Page 43 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

"No."

Told me what? I took another step.

"…she is involved," Graves was saying.

"Not in this."

Not in what? The pronoun was doing a great deal of work, and none of it for my benefit.

"I think that is a distinction Lady Rosalynd herself would dispute."

A pause. Then Finch. "He's right, Your Grace. The lady has a way of involving herself."

I drew myself up. That sounded suspiciously like criticism.

"I know perfectly well what she has a way of doing," Steele said.

"Then why keep it from her?" Graves asked.

Silence. Long enough that I thought he would not answer at all.

Then: "Because I'd prefer to keep her alive."

I went perfectly still.

Keep me alive.

The words themselves were nothing. Men say such things in novels weekly. It was the way he said them—flat, final, no rhetoric in it anywhere—that put the cold back in my spine. Steele angry was a thing I had encountered before. This was not anger.

"The money, the river, this property beyond Hammersmith," Graves said. "They are all beginning to point in the same direction."

Property. River. Hammersmith.

I pressed the words into my memory in Graves's own order, exactly as spoken. Whatever they meant, I would want them later, unimproved by imagination.

"All the more reason to tell her," Finch said.

"No." The word came sharply from Steele. Even through the oak, the quality of the room's silence changed. "I won't have her blundering into this."

I beg your pardon.

"Until we know what we are dealing with, she stays out of it."

That was quite enough.

I could have retreated. I could have gone home, sent my businesslike note in the morning, and left the three of them to their maps and their secrets and their touching concern for my continued existence. I could also have taken up needlepoint.

I threw open the door.

Maps covered the desk, their corners weighted flat with an inkwell and three books, the river running through the largest of them in a long blue curve. Papers lay everywhere. Finch sat by the fire with a bottle of ale in one hand. Graves occupied the chair nearest the desk.

Steele stood beside the mantel. He did not look surprised to see me.

I did not disappoint. “What the blazes is going on?"

Chapter

Sixteen