Page 59 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

Then she said, with the terrible gentleness of a woman who has buried a husband, raised a son, and misjudged nothing in half a century: "Are you increasing, child?"

What?

Claire's hands went still in her lap. She looked at Grandmother, and then at me, and then the last thing she had been carrying alone went out of her, visibly, all at once.

"Yes, ma’am. I am."

Chapter

Twenty-One

A Sacrifice Declined

For a moment none of us moved.

And then Grandmother looked at Claire the way she looked at a hand of whist that has just improved considerably. “Well, that settles the question of what this family does next. Cosmos will be cleared. There is no version of events in which my grandson hangs while his child is born to a ruined widow. I decline to permit it.”

Claire’s composure, which had survived the confession itself, very nearly did not survive the kindness. Her chin came up by force of will alone.

“Then you will understand, Lady Rosehaven, why I must do the one thing I can do.” Her hands were folded in her lap with a stillness that frightened me. “I was with him the night Crane died. Cosmos came to me at eight and did not leave until past two. I shall go to Scotland Yard this afternoon and swear to it.”

“No,” I said. “You shall not.”

“Rosalynd—”

“Sit down, child,” Grandmother said, though Claire had not risen. It was that sort of voice. “And listen to my granddaughter, who is about to be sensible.”

I did feel irritated, as it happened, though not for the reason Grandmother supposed. I was about to make Steele’s argument, in Steele’s order, very nearly in Steele’s words. The same argument he had made to me days ago, when I had wanted to fling myself and the truth of the pistol at Scotland Yard. I had raged at him for it, even though he’d been right.

“Claire. Think of what Dodson has. A quarrel over blackmail, sworn to by a respectable witness. Cosmos striking Crane. And an attachment between you and Cosmos that his men assembled in two days from carriage wheels and balls. All of that is inference. Damning, but inference.” I leaned forward and took her hands. They were cold, the way mine had been in Steele’s entrance hall. “Now imagine you walk into Scotland Yard and swear that the Earl of Rosehaven spent six hours of that night in your house. Just the two of you. Until two in the morning. You will not have given Cosmos an alibi, dearest. You will have converted Dodson’s inference into sworn fact. You will have taken the motive he has built and gilded it.”

“But it is the truth.”

“It is a lover’s truth, and Dodson will call it a lover’s lie before you have finished taking the oath. That is the injustice of it. The testimony is worthless to Cosmos precisely because you love him. A stranger’s word could free him. Yours cannot.”

“It would be worse than worthless,” Grandmother said. “You would hand them your own head along with his. At present, Mr. Crane’s slander about your husband died with Crane. Walk into that building, place yourself under oath at the center of this affair, and some clever young man will dig the slander up again inside a week and give it the inquest it never deserved. They might name you accessory before the assizes met. And then, child, what becomes of what you carry?”

Claire’s hand moved to her middle, the small unconscious gesture I had seen several times without understanding it, and now could not see without an ache.

“And I will tell you the other thing,” I said, “because you have not thought of it, and you must. Cosmos would deny it.”

She stared at me. “He would perjure himself?”

“Without hesitation. You know he would. And Dodson will sit between the two of you watching each of you commit a crime to spare the other. And he will use it, Claire. A man who lies to protect a woman is a man who would kill to protect her.”

The fight went out of Claire by degrees. What remained was worse to look at than the resolve had been.

“Then there is nothing,” she said. “He is in a cell for striking a man on my account, and there is nothing on this earth I can do for him.”

“There is something you have already done,” I said. “You gave me Benson.”

It took some time to lay it out, and I chose with care what was mine to lay. Not the whole of it—not the masked man, not the Floralia, not the parts of this history that belonged to me and to an enquiry I was not at liberty to expose even here. But the shape of it. That could be given, and they had earned it.

“Crane did not find your secret, Claire. He was sent to it. Steele and his men looked into his affairs and found money—two years and more of steady wages from a source no clerk can trace. Crane was not a blackmailer who happened upon softness. He was a collector, salaried, gathering other people’s secrets for a man who pays to know them. For two years he kept an acquaintance that nobody in London could explain—an elderly gentleman with gout and a dreadful chest. Sir Reginald Harcourt.”

Claire had gone very still. She arrived at it one step ahead of my telling, her face changing as the steps assembled themselves. She was not slow, my brother’s Claire.

“Benson,” she said. “Benson went to Harcourt.”