Murder on Cold Street (Lady Sherlock #5) - Sherry Thomas Page 0,34

wondered if he should come around less often, so as not to always cause his hostesses to rush off to hide in their rooms.

Holmes rose from the card table, took a seat on the settee, and shook out her skirts. He suspected that those skirts, laden with tiny jet beads, didn’t need such elaborate arranging, but that she enjoyed hearing the tiny plinking sounds the beads made, when they struck one another with the movement of the brocaded satin.

When the other ladies had left, they had told them to keep playing, but it was obvious that the games had ended for the night. He began to gather up the cards and was about to ask after her sister Bernadine Holmes, who now lived with her, when she looked up and said, “Inspector Brighton was at Mrs. Treadles’s house when I called.”

He was immediately alert. “Oh?”

She recounted the interrogation she had overheard.

He didn’t know at which point he abandoned the task of returning the playing cards to their case. He only realized, at the end of her recital, that he had deformed three cards in his left hand, so hard did he clutch them.

“He was that blunt and merciless? He went that far in his conjectures?”

“He was. And he went no further than I would have. In fact, I would have gone further—and I think he, too—had Mrs. Cousins not interrupted the proceedings.”

He smoothed out the bent cards as best as he could, a hard weight over his lungs. He hated to think of Mrs. Treadles’s plight, so desperately alone and in need of friends. He’d never held it against Inspector Treadles, when the police officer had grown distant from him. Nor had he thought ill of his friend on Holmes’s behalf: Holmes needed no one’s good opinion; her own was sufficient.

But he was angry on Mrs. Treadles’s behalf, that the husband whom she’d loved so deeply and for whom she had given up so much had not treasured her as he ought to. Had abandoned her when she was most in need of warmth and support at home.

And yet he could not stoke that anger without remembering how proud Inspector Treadles had been of her, the last time they’d spoken, right after—if he wasn’t mistaken about the chronology of events—the reconciliation between husband and wife. Nor could he entirely disregard what Holmes had related just now, of the efforts Inspector Treadles had put in since his return from Stern Hollow to become a better husband.

In the end his careening emotions coalesced into a sharp anxiety, a wedge of fear veined with the hope that the Treadleses should have that most precious of all commodities, time. Time enough to heal the wounds; time enough to begin anew; time enough to regrow trust and build something stronger and more resilient together.

But none of it would be possible if Inspector Treadles couldn’t regain his freedom.

Lord Ingram forced himself to breathe deeply, to put away the cards, and to train his thoughts to settle back on the case at hand. Only to realize something that made his heart thump. With no small amount of reluctance he glanced at Holmes. “Mrs. Cousins arrived at an extremely fortuitous moment. I take it you think it had more to do with planning than with luck.”

She looked at him a moment longer than necessary, as if assuring herself that he was all right, before saying, “When I walked past the servants’ hall the first time, the coachman was not there. The second time he was, but he had a bit of rain on his clothes, just where a mackintosh might let some through. The basement of a house such as Mrs. Treadles’s typically extends all the way to the mews. And even if there aren’t steps inside the mews leading down into the basement, there should be a set of steps right outside.”

Smoking bishop had been served just before Mrs. Watson and Penelope left. He picked up his still-warm cup. “So . . . unless he was in fact out driving a coach, he would not have become as wet coming from the mews to the servants’ hall.”

“Exactly. His master was in a jail cell at Scotland Yard, his mistress at home. Why did he go anywhere at all?”

Except to bring Mrs. Cousins at his mistress’s command. Mrs. Cousins who, when she got there, would stop the interrogation.

The mulled wine had been steeped with roasted Seville oranges and cloves. He didn’t mind cloves, normally; tonight, he found their