He reached the top floor without seeing anybody. His bedroom was the first one leading off the landing. Next to that was an empty room that would normally be occupied by a butler, if the family could afford one. Around the corner was Mrs Eglantine’s room and those occupied by the various maids and the lads who worked in the stables and the gardens, as well as the back staircase, which they used to move through the house without being seen. Only Sherlock and Mrs Eglantine were allowed to use the main stairs.
He turned the corner. The rest of the landing was empty, of course. Mrs Eglantine’s door was closed, but not locked. That would have been a terrible breach of the unwritten contract between employee and employer. In theory the servants’ rooms could be entered by Sherlock’s aunt and uncle at any time, for any reason, and even though that right theoretically extended to Sherlock he still felt his heart accelerate and his palms become moist as he reached out for the doorknob.
He turned it quietly, pushed the door open and entered the room, closing the door quickly behind him.
The room smelled of lavender and talcum powder, and faintly of some heavier floral scent that brought to mind decaying orchids. A threadbare rug was set in the centre of the otherwise bare floorboards. The bed was neatly made, and any clothes had been hung in the narrow wardrobe or folded in the chest of drawers. Apart from a hairbrush on the windowsill, a framed print of a landscape hanging on the wall and a Bible on a shelf by the bed, the room was bare of ornamentation.
There was something so impersonal about the room that it was difficult to believe that anyone actually lived there, slept there, on a daily basis. Given Mrs Eglantine’s aloofness, her almost inhuman stillness, Sherlock could imagine her walking into the room late at night, at the end of her working day, and just standing there, like a statue, unmoving until the sun rose and it was time to start working again. Switching off her fake humanity until she had to pretend again.
He shrugged the thought off. She wasn’t a supernatural creature. She was as human as he was – just a lot nastier.
Sherlock pressed his back against the door. The thought crossed his mind that Mrs Eglantine might have stood just like this in his room before searching it, and it made him angry. If she’d searched the house, as she had said, then she must have searched his room. Damn the woman! What was it she was searching for, and what was it that made her invulnerable?
He quickly memorized the positions of everything he could see – the hairbrush, the Bible, even the way the framed print was hanging at a slight angle and the distance between the top sheet on the bed and the pillows. Given Mrs Eglantine’s eye for detail, Sherlock had a feeling that she would notice if anything was disturbed. He had to make sure that everything was returned to its original position before he left.
He started with the chest of drawers, quickly sorting through the clothes in each drawer. He quelled the sense of guilt he felt by telling himself that Mrs Eglantine had almost certainly done the same to his clothes. When he found nothing, he ran his hand across the floorboards beneath the chest, just in case something had been slid underneath. Still nothing.
He turned away, and then turned back as a sudden thought struck him. Quickly he pulled each drawer completely out and felt underneath it for bits of paper or envelopes that might have been attached there, then looked into the hole left by the drawer for anything that might have been pushed inside, but apart from dust, spider webs and an old lace handkerchief he didn’t find anything.
Leaving the chest of drawers, with a final check to make sure it still looked as it had before he arrived, he turned to the wardrobe, but a noise from outside made him freeze. His heart thudded painfully. Had that been a creak of a floorboard? Was someone standing outside, listening for him in the same way he was listening for them? Had Mrs Eglantine finished her meeting with Cook and returned to her room for some reason?
The noise happened again: a scratching sound, difficult to place. Sherlock looked around wildly for somewhere to hide. Under the bed? In the wardrobe? He took a half-step, hesitant, fearing that a board would creak beneath his feet and give him away.
Before he could move again he heard the noise for a third time, and he recognized it with a rush of relief. It was the sound of ashes being scraped from one of the fireplace grates downstairs with a shovel, echoing through the chimneys. He relaxed, and let his hands unclench.
Now that his attention had been drawn to the fireplace, Sherlock moved across to it. He ran his hands through the cold coals in case anything had been hidden there, and even craned his neck to look up the chimney, but there was nothing to see.
He turned back to his search of the room, checking under the bed, but apart from an empty suitcase there was nothing there. The wardrobe was occupied by a number of dresses on hangers and two hats on a shelf – all of them black, of course. Sherlock wasn’t sure if it was just a housekeeper thing, or whether Mrs Eglantine spent her entire life wearing black. She was a ‘Mrs’, which meant that she was either married or widowed, but Sherlock could only imagine her walking up the aisle in church wearing a black wedding dress. He shivered and pushed the grotesque thought away.
He stood in the centre of the rug and looked around. He’d checked all the obvious places. The room was small enough and neat enough that he could see virtually every hiding place, and there was nothing unusual, nothing that he wouldn’t have expected to see in a housekeeper’s room.
If he was hiding something in his room, where would he put it?
On a sudden thought he stepped to one side and pulled the rug back. Nothing underneath but floorboards. He wasn’t expecting there to be – Mrs Eglantine was nothing if not clever, and hiding something beneath the only rug in the room was too simple and too obvious – but he had to check anyway, just in case.
Looking at the floorboards prompted him to test them with his foot, looking for any looseness. Maybe she’d levered up one of the boards and hidden something underneath. If she had, then she’d fastened it back too well for Sherlock to detect. He’d need a crowbar to lever them up, and that would leave traces.
The picture on the wall kept attracting his attention. For a minute or two he dismissed it, thinking that it was just the way it was hung at an angle that disturbed his ordered mind, but his thoughts kept circling back to it. It occurred to him that something might have been hidden behind the picture. Gently he eased it away from the wall and turned it so that he could see the back.
Only a pencilled price mark.
He sighed and put the picture back at exactly the same angle he had found it.
Hands on hips, he surveyed the room again. If there was a secret in the room, then it was particularly well kept.
If, in fact, the secret was in the room to start with.
On a whim he crossed over to the narrow window that looked out over the gardens to the back of the house. He couldn’t see anybody, so he was safe from observation. The window was open a crack. He pushed it further open and leaned out.
Something was hanging from a piece of twine that had been wrapped around a nail stuck in the wood of the window frame – a package that dangled a couple of feet below the level of the windowsill. It was small enough that it would have been almost invisible from the garden below, unless someone knew exactly what they were looking for.