Page 14 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

Finch was silent for a moment before answering. “I can put men on the tradesmen, clubs, and whoever holds his paper. I'll have a word with the valet about the more personal matters. But there is one world my men—and I—cannot enter.” He met my eyes. “The drawing rooms. The dinner tables. The musicales and house parties. That is where Crane truly lived, and where the people who knew him best will speak most freely.”

He paused.

“You are not going to like my saying so.”

“Then perhaps do not say it.”

He pinned me with a steady stare. “It must be raised, Your Grace.”

“Go on, then.”

“Crane spent his life reaching above his station,” Finch went on, untroubled, because the day Caleb Finch was intimidated by a duke’s tone had not yet dawned. “The house, the club, the company he kept—he wanted the rooms a baronet of no fortune is never asked into, and he spent what he hadn’t got to stand at the edge of them and be tolerated. A man like that leaves his truest tracks in drawing rooms, not in ledgers. Who received him and who merely suffered him. Whose invitations he chased and whose never came. What was murmured about how he came by his money, or the want of it. None of it opens to me, or to any man I’d hire, because we are not asked into those rooms.” He let a beat go by. “It opens to Lady Rosalynd.”

I had braced for it. “No,” I said all the same.

Finch did not so much as blink. “Your Grace⁠—”

“She is to be kept clear of this. I have arranged a great deal, at no small cost, so that she stands as far from this business as she can be made to stand. I did not arrange it only to hand her a part in it now.”

“I know what you’ve arranged.” Finch’s voice did not rise to meet mine; it went the other way, lower and unhurried, the tone of a man gentling a horse that has taken fright at its own shadow. “I’ve watched you arrange it while wearing the face of a man who hasn’t slept in all that time.” He folded his hands on the directory. “May I ask you something plainly, the way you pay me to?”

I said nothing, which he took, correctly, for assent.

“Do you truly believe you can keep her out of it?”

Rosalynd had demanded a part in this, and I had agreed to it. But there were ways to set her a task without setting her in danger, and I meant to use every one of them. “Yes. I bloody well do.”

“With respect, Your Grace, you are a fool to believe it.”

The retort rose, scathing, and I held it between my teeth. The man was giving me an honest opinion. And I needed him.

“You’ve a notion,” Finch continued, “that if you name no thread, point at no door, hand her some nonsense to chase, she’ll stay safe. It runs the other way. Keep Lady Rosalynd in the dark and she will not sit in the dark. She’ll light her own candle and go looking, alone, down whatever passage she pleases, with no man—not you, not one of mine—anywhere near to mind her, and no word of where she’s gone.” He met my eyes. “And unless you’ve forgotten, she walked into a house full of men hungry for sport, willing or not, and came out of it whole.”

“Not quite, Finch. She was almost—” The word would not come.

“That is why you give her the work. Give it, and you’ll know the ground she stands on. Withhold it, and she’ll find ground you’ve never surveyed. You can ask her not to venture out alone.”

As though that had ever stopped Rosalynd. I crossed to the window before I said something unforgivable. For years I had paid this man for the truth. He had never once had the grace to make it comfortable. But then truth rarely was.

“Best manage it, Your Grace,” Finch said behind me, quietly. “Else she might come to harm.”

I turned on him. “I know it. Damn you.”

Rather than take offense, Finch rose, filled a none-too-clean glass with my whiskey, and put it in my hand. I drank it down in one swallow.

After a moment I asked, “What do you suggest?”

“Men outside her house. One front, one back. They follow her wherever she goes.”

“She’ll know.”

“She won’t.”

“Very well. The next time we meet I’ll hand her a true assignment, one that will play to her strengths. I’ll send a note to let you know.”

“You’re doing the right thing, Your Grace.”

“Am I?” I held the glass out for more and turned back to the street below. A clerk hurried past the window with a sealed packet pressed to his chest, something valuable, I supposed. But nothing in this diamond district was worth more than Rosalynd—the woman I loved, the woman I could never have. I swore I would keep her safe, whatever it took.