go home because if she went any later, she’d get lost in that fog.
“Mrs. Sullivan, after she got into the carriage, still wanted to go to Cold Street. I was worried about Mr. Sullivan myself, but the fog was getting too thick and no one ought to be abroad. So I said I had to do what Mrs. Portwine told me and took her home. And that was all I did that night.”
I told him that God would punish him in the form of a wrathful husband that he had wronged, Mrs. Sullivan had said to Charlotte at their first meeting. But had she ever truly believed that anything would happen to him? Despite his disappearance in the wake of the party, when the police had come knocking the next morning, had she been any less dumbfounded?
As the two women traversed the rear garden in the direction of the house, Charlotte said, with a backward glance, “Your carriage is very distinctive, Mrs. Portwine. Did you wish it painted like that?”
Mrs. Portwine snorted, but there was barely a ripple to her voice as she said, “Mr. Sullivan enjoyed small cruelties. The carriage was painted according to, or I should say, against the preference of his incumbent mistress. If she was the sort who preferred to flaunt the fact that she was a rich man’s mistress, then she received a staid black carriage, without even a bit of gold trimming. If she, like me, would rather not be known, upon first glance, as a kept woman, a flamboyant pattern it was then.
“Because of my friendship with Mrs. Calloway, his previous mistress, I was acquainted with his inclination to inflict such humiliations. Since I couldn’t completely disguise the fact that I preferred not to advertise my fallen-woman status, I made it known to him that I disliked blue stripes intensely. Lo and behold I got blue-and-white stripes.”
With great force, Mrs. Portwine kicked a pebble out of her way. “I like blue stripes. I especially like blue-and-white stripes. But still I would have given anything to scrub them off that carriage.”
* * *
Back in Mrs. Portwine’s drawing room, Mrs. Sullivan was still in the same chair, hunkered low, a bundle of gloomy black crape.
“Mrs. Sullivan, may I ask you a few more questions?” said Charlotte.
“I believe there’s something that needs my attention in the kitchen,” said Mrs. Portwine, her sense of discretion unimpeachable. “Do please excuse me for a minute.”
“Surely, Miss Holmes,” said Mrs. Sullivan dully, “your prurient curiosity should have been more than satisfied.”
Mrs. Portwine’s tea gown had a sack back that floated most elegantly behind her. Charlotte followed its progress, planning a dazzling tea gown of her own. The wrapper would need to be red or bright purple. No, even better, pink. She’d look wonderful in pink.
Only after Mrs. Portwine had gone did she turn to Mrs. Sullivan. “I remain curious about less prurient matters. For example, I am very interested in seeing you work the lock on the study in this house.”
“You—what?”
“Your husband is no more. Who is to stop you from trying your lock-picking talents on that particular door?”
Mrs. Sullivan sat up straighter, only to slump again. “But he must have already removed whatever he didn’t want me to see.”
“Maybe, but you might find other things in there.”
Mrs. Sullivan blinked—and shot out of her chair.
The study was on the ground floor. Its door had a solid brass knob with oriental motifs in bas-relief and a keyhole underneath, the whole mounted on a heavy-looking backplate. But the door was also secured with a substantial padlock.
Mrs. Sullivan pulled a few pins out of her coiffure and set to work on the padlock.
“You’ve had plenty of experience,” said Charlotte after a moment. She herself had spent significant hours at this exact activity, albeit with better tools and under the guidance of a master practitioner.
“The books he allowed me to read were too tedious—much more fun to try to find out what he’s hiding from me,” said Mrs. Sullivan with two pins held between her lips, her syllables somewhat squashed. “But maybe if I’d read those books, his soul wouldn’t be headed straight for, well, you know where.”
Charlotte was not interested in Mr. Sullivan’s fate in the afterlife, if such a thing indeed existed. “What do you enjoy reading?”
Mrs. Sullivan shrugged. “Many things. At one point we had every published volume of the ninth edition of the Britannica. And then one day he cleared them all out of the house, while I was still