I bobbed my head. “Thank you. It’s quite kind of you.”
Before either of us could say more, the driver gave a shout, and the house dame stepped back only a second prior to the carriage jerking forward.
Throughout the trip to the station, I turned over in my mind what little I had gleaned from my exchange with the Head Master. I had assumed the issue lay with her health—although I knew her to be quite hale for a woman of forty-six. What other situation would cause my father to pull both his sons out of school? Scandal possibly. Although, she came from a good family with a stalwart reputation, and my mother was by nature a moral upright person. The most shocking character on either side of her parentage was my grandmother, the sister of Horace Vernet, the artist. Being French and having the patronage of Napoleon III certainly raised eyebrows in some corners, but that would hardly create a scandal worthy of removing Mycroft and myself from school.
The basket Mrs. Whittlespoon had given me bumped my elbow. To distract myself from the thoughts swirling about my head, I took the opportunity to check its contents. A small apple, two thick slices of bread, and a medium wedge of cheese. I found the thought of food unsettling and closed the basket.
Soon after the driver deposited me and my trunk on the station platform, a train pulled in spewing a cloud of smoke and dust. I spotted my brother leaning from the window of a first-class compartment at the rear of the train. He pointed to a man pushing a cart toward me, and once free of my baggage, I joined him.
My brother and father were “cut from the same cloth”—as they say—with thick waists and high foreheads. One had only to examine my father to know how Mycroft would appear thirty years hence. The exception being the eyes. Not in color, but in sharpness. My father’s lacked the keen intellect apparent in my brother’s. While Father was quite an accomplished man—as a squire he served as a justice of the peace and was versed in many subjects, especially entomology—Mycroft’s intensity marked him as our progenitor’s intellectual superior.
That keenness also gave him little patience with others. Despite being my only sibling, I was never truly comfortable around him. With rare exceptions, I guarded my words and actions carefully in his presence, knowing they would be weighed, and mostly likely found lacking in some aspect. For that reason, when he indicated I should sit in the tufted, blue seat opposite him in the compartment, I didn’t argue. He had taken the backward-facing middle seat because it was less prone to the smoke and dust blown in through the window.
I plopped down on the cushion, and a small cloud of ash rose from my action, sending me into a brief coughing fit. When a small smile graced his lips, I ignored it and settled Mrs. Whittlespoon’s basket next to me.
Mycroft jutted his chin at it. “What’s that?”
“Mrs. Whittlespoon gave it to me. For the trip.”
“What’d she give you?”
“You want it? I can’t—I’m not hungry.”
He took the proffered basket and studied the contents. Putting the cheese between the two slices of bread, he took a bite and caused my stomach to flip yet again. It hadn’t quite settled when the train lurched forward and another wave of nausea swept over me.
To distract myself, I stared out the window at the passing countryside and summoned the nerve to ask him what had occupied me for the past several hours. “What exactly happened to Mother? I know she’s not dead, but I have no information beyond that. Is she sick? Dying?”
“She’s fine.”
“Someone’s not, or we wouldn’t be called home.”
No reply.
“I’m going to find out. Wouldn’t it be better for me to learn it from you now, than when we arrive at Underbyrne?”
Through his cheese sandwich, he said, “You want to know, you little twit? Here it is. Mother’s in gaol, accused of murder.”
The force with which this pronouncement hit me was the same as if he’d given me a blow to the stomach. The queasiness I’d battled since my fight with Fitzsimmons returned with a vengeance. Bile surged into my throat. The compartment closed around me, and my deepest desire was to flee. I stood, realized there was truly nowhere to go, and dropped back down into my seat.
“Put your head between your legs.”
I glanced at Mycroft, but his words sounded as if I were under water.
“Put your head between your legs.”
When I remained immobile, he grabbed me by the hair and bent me over.
“Breathe,” he said.
After several gulps of air, my hearing improved, and my heartbeat slowed. “You can let go now.”
He sat back, and I raised my head. “Mother? Wha— How?”
“I don’t know all the particulars. I gleaned it from my own analysis of the information in the papers.”
He pulled part of a newspaper out of his breast pocket and passed it to me. Despite the train’s movement, my original agitation subsided enough for me to read the dispatch concerning Mrs. Emma Brown having been found dead on our estate.
“Mrs. Brown, the midwife?”
Mycroft nodded. The whole village knew the thin, older woman. She’d been at the delivery of at least half the town. The other half had been seen either by Dr. Farnsworth, the village doctor, or Mr. Harvingsham, the village surgeon. As far as I knew, Mother had little contact with Mrs. Brown. Dr. Farnsworth or Mr. Harvingsham tended us during certain severe illnesses, but my mother relied mostly on her own knowledge of herbs and medicine to treat our ailments.
He then handed me another newspaper sheaf. This one was from a larger paper and included an editorial decrying the bias in some county judicial systems. In point, the author noted a recent incident of a justice of the peace’s wife whom a local businessman had accused of his wife’s murder and yet the woman still resided at home.
“You believe that this refers to Father?”
“How many dead bodies do you think crop up on the property of justices of the peace? Of course, it’s referring to our parents, idiot. And after that editorial appeared, the constable was forced to arrest Mother and put her in gaol.”
Calmed by the supplied information instead of my own dire speculations, I returned the two papers to him and contemplated this new turn of events. One didn’t argue with Mycroft or his ability to deduce specifics from the barest of details. He had exercised his ability to knit together bits of intelligence from various sources into a whole truth for as long as I’d known him. And he was seldom, if ever, proved wrong.
All the same, one glaring omission remained.
“She’s innocent,” I said.
“I lack enough information to make that assertion.” Mycroft pulled the apple out of the basket. “You sure you don’t want this?”
When I shook my head, he bit into it and then spit out what he had in his mouth. I could see the apple’s brown inside from across the compartment. Had the circumstances been different, I might have found this comeuppance amusing. Instead, I found no satisfaction in the event, not being able to shift my focus from the idea of Mother as a murderess. Unable to conceive of her in those terms, I returned to my original contention that she had been unjustly accused. And I had to find out what had truly happened—which only Mother could supply.
At that moment, I resolved to find a way to visit her.