Page 56 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

Chapter

Twenty

A Shocking Revelation

Breakfast at Rosehaven House began with an easing of the rules.

Normally, there was to be no reading at the table, no arguments, and no attention to other tasks. We were to enjoy convivial conversation—well, as convivial as my siblings were capable of. But given our current level of anxiety over Cosmos’s travails, I thought it best to relax the rules.

Holly and Ivy were disputing the ownership of a hair ribbon that belonged, as far as anyone could establish, to neither of them. Fox was reading at the table, but still concealing the book in his lap. Laurel had a novel propped against the toast rack with the page held down by the marmalade spoon. Chrissie was sorting the morning's invitations into three piles whose criteria she did not bother to explain. And Petunia sat at my left hand, feeding the corner of a sausage to Snowball.

At the head of the table, Cosmos read a botanical journal and stirred his tea without looking at it, missing the cup entirely on every third pass. He had gone gray about the eyes this past week, and thinner. But he was here, and the table was loud, and the morning sun lay across the cloth in a warm stripe.

I poured my tea and allowed myself, for the length of one cup, to believe in the morning. Unfortunately, that belief did not last beyond my next breath.

Honeycutt entered the room with an expression that left no doubt my enjoyment was about to end. "My lady. Inspector Dodson is in the hall. With six constables."

The table went silent at once.

Cosmos closed the journal, squared it against the table's edge, and rose. That small tidiness, that setting of his place in order told me he had been waiting for this.

"Finish your breakfasts," he said to the table, in the mild voice he used for identifying seedlings. "All of you. I shall be back before you've missed me."

Of course they did not finish their breakfasts. By the time Cosmos reached the hall, we were all of us behind him in a ragged, forbidden procession.

Dodson stood in the middle of our hall. Six constables by his side. Through the open door, at the foot of our steps, in the full morning light of Grosvenor Square, waited the police wagon. A crowd of nursemaids, footmen and, seemingly, one viscountess's entire household had already gathered along the railings.

"Cosmos Rosehaven, Earl of Rosehaven." Dodson's voice carried. He meant it to. "I hold a warrant for your arrest, for the willful murder of Sir Basil Crane."

"I understand," Cosmos said. "I am ready to accompany you."

"Hands, my lord."

The word did not make sense to me until one constable stepped forward with the irons.

"That is not necessary." My voice came out of me in a shout. "He has said he will accompany you."

"Regulations, my lady," Dodson explained. There was nothing in his face at all, which told me how much he was enjoying it.

Cosmos held out his wrists. He looked at no one but me while the irons went on. His look silently said what it had said before. Steady. Say nothing. Hold the house.

But out loud, he said, “Send to the solicitor. And tell those who should be told. Gently."

"It is in hand," I assured him, having no idea whether anything on earth was in hand.

He walked out of Rosehaven House between two constables the way he walked everywhere—unhurried, methodical, with singular purpose. Outside, the whole square watched the Earl of Rosehaven go down his steps in irons and into the black wagon. Its doors shut on him with a sound I expected to hear for the rest of my life.

Behind me Petunia burst into tears.

Somehow, we got the children into the drawing room, Chrissie and I.

Ivy was crying because Petunia was crying. Holly was not crying, which was worse. Fox walked to the window with his fists in his pockets and offered, in a low voice, to prepare something for Inspector Dodson's tea. I pretended not to have heard him.

"Six constables," Laurel said. She was pale and precise. For once, she did not have a book in her hands. "Last time it was two."

"Last time they asked," I said. "This time they came to take. It is a difference of manners, not of truth. Cosmos has done nothing wrong, and we are going to bring him home."

"When he comes home," Petunia announced, arriving out of her tears into a cold and shining fury that Grandmother would have recognized in a mirror, "Inspector Dodson is going to be extremely sorry."