“But the price will have to go up.”
“Of course.”
He gave a deep and dramatic sigh, and emptied his glass. “Let’s look at some samples, then. Do you have a colour in mind?”
“Mauve, I think.”
He winced, but the argument was gone out of him.
—
It took Mrs Hudson the rest of the day to finish her preparations, most of it in the hands of a woman recommended by Jonny as being not too incompetent with dye-pot, tweezers, and manicure scissors.
When she returned to Jonny’s shop, his were the only lights in view. He locked the door behind her and led her to the changing room, where he stood back to examine her, head to toe. In the end, his head made a motion that was equal part understanding nod and disapproving shake, and brought out a garment that he hadn’t the spirit to give his usual dramatic unveiling.
Her smile was unfeigned. “Oh, it’s perfect, Jonny.”
“It’s not perfect, it’s bloody hideous, pardon my French. I’ll have you know that I’ve already started your other dress, to get the taste of this one out of my mouth. It’ll be finished tomorrow, even if I am working Sunday. I expect you to come pick it up before the week is out.”
“I don’t—”
He glared. “You’re not about to tell me you don’t want it. Because you did give me a promise, my dear Mrs Hudson.”
“No, no—I’m happy to have it. In fact, I’m so sure of it, let me pay you for it now rather than wait.”
“You don’t need to do that,” he said, startled into a retreat. “What if you don’t like it? What if I’m hit by a bus? What if I find God and go off to live with the Naturists?”
“Dearest, I insist. By way of apology for my complete disruption of your week-end.”
“Well,” he admitted, “it will help me make my own apologies to my friend, who was expecting something in the way of theatre tonight. Now, try on your dress while I get us something strong to drink.”
After a while, the two of them stood, glasses in hand, to study the reflection in the three-sided mirror.
“What a horrible dress,” he said.
“It’s perfectly fine.”
“Yes, if you don’t mind looking like an aged femme de nuit with bad skin.”
“I won’t tell a soul that you made it.”
“You’d better not, or I’ll never dress you again.”
“Think of it as a theatre costume, rather than a dress,” she said.
“The phrase, ‘Mutton dressed as lamb’ does come to mind,” Jonny grumbled.
She smoothed her free hand down her torso and over her hips, turning to look at her profile.
Once upon a time, when she had been Clarissa, she lived in front of the looking glass. More recently, her relationship with mirrors had been confined to an occasional glance when her hair was feeling awry. There beneath Jonny’s unforgiving light, she took a last fortifying swallow and set down her glass, reaching into her shopping bags for the rest. She slipped on the light summer coat, its grey colour making the mauve of her dress go dull, then stepped into a pair of shiny black shoes. The hat was an uncertain cross between a cloche and a boater, and the flower pinned to it did not quite match the colour of the frock. She smoothed on a pair of delicate cotton lace gloves, settled her new black handbag over her arm, and stood back to contemplate the overall effect.
Jonny made a sound deep in his throat and rapidly drained his glass. She, however, winked at him in the mirror, and then her face underwent a change.
“Oh, who am I fooling?” she said with a sigh. “I’m an old woman; I’ll never be attractive again.” She reached into her handbag for a dark pencil and applied it to the grey in her eyebrows, only making matters worse.
Jonny shuddered and turned away, muttering grimly about her bringing it back with her, so he could take it into the yard and burn it.
She paid him, for both dresses, present and future. She added an apology to his friend, and kissed his cheek good-bye. When she let herself out onto the street, it would have been difficult to say which of the two seemed more downtrodden.
It was late, but it was a Saturday. The day’s long warmth and the after-theatre traffic filled the streets and pavements. Those strolling along seemed unusually blind when it came to avoiding Mrs Hudson’s person, with a continuous string of exclamations and apologies as she walked. Eventually, she moved towards the street, raising a tentative hand at the passing taxicabs. Half a dozen passed, unseeing, before a grey-haired driver swerved to the kerb—but as Mrs Hudson made her way towards the door, a brusque young man with a girl on his arm brushed past her to yank the door open and hand his young lady inside.
The taxi darted away, and Mrs Hudson smiled, very quietly, before turning again towards the flow of cars and putting up a somewhat more assertive glove.
This time, a cab pulled up immediately.
She gave him the address, and sat back, hands together, as the driver followed his head-lamps through the streets to the house of the man who had fathered her son.
Holmes’ feet slowly retracted, coming to the carpet in a sort of slow-motion counterpart to the furious working of his brain. “The Honours list?” he said. “Mycroft is the key to this? What is the—”
As if he had summoned his brother from the club across the road, the key sounded again in the door, and the big man himself entered.
Mycroft Holmes had shed a great deal of weight since his heart attack a year and a half earlier, but he would never be slim, and he would forever move like a man wrapped in bulk. He stopped dead as he saw our faces turned in his direction; one could see the summoning of energies.
“Hugh Edmunds.” Holmes, on his feet now, threw the name across the room like a weapon.
Mycroft’s fingers came up to work the buttons on his overcoat. He removed it, hung it up, closed the wardrobe door—and when he turned back, all traces of alcohol were gone from his eyes. “The Earl of Steadworth, yes. A man with sins, but most of those committed outside of England. And he has proved himself a…useful man in several difficult situations. So I let his name go through. Should I not have done so?”
Instead of replying to the question, Holmes asked one of his own. “Mycroft, what do you know about Mrs Hudson?”
To my astonishment, Mycroft looked discomfited. “Ah. Sherlock, it is my job to know things. Even—one might say particularly—those things that you do not care to talk about.”
Holmes dropped back into his chair, snatching up his pipe. “I suppose Watson knows all the details of my past as well, and wants only to protect me!”
Mycroft came to sit down in the largest chair before the fire, waiting until Holmes raised his eyes before he spoke. “I have never made use of this knowledge, Sherlock. I merely could not risk secrets.”
“Well, you missed one. Hugh Edmunds is the father of Mrs Hudson’s son.”
Mycroft’s face underwent a series of rapid changes: an instant of surprise gave way to reflection, then his expression grew dark as his brain analysed the significance of the fact. “You think Steadworth was using Samuel Hudson as a means of manipulating me? But, I’d already approved him.”
“Did he know that?”
Mycroft folded his hands over his waistcoat, his eyes losing focus as his mind reviewed the information it had been given. “He may have had doubts. I called the Earl in for a personal interview, which I seldom do. His name had been proposed for the New Year’s list, but as I said, several…misdeeds had been noted, requiring me to spend a degree more attention than I might have. One or two men regard him with distaste. I, myself, was not entirely pleased at how nakedly the man lusts after his Honour. However, neither did I think he would make any unseemly use of his position, not in public. In the end, it was decided that his sins were no more than the misdemeanours of his age and his class, and it was less important to please the fastidious than it was to acknowledge the services he had done the nation. And, frankly, His Royal Highness likes the man.”
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“Could Edmunds have believed you were going to refuse him?” Holmes demanded. “You personally, that is?”
“The process is only secret in theory,” Mycroft admitted. “In practice, a man with the Earl’s experience, and his acquaintances, generally has some idea of where he stands. Although it is not until the list goes to the Gazette that one may be certain.”
“Are names ever withdrawn between that publication and the actual granting of the Honours?”
The older man’s prodigious mental facilities worked for a time, before: “Rarely. Unless someone has died in the interim, I recall only two occasions in which the Honours list was not completed. In one of those, the man came home early from a shooting party, gun in hand, and discovered his wife with the estate manager; in the other, a newspaper reporter uncovered a series of letters suggesting a bishop had certain political sympathies with what might be called the wrong side.”
“Resulting in scandals?” I asked.
“Quite.”
“So if something came to light on a lesser order, such as fathering an illegitimate child, the name might be permitted to stand?”
“Once published in the Gazette, public forgiveness would be better than the admission of error.”
“And once the Honours were actually given?”
“Retracting an Honour is a serious embarrassment. Heads would roll on the Palace staff.”
“So we could say that a means of keeping information from your hands, or one that provided leverage on your decision, might be valuable?”
“Why don’t you tell me what you know,” Mycroft suggested gloomily.
So we did.
Reiterating it to him, however, brought the fragility of the argument to light. By the end, I found myself growing more interested in Holmes’ mythic £250,000. A mutineer’s bounty was appealing in so many ways—and it sounded as if the Gloria Scott had possessed a rich assortment of financial villains to choose from, as Prendergast’s partner in fraud. However, now doubts had been raised, Mycroft could not overlook Hugh Edmunds.
Mycroft glanced at the mantelpiece clock with regret: after midnight. “I might wish you had brought this to me earlier in the day.”
“We did not have it earlier in the day,” Holmes informed him.
Not much earlier, at any rate. “Have we any idea where the Earl is?” I asked. “Berkshire?”
“Mayfair,” Mycroft replied. “He would want to be in his London house when the announcement is made.”
“With the champagne already on ice,” I added. “Shall we go speak with him?”
“In the morning, certainly.”
“You really think we should wait until then?”
Mycroft raised one eyebrow, a look even more supercilious on him than it was on his younger brother. “Scotland Yard may be happy to break down a gentleman’s door in the middle of the night, but this is a conversation, my dear, not an accusation of murder.”
I heard Holmes mutter something that sounded remarkably like Thank God, but did not let it distract me. “If you find out that—”
Mycroft raised one hand. “If some new fact comes to light, I have until Monday noon to inform the Gazette of changes, without causing undue awkwardness.”
“Without the newspapers catching wind of a scandal, you mean.”
The big man was adamant. “I am not going to raise that sort of mid-night turmoil without good cause.”
Clearly, as far as Mycroft Holmes was concerned, re-setting a few lines in the upcoming London Gazette was, suspicions or no, inadequate cause for storming the Earl of Steadworth’s gates in the dead of night.
Whether she was Clarissa or Clara, Mrs Hudson had never entirely lost sight of Hugh Edmunds. She had seen the photographs of his wedding to the Hon Virginia Walthorpe-Vane, a petite Shropshire girl with a disturbingly innocent face. She saw the announcement of his father’s death, in 1886, and kept an eye on the Earl of Steadworth’s progress, from the back benches to positions of growing authority, becoming a man on the inside of power—a man who, reading between the lines, was brought in for the sorts of negotiations the more squeamish shied away from.
She had studied every photograph, and wondered. In the early years, his handsome features had proclaimed honest goodwill and competence. Later, however, the lines had spoken of something else, some faint edge of cruelty and greed—although she knew it might be her own prejudice, showing her qualities that she had never suspected when the man himself stood before her.
From her first Cheat on the streets of Sydney, when the man with the gold watch-chain gave her a half sovereign coin, she had known what men were thinking. Women might escape her eyes, but few men—remarkably few. Since the attack in Ballarat, she had known that any man she was unable to read could be very dangerous indeed.
Something to remember, tonight.
—
The clocks were striking midnight when her cab stopped in front of Steadworth House. The ground-floor curtains of the noble building were dark, and most of the upper rooms as well. The driver peered up and said uncertainly, “You sure you want me to drop you here?”
Mrs Hudson was pleased as she counted out her coins. How much could be said with nine brief words and a tone of voice: this man knew that she did not live here as family, and knew just as positively that she was not a servant to enter at the back.
“No, it’ll be fine, thank you.” She waited until he had pulled away before making her way up the steps to plant her gloved finger on the button for the electrical door-bell.
Her finger was growing tired when a light came on in the depths of the house. She stood away, clasping her hands together on her cheap, shiny handbag.
By the scent that wafted out with the door’s opening, she had caught the butler at a late-night glass of his master’s Armagnac; his collar betrayed a rapid attempt at restoring decorum. With one glance, his butlerian attitude towards a caller at this hour—stiff disapproval mingled with polite curiosity—dismissed her person and slid into something close to outrage.
“Madam, the hour is very late.”
“And getting later all the while,” she retorted. “I suspect the Earl will be displeased at having to listen to that long peal on the bell.”
Her confidence, so at odds with her appearance, gave him pause, though not actual retreat. “The Earl has gone to bed, Madam. Surely this can wait until morning.”
“If it could wait, I would have come in the morning. Kindly tell your master that Clarissa will see him now.”
His mouth worked a few times before it found words. “Madam, I cannot wake him unless it is an emergency.”
“You tell him my name. Let him judge how urgent it is.”
“I…very well, Madam. Would you please wait in here?”
She let the man usher her into a cold drawing room, switch on the electric lights, and close the door firmly behind her. If there had been a lock, she thought, he’d have turned the key.
The portraits on the walls had heavy gilt frames; the fireplace was marble; a trio of settees looked as comfortable as the table they stood around; the chandelier would take a maid an hour a week to polish. The zebra skin splayed in front of the hearth looked like a creature slow to move when a steam-roller came down the lane.
One thing to say for Mr Holmes: the man had never liked fussy decorations or dead animals.
It took eleven minutes before Hugh Edmunds came in, plenty of time to peruse the faces of previous generations, to test the hard surfaces of the seats, to peer through the diamond-shaped panes of the doors that would open on a fine evening to the narrow terrace. Through the wavy glass, colourless flowers and ghostly statues gleamed in the light from nearby streetlamps. Beyond them, the streets were silent. Then the door behind her came open, and those pale eyes of the paintings were given life. The utterly guileless gaze, the confident set of the head, yet somewhere about him—the shoulders?—there was a certain wariness, as if suspecting that the room contained a threat. The Earl had slip
pers on his feet, but otherwise had taken the time to get dressed, wearing suit trousers and a fresh white shirt beneath his smoking jacket: armour against importuning women.
“Good evening, Hugh.”
“Clarissa Hudson, by all that’s holy—I thought you must be dead long ago!”
“Not quite.”
“Bit of a surprise, hearing your name. Oh, Daniels, that’ll be all,” he said to the butler. “I shall see Miss Hudson out.”
Disapproving, and disappointed, the butler took his reluctant leave. The door closed; footsteps retreated down the corridor outside. When he was satisfied that they were alone, Hugh began to circle the room, his eyes on her all the time. He came to a set of decorative doors and reached back to slide one side open, revealing a well-stocked drinks cabinet.
“Glass of something, old thing?”
“Thank you.”
“You liked champagne, I remember, but there’s no ice. Seems to be everything else.”
She had no wish to follow Jonny’s good bubbly with bad. “I’ll have whatever you’re having, Hugh.”
He splashed amber liquid from a decanter into a pair of glasses, and set the decanter down. He then paused to survey the unprepossessing figure before the unlit fire. Mismatched costume, unsuitable hair, makeup that tried too hard. His guarded stance relaxed, the cock-crow aspect of his personality reasserting itself as he turned to pick up the glasses.
And to think she’d once found that charming.
He placed one drink on the low marble table in front of the fireplace, and dropped onto the scarlet settee on the table’s other side. She settled obediently onto her assigned patch of brocade, and saluted him with her crystal tumbler.
Only when he had lowered his own drink and his face was in the light from the lamp at her shoulder, did she ask him, “Hugh, when did Samuel come to see you?”
His surprise looked remarkably like guilt. He drew up his leg to prop it across the knee—then caught himself. Instead, he stretched out both legs in a show of nonchalance, resting the glass on his belly. “Yes, about that. Why did I never know we had a son?”