“But we are driving through the streets of London. I merely need to hail someone and call for help.”
She scoffed. “London? No one will hear you. This city is an uncivilized place in comparison to my beloved Paris. I despised having to come back here when Willa’s mother died. And these windows are tinted gray to keep out the sun—which we had plenty of in Paris, but not so much here. No one will see you.”
“Very well, then. I’ll trust your judgment on that at least. How much longer until we arrive at our destination?”
“As I am driving a circuitous route to ensure we aren’t followed, and along less-traveled roads where it’s unlikely we’d be noticed, I estimate perhaps another twenty minutes.”
“Excellent. That should give us plenty of time to discuss precisely why you would go through so much trouble to make your niece go mad—or even die. My initial supposition of the motive was money.”
“My, Miss Holmes. How fascinating.”
But I wasn’t finished. “Yet, I find money such a banal motive for what basically amounts to murder. And if you were a man, I might have been satisfied with that. But in this case, the perpetrator isn’t a man, but a woman—which I’d suspected for some time. And women aren’t quite as base and simplistic in their motives, are they?”
“Indeed. Miss Holmes, I do believe if the circumstances were different, I might actually like you.”
“It was you who hired Mrs. Yingling and eventually killed her, wasn’t it?”
“I should have known you’d figure that.” Her voice wasn’t grim so much as admiring. “Was that what put you on to me? I realized later I shouldn’t have acted quite so rashly, but I was concerned that cloud-headed medium would reveal what she knew. And once I learned Her Royal Highness had set a Holmes on the case, I feared you might get your uncle involved.”
“As you can see, it was not necessary for my uncle to become involved in one of my cases,” I informed her. “What precisely did Mrs. Yingling know? That you’d hired her to help make Willa believe she was going mad, all the while driving her to become more and more dependent upon the séances?”
“Of course. And the beauty of it is, now that Mrs. Yingling is dead, I will regain the title of the little cottage in Sussex where she planned to retire and where I intend to relocate shortly. It’s an excellent plan, if I do say so.” Miss Kluger shifted the vehicle and turned down a dim, narrow street.
“And what about Olympia Babbage? Did she know too much as well, and have you had her snuffed out, too?”
“Once again, your astuteness astounds me. But no. Miss Babbage is too valuable to be removed from the equation. She has many diverse skills that would be a shame to destroy. However, like you shall shortly be, she is in our custody and we shall keep her until she is no longer useful.”
I was relieved that the young female inventor hadn’t met the same fate as Mrs. Yingling. “What I’m most curious about is how you mesmerized Willa in the first place, and why. Why not just leave her be?”
“That was a grave error on my part, and one I regretted from the moment it happened. The first time I mesmerized Willa—which was simply when I visited her chamber in the middle of the night and used a golden ball on a string—she wasn’t completely, as we describe it, amused. Enthralled, hypnotized—whatever you wish to call it. In a very malleable state of mind.”
“And so she remembered what happened whilst she was amused . . . but as a dream. A dream where she visited Robby and saw that he was still alive. But it wasn’t really a dream. You took her there. And that was your mistake.”
“Yes. I had no idea how powerful Willa’s mind was, to fight my considerable ability to amuse a person. When she began to remember that ‘dream,’ I knew it was only a matter of time until she realized it wasn’t a dream—”
“And that she really had been in Smithfield, near a sign with a very big, so-called floating key—that is, Ivey & Boles. Their storefront is quite distinctive. When she mentioned seeing a large cogwork key in her dream, that caused me to realize she might not actually have been dreaming.”
“Just so. You are quite brilliant, Miss Holmes. But it’s a shame you didn’t realize it was I who was the perpetrator before you got into this vehicle.”
“Perhaps it was a miscalculation on my part. But I am also curious as to why—and how—you caused her mother to visit Willa in the first place, in her chamber. I assume you’re unaware I witnessed one such visitation last night. I confess, I haven’t been able to determine precisely how you conducted that particular sensation. It was quite . . . authentic.”
“That’s because I didn’t. I can’t take credit for that, Miss Holmes. Those spiritual manifestations are real, and they are part of the reason I was forced to act as I have.”
“You believe the ghost of Marta Ashton is actually visiting her daughter?”
“I have no doubt of it. For that’s what has caused Willa to be so certain Robby is still alive.”
“Is he?” That was one thing I hadn’t quite figured out yet.
Aunt Geraldine gave me an enigmatic smile. “If Marta hadn’t been speaking to her from the spirit world, then Willa would never have pursued the belief that Robby was still alive, and she would have thought nothing of her so-called dream. It would have all died down, and I wouldn’t have been required to arrange for her to be manipulated by a medium in order to confuse the issue. Those visitations are authentic.”
“The question of the authenticity of Mrs. Ashton’s visitations is, apparently, the first of two things on which we must disagree, Miss Kluger.”
“What, pray tell, Miss Holmes, is the second?”
“That you have been outfoxed by a Holmes for the second time.” With that, I withdrew the Steam-Stream gun from my voluminous skirts and pointed it at her. “Wouldn’t you agree, Miss Kluger?”
Miss Holmes
Welcome to La Société
“I suspected you for quite some time, Miss Kluger.” I adjusted my weapon so it pressed into the side of her torso. “But it wasn’t until I smelled the pickle juice on the papers in Willa’s bedchamber that I realized it was you behind all of this villainy.”
“Pickle juice?”
“You’re quite fond of the Honey-Sweets in particular, aren’t you? That information, combined with the crickets I kept noticing inside an otherwise pristine house, finally made the pieces click together. Crickets are the preferred food of spider pets, are they not?”