he was there in the morning, impatient for everyone to be ready to head out on the first train. Mrs. Watson, despite her best effort otherwise, fell asleep as soon as the train left the station and did not wake up until Miss Charlotte tugged at her elbow, reminding her that it was time to change trains.

Seated in a compartment of their own on the next train, Mrs. Watson dozed off again. This time, however, when the train began moving, she woke up with a start. “Where’s the petticoat?”

Miss Charlotte, still in disguise as Sherrinford Holmes, patted the satchel next to her.

Are you not going to decipher what’s on it?

“Have you already deciphered what’s on it?” Mrs. Watson asked uncertainly.

Miss Charlotte proffered a notebook. “Yes.”

Mrs. Watson accepted the notebook but made no move to open it. “Which—which of the four codes did she use?”

“All of them, mixed together.”

“And—the decoded text is in here?”

“I added paragraph breaks and punctuation, and corrected for x’s and z’s, which Mrs. Carstairs had omitted in her alphabet. She’d omitted the letter q, too, but did not need to use it.”

Mrs. Watson still couldn’t open the notebook. Those were Justina’s words inside, from goodness knows how long ago. This was why she had wanted Sherlock Holmes’s involvement, because she’d hidden her truth so deeply and she hadn’t wanted to take it with her to her grave.

“It’s—it’s something terrible, isn’t it?” she murmured, hoping against hope for a different answer.

“I’m afraid so.”

“And does it have anything to do with her death?”

“Possibly.”

Outside the train, early morning sun shone on a freshly washed countryside. Fields and pastures receded only for more fields and pastures to come into view, green and glistening. Across from her, Miss Charlotte, the underside of her eyes darkened by shadows, regarded Mrs. Watson steadily. She had no comfort to offer but she did not shy away from Mrs. Watson’s misery.

Mrs. Watson closed her eyes for a moment and opened the notebook.

Cordelia Carstairs did not die from childbirth. I killed her at Everett Carstairs’s urging: He promised to marry me if I made him an eligible man again.