Sherlock hauled it in and rested it on the windowsill. The twine was tarred to make it weather-resistant, and the package was wrapped in oilcloth. It left a reddish powdery residue on the windowsill. It looked to Sherlock as if the oilcloth had been rubbed with brick dust to make it even more difficult to see from outside. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to hide this package.
With a momentary hesitation, and a shiver of anticipation, he untied the twine and unwrapped the package.
Inside was a folded mass of paper. Sherlock wiped his hands on a handkerchief before unfolding it carefully, making a mental note of which layers were on the inside and which ones were on the outside. It was bad enough that he was in her room; he certainly didn’t want Mrs Eglantine knowing that he had found her hidden papers and was riffling through them.
The papers unfolded into two large sheets. The top one was a set of plans of Holmes Manor – architect’s drawings showing all the rooms on all the floors, all to scale. Many of the rooms had been crossed off in red ink. Most of them had scribbled notes written in them, or arrows pointing to particular features with question marks attached. One particularly thick wall between the dining room and the reception room had a note written beside it which said: ‘Check for secret compartments in the wall. Could be accessed from either side.’
The second sheet was slightly smaller than the first. It was a set of words and phrases written in the same handwriting as the notes on the architectural plans. They had boxes drawn around them, and the boxes were linked by lines and arrows in a kind of network. It looked as if Mrs Eglantine – assuming it was her – was trying to connect up a series of disparate elements, discoveries or thoughts into a coherent pattern – and failing. Sherlock scanned through some of the notes and found names of members of the Holmes family, as well as names that he didn’t recognize, alongside places that he thought he’d heard of and words that just seemed to be randomly chosen but presumably meant something to Mrs Eglantine. In the centre, like a spider sitting in the middle of its web, the words gold plates had been circled twice in an emphatic hand.
Gold plates? Was that what she was looking for?
Reluctantly Sherlock folded the papers up again, careful to make sure that he used the same fold marks in the same order as he had unwrapped the package. He wished he could keep them for further study, but that would be risky. He couldn’t even copy them – there was too much information there, and it would take too long. He knew more than he had earlier, but he wasn’t sure he was any the wiser.
He wrapped the papers up in the oilcloth, retied them with the twine and carefully lowered them out of the window, first checking that the garden was still empty.
Finally, he closed the window, remembering to leave it open a crack.
He took a last look around the room, partly for anything he might have missed and partly to see if he’d left any traces. To both questions, the answer was no.
After listening at the door for a few moments to check that the coast was clear, he left Mrs Eglantine’s room and slipped along the corridor. For a moment he considered going into his own room, but there was nothing for him to do there apart from rest for a while, and think, and he had other things to do. He headed downstairs.
The heavy oak door leading out into the drive and the gardens thumped closed as he entered the hall. Someone had just left the house. Through a narrow window Sherlock could see a black-clad figure walking to a waiting cart. It was Mrs Eglantine. She had put on a coat, which meant that she was probably going into town. She must have finished her conference with Cook, and a shiver went through Sherlock as he realized how close a call he’d had. If she’d kept her coat upstairs instead of in the kitchen, then she might have found him.
The cart clattered away and vanished through the gates to the road. Sherlock turned and headed back towards the kitchens.
‘Master Sherlock!’ Cook called as he entered. She was a large woman, her cheery face usually red from the heat of the ovens and her hands covered in flour, but today she looked pale and the skin around her eyes was creased as if she was trying to stop herself from crying. ‘I just got some bread in the oven. Come back in a while and you can ’ave a nice hot slice wiv butter fresh from the churn!’
‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but I was looking for Mrs Eglantine.’
Cook’s face seemed to age five years in as many seconds. ‘She’s gone to town. And good riddance too! ’Parently the quality of the vegetables I’ve been preparin’ for this household is not up to the standards she expects.’ She sniffed. ‘Anyone’d think she was the lady of the house, rather than Mrs ’Olmes, and this was some swanky ’otel rather than a country ’ouse.’
‘She’s certainly a difficult person to please,’ Sherlock said cautiously. He’d learned from Amyus Crowe that general statements, left hanging like that, normally encouraged talkative people to talk even more, and Cook was one of the most talkative people he knew.
‘She is that. I never known such a person to find fault, and ’er tongue’s as sharp as a butcher’s knife. I worked with ’undreds of ’ousekeepers over the years, but she’s got to be the most hoity-toity and the most unpleasant.’
‘What made my uncle and aunt employ her in the first place?’ Sherlock asked. ‘I presume she must have had a good set of references from her previous jobs.’
‘If she did, then I never got to ’ear about them.’
‘I keep seeing her around the house,’ Sherlock said. ‘Just standing there, not doing anything apart from watching and listening.’
‘That’s ’er all over,’ Cook confirmed. ‘Like a crow, just standin’ on a branch waitin’ for a worm.’ Colour was coming back into her cheeks now. She sniffed again. ‘Soon as she arrived she turned this kitchen upside down. Moved everythin’ out into the garden and ’ad the walls an’ the tiles scrubbed. Give ’er credit – she did it herself. Shut the door an’ worked for a whole day, she did. Said she’d ’ad experience of ’ouses wiv mice an’ rats an’ she wanted to make sure there weren’t none ’ere. The nerve of the woman! As if I’d let a mouse in my kitchen!’
‘She’s a strange woman,’ Sherlock confirmed.
‘I got some biscuits I baked earlier,’ Cook confided. ‘Do you want a couple, to keep you goin’ before tea?’
‘I’d love some,’ he said, smiling. ‘In fact, I’d happily miss tea and just eat your biscuits.’
‘It’s nice to ’ave someone who appreciates my cookin’,’ Cook said, beaming. She seemed more cheerful now.
After wolfing down three of Cook’s biscuits, Sherlock headed back into the house. He wasn’t sure that he’d made much progress, but he seemed to have established that Mrs Eglantine had somehow blackmailed her way into the house and that she was searching for something. The gold plates that had been mentioned in her notes? He supposed it was possible, but it sounded a little unlikely. Why would there be gold plates, of all things, in his aunt and uncle’s possession? What would they want such a thing for? He’d been living there for over a year now, and he’d never seen any plates apart from the porcelain ones that were used every day and the bone-china ones brought out on Sundays and when anyone visited. Neither of those sets of plates had any gold at all on them, not even gold-leaf edging.
Suddenly he couldn’t face the prospect of staying in the house for the rest of the day. It seemed to be weighing down on him like a heavy coat. He had to get out. For a few seconds he thought about heading over to see Amyus Crowe – and Virginia – but he felt as if there was more that he could do concerning Mrs Eglantine. If she was in Farnham, sourcing fresher vegetables than Cook had got, then perhaps he could find her and watch her for a while from hiding. After all, perhaps the vegetables were just an excuse. Perhaps she had a different reason for going into town.