“We didn’t have a son, Hugh. I had a son.”
“Come now, Clarissa—the boy’s the spitting image of me at his age.”
“Interesting. I’ve always thought he resembled my father. When did you meet Samuel?”
“He showed up here, out of the blue, a couple weeks back. The most ungodly Australian accent and a suit like something you’d bury a bank clerk in. Flourishing a handful of old letters and a photo of me from The Times, along with a story I’d have thought highly unlikely if it hadn’t been like looking in a mirror.”
“What kind of letters?”
“From your father—who, it seems, wasn’t quite as dead as you told me, all those years ago.”
“Probably not. Who were the letters to?”
“Your mother and your sister. Alice?”
“Alicia. I doubt the letters said all that much. My father couldn’t have mentioned your name, since he never knew it.”
“No, but he knew you were having a child, and he referred to the father as a ‘Lord.’ Samuel seems to have grown up believing that Alice—sorry, Alicia—was his real mother, until he came across those letters. She also had a photo of me from some years back—she must’ve spotted it and had the same thought I did: Samuel Hudson looks a hell of a lot like Lord Steadworth.
“Oh, and he had a necklace, a half sovereign strung through a chain. Now, that I have a very clear memory of.”
At his leer, Clara Hudson’s fingers tightened on the crystal: a telegram, crumpled into his pocket before she could see it; bereft tears at the fictional loss of a mother; his face, nuzzling the front of her uncorseted gown in search of comfort. And afterwards, his fingers playing with the gold coin between her breasts.
He grinned at her blush. “Oh, Clarissa, if only my dear wife had proved as hearty as you, I might have had a more productive marriage. Instead, all I have left are two sickly girls and a son whose accent puts my teeth on edge.”
“What did Samuel want from you?”
“Do you know, I think he wanted recognition, more than money—although he seems happy enough to be offered money. And I suppose revenge—on you. He went all dark and broody when he talked about you pawning him off on your sister. He seems to have found it troubling to discover as a grown man that his parents hadn’t been his parents. But more immediately, he’s looking for his grandfather.”
“My father? Did he tell you Papa was still alive?” Even without a bullet, James Hudson would have been fast approaching his century mark.
“No, he claimed his grandfather had disappeared around the time he was born, and thought I might know where he’d gone. One of the letters indicated that your father had money hidden away somewhere. I believe the phrase was, ‘a fortune dropping out of the sky.’ Since nothing of the sort came to light after your sister died, he came here hoping that the old man might have told me about it.”
“Why on earth would he think that?”
“Your father’s letter said he had recently figured out something that had been puzzling him for a long time, and expected to come into a lot of money because of it—although he didn’t obligingly go on to say what that might be. Were there pirates in your family, Clarissa? A map to buried treasure? Samuel thinks it might have to do with the rights to a gold mine. Your father was on his way back to Australia to retrieve whatever it was—after which, he told your sister, they would all live in comfort for ever after. I assured Samuel that not only did I have no idea about any Hudson family monies or gold mines, but the closest I’d come to your father was one night on opposite sides of an hotel door. That was he, I take it, who tried to pound down the door that night?
“I did, frankly, wonder if this was not a rather clumsy attempt to introduce the topic of money. Just in case I felt like clasping him to me and declaring him my one true heir.” Edmunds shook his head, and got up to fill his empty glass. “However, it was another part of that same letter that caught my eye. Have you seen them? The letters?”
“No.”
“I tried to get him to leave them here with me, but he wouldn’t. Suspicious little bugger, your son—watched over me while I read them. Anyway, in one, your father says that he is on his way to see a man by name of Beddoes, down in Hampshire. Now, this was a man I met briefly, back in the late ’seventies—he was in a deal with the bank when he simply up and scarpered. Created untold confusion. And, by a fascinating coincidence, that very name was in the papers not long before Samuel showed up here. Bones found on the fellow’s estate. ‘The Skeleton in the Gamekeeper’s Garden,’ I believe they called it.”
Fortunately, Hugh had got up to lay a match under the laid fire, so he missed her reaction. “I remember reading about that,” she said when she’d got her voice under control. “Although I’m not sure what connexion you imagined there.”
He straightened, wincing like an old man. “Clarissa, I always knew you walked the line of being shady. Good girls don’t spend the Christmas holidays in Monte Carlo, or keep thick packets of £20 notes at the bottom of their sponge-bag. Yes, yes, I went through your rooms when you were away. Wouldn’t you? And if you’re that way, it’s a sure bet your father wasn’t sea-green incorruptible. So when I see a letter written back in ’seventy-nine saying your father—remarkably lively for a dead man—is on his way to see this fellow Beddoes…well, put one criminal together with another, and come up with a man buried in the woods.”
“Did Samuel know about the skeleton?”
“Not until I told him.” He walked back to the settee. “I’m not sure why I did. Probably to get him out of the way for a bit, so I could think things over. It was the second time we’d met. The first time he showed up here was a Tuesday, when I have a regular lunch date with the Prime Minister, so I’d have put him off even if he hadn’t been talking madness. We met again the next afternoon—not here. There’s a nice anonymous restaurant I know that keeps a few muscular waiters in shouting distance, in case a customer gets out of hand. He sat there drinking a lot of expensive claret while I squinted my way through his letters. That’s when I told him about the skeleton.”
“I don’t imagine that was the last time you saw him.”
“No. He ’phoned here last Saturday, and I met him at the same place. He’d been in Hampshire, and although most people figured the bones had to be those of Beddoes himself, who’d disappeared about then, Samuel was convinced they were his grandfather’s. Something on the body that the people in the village told him about. We had a long talk, and I, er, I told him he should go down and see you. Just to say hello.”
Surely Hugh hadn’t always been such a shockingly bad liar? Had her eyes been clouded by love back then, or had he lost the knack? Perhaps he simply could not be bothered to assemble a believable lie for such an obvious old failure as Clara Hudson?
“So you knew where I was, all the time?” she asked.
Something flickered at the back of his eyes, and he bent sharply to take a cigar from the ornate table-top humidor. He clipped the end and traded the clipper for a cigar lighter in the shape of a naked woman. Her silver head spouted flame as he warmed the length of tobacco (a masculine ceremony that had always struck her as odd, considering the cigar’s resemblance to the male anatomy). Comforted by the delay, he set the lighter back on the table and spoke from a concealing cloud. “Actually, no. He’d told me where you’d been all these years, the first time he and I met. I’d no idea. Keeping house for Sherlock Holmes—imagine.”
His open disdain could not hide a degree of uneasiness. Most likely it was due to the mere idea of Mr Holmes, who tended to make even the innocent a bit uneasy. She wished she could be sure. She said nothing, which encouraged him to go on.
“I suppose if I’d realised where you were, I might have looked you up. I know the man’s brother, slightly. He’s a, well, a professional contact, really. Not a friend—ha! Mycroft Holmes has no friends. But it never came up. And Hudson is a common enough name.”
Something about Mycroft Holmes appeared t
o bother Hugh: he spoke the name as if picking at a sore, unable to help himself. However, she had a few more mild questions before she could begin to press.
“It was good of you to suggest that Samuel come down to see me.”
“Well, a boy only has one mother. Except when he has two, I guess,” he added with a bray of laughter.
“And when you told him about the skeleton, he said he might know who the bones belonged to. I’ll have to let the police know that it might be my father. After all these years. I wonder what could have happened? And, what was it they found on his body, do you know? That Samuel recognised?”
“Some object made out of string, he said. Got pretty worked up about it, for some reason. And, er, that’s when he said he’d go down and see you. Except that he didn’t have any money. So I gave him some.”
“Really?”
He shrugged, studying his cigar. “The least I could do.”
“He must have been pretty broke, if he couldn’t have afforded a train ticket to Sussex.”
“Yes, well, it was a bit more than that. He said he’d need a motorcar. Not just to go see you, of course, but while he was in England. And I think he wanted to impress you, a little. Maybe.”
“A motorcar.” Some part of that was a lie, she thought.
He rubbed off the end of the cigar in the ash-tray, then looked up at her, head tilted to one side. “You’re still a remarkably attractive woman, Clarissa Hudson.”
She laughed. “And you haven’t changed a bit, Hugh. Your face looks as if you’ve never had a moment’s worry in your life. You look unlived-in.”
Stinging words from this frumpy woman across the table startled him into a sharp reaction. “How could you give your baby up, Clarissa? What kind of unnatural mother were you?”
“You—” She caught herself, and turned slashing scorn into a calm interest. “Perhaps you think I should have handed him over to you?”
But he’d seen her reaction. “Why not? I could have given him to one of the tenants to raise, given him a job when he was grown. Too short for a footman, but maybe sub-gardener.”
“That would have been generous of you.” Suddenly, she was weary: weary of this man, sick of the Act. In any event, she had all the facts she needed—all but one. “Hugh, when you bought Samuel a car, did you also give him a gun?”
“I never gave—I mean, did he have a gun?”
The empty protest echoed through the room. With a sigh, and feeling every one of her years, Mrs Hudson moved her handbag from settee to lap, signalling her preparation to leave. First, however, she spoke to the man who had once been her lover: whom she had once thought she loved. “Yes, Hugh. Samuel came to my house with a gun. I think you not only knew it, you planned it. I think you and he decided that I was going to mysteriously disappear, and a ransom note would be delivered to Mr Holmes. Just…not for money.” She waited. When no denial came, she shook her head in despair.
“I imagine you wanted to pressure Mr Holmes into doing something. That’s how you work, isn’t it? You find a person’s weak spot and exploit it to the hilt. So you have some sort of a business deal or power play in the works, and when Samuel walked in your door, he all but handed you the means of tipping matters in your direction. I suppose the plan was that he would hold me somewhere until the deal was concluded.
“Or was he just going to shoot me and push me into a pit, like my father was? It doesn’t matter. No threat to me would have bent Mr Holmes to your will. Even when he thought it was his wife you had, he was coming after you. And he will find you.”
“Clarissa, I have no idea what—”
“But I wasn’t at home. Instead, a young woman came out of my door. A young woman I am extremely fond of. For three days, I believed she was dead. Her husband believed she was dead. I stood back and watched him tear himself to pieces, knowing that I was to blame—that whatever took her, it was somehow due to me. But she didn’t die. In fact, I believe the dear girl may have killed Samuel.”
He gaped across the table at her. “Samuel is dead? I thought…”
She got to her feet. “You thought he was hiding somewhere? In a house you’d arranged for him, perhaps, with me tied up and waiting?”
He too rose, cigar forgotten in his hand. “I never! How could you think…!”
“I wonder if Samuel was bright enough to realise that he was condemned, the instant you sent him towards me. If he murdered me, you’d have seen that the evidence against him left you untouched. If he set me loose, once you’d got your way, you’d have been too afraid of betrayal to let him live. Either way, my son had to die. Isn’t that right, Hugh? Over nothing more than a business deal.” She put a twist of utter scorn on her last words, and watched him explode.
“Business deal!” he roared. “I’ve been working my whole bloody life for this, Clarissa. My father shot himself, my mother and wife between them made my life a living hell, I was too young for one war and too old for the other, and three times—three times!—I’ve been mooted for the Honours list and set aside. I’ve served my nation all my life, doing the Crown’s dirty work, and I’m left as nothing but an Earl without a son. My title is going extinct, after me. Jesus, the nation owes me a Dukedom—the least it can give me is a KG!”
She could only stare at him. A son and a father, each with their own mad desires, brought together to ignite like one of Mr Holmes’ experiments gone bad. This was madness—doubled. Trebled, even: her father had lighted the slow-burning fuse. Oh, the men in her life who thought their needs justified any wickedness, men for whom the world was meat and entertainment. Were it not for Mr Holmes—and Billy before him—would she have become the same?
She shuddered. “Oh, Hugh. This nation owes you nothing but a prison cell.”
His face changed. His pale eyes moved, considering the flat colour of her hair, the mediocre cut of the dress she wore, the sagging skin of her ageing cleavage. She was nothing; she was less than nothing. Half a century ago, Clarissa Hudson had challenged and entertained him, and now she stood here—she dared to stand here—and threaten him?
She saw the decision come upon him: his mouth went cruel, his eyes flicked at the closed door. He noticed the cigar in his hand, and threw it at the ash-tray. With his hands free, he took a step around the corner of the table, headed towards her at last.
She retreated. He came inexorably on, moving faster now. “Hugh!” she cried, stumbling a bit on her unfamiliar shoes. And then he was on her, hands around her throat like a mockery of love remembered. His grip closed down, and the room faded around her.
Holmes and I watched Mycroft retreat to a well-deserved rest.
“He looks tired,” I commented. Holmes grunted, cleaning out the day’s muck from his pipe, a last act before taking to his bed. Uneasily, it occurred to me that Mycroft had looked tired before his heart attack—and that Holmes could use a rest as well.
“When did you last sleep?” I asked him.
“On the way up from Sussex this morning. Billy was driving so slowly, there was nothing to do but escape.”
“So, an hour last night, less the night before.”
“Oh, at least twice that.”
I had not been aware until that very moment that my mind was made up. I stood. “I, however, have had more sleep than my body knows what to do with. I’m going to take a cab over to Steadworth House and make certain the Earl doesn’t slip away while we’re not watching. Bring me a flask of coffee when you and Mycroft come in the morning. And—would you please ring Billy before you come? I promised I wouldn’t take any action without him, but I’m not going to wake his wife at this hour for the sake of watching a dark house.”
Normally, Holmes would have raised an amused eyebrow and handed me my coat. Perhaps my doubts about Mycroft’s infallibility were proving contagious. Or perhaps the accumulated emotional burden of the past week—my apparent death and the threat lying over Mrs Hudson—had made inroads on his usual willingness to bid me adieu. In any event, he could see
I had no intention of following Mycroft’s hands-off decree towards the Earl of Steadworth, and he was not willing to let me go on my own.
We resumed our coats and went to wave down a taxicab.
After I telephoned to Billy.
There were, in fact, lights on in Steadworth House: one showing through the fan window above the transom, another in the room to the left of the doorway.
When the taxi had puttered away, I asked Holmes in a quiet voice, “Do you think we should ring?”
“I’d rather know who is in that side room.”
Hugh Edmunds’ London home was one end of an eighteenth-century terrace block, a pair of houses joined together internally after his ancestors came into money. The narrow street down its side, little more than an access alley to the yards and stables behind, had a marked slope to it. Some Victorian-era improver had decided to tidy that side with a terrace that was scarcely wider than its collection of Grecian statuary, but tall at its back due to the slope.
The terrace, naturally, was encircled by a stone balustrade topped with spikes to discourage burglars, prank-players, and hoi polloi in general. The barrier did not discourage us, although we did retreat a distance down the dark alley before Holmes boosted me up, so I in turn could pull him over.
We padded on silent feet down the terrace stones, circling the urns and statues towards the shaft of light that spilled from a pair of tall, diamond-paned doors. We were still well short of the light when a muffled cry reached our ears. We exchanged a startled glance, then leapt forward as one, to press our noses to the glass.
The curtains were parted, but the diamond panes broke the room beyond into a million pieces of light. There was a lamp in there, and a fire burning, but other than that, it could have been empty or filled with a silent crowd.
I put my mouth near Holmes’ ear. “I did hear something.”
He nodded, but we held back, hoping for more. A cry comes from passion—but of that, there are many flavours. It would be rather embarrassing to break in and discover the aged Earl in flagrante with his housemaid. On the other hand…