Page 60 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

"Straight from your household into his. Carrying everything Edmunds ever trusted him with—the physician, the chemist, the potion fetched discreetly for a vain and private man. Your secret did not fly through the air, Claire. It walked from your house to Sir Reginald Harcourt's dressing room, and from Harcourt it was handed to Crane with a price upon it and your name attached."

Claire's hands had gone still in her lap. "Can you prove it?"

"No." The word cost me something to say plainly. "I have a valet and a coughing fit at a musicale. Steele has taken it apart in front of me line by line, and he was right to. What I have is a house. Not a man. He asked me to do nothing until his men report to him. I’m to be sensible in the meantime. I told him I would."

"But you don't believe that it’s only a house."

“No. The man who set Crane on you, the man whose wages kept him in Belgravia, the man behind the whole of this is Sir Reginald Harcourt. I cannot prove one word of it." I met her eyes. “But I would swear to it before the Queen herself.”

“Still, I wrote the reference.” Claire’s voice dropped to almost nothing. “Benson asked for a character, and I sat at Edmunds’s desk and wrote that Benson was honest and discreet and faithful, and I sent him—I sent him myself⁠—”

“You sent a servant to a situation. That is all you did.” I gripped her hands hard enough to hurt, because gentleness would not reach where she had gone. “The man who turned that servant into a weapon is the one who owes this debt. I mean to see it collected. You did not do this, Claire. It was done to you. You are going to stand on it, because your child will need a mother who can.”

Grandmother, throughout the whole of this, had said nothing at all. Her gloves lay forgotten on her lap.

I have known my grandmother's silences my entire life and can tell them apart the way other people tell birds apart. This was not the silence in which she gathered her forces. It was the other one, which I had encountered perhaps four times, where she went somewhere private and came back holding something she did not like.

“Sir Reginald Harcourt," she said at last.

"You know him?"

"Rosalynd, I have been out in society since before your father was breeched. I can seat every family of consequence in England three generations deep. I can tell you which duchess's mother was an actress and which bishop's fortune began in a gaming club, and I have never in my life required more than a name and a county to do it." She turned her head toward me. "And yes. I can seat Sir Reginald perfectly well. And I find I do not care for it."

"Tell us.”

"Knighted in seventy-one or seventy-two. A subscription to a hospital, or a loan to a colony, or some other worthy thing nobody has ever troubled to repeat because there was nothing in it worth repeating. Money out of the City. No land, and therefore no county and no neighbors. No wife. No children. No brother, no nephew, nobody standing behind him at all." She smoothed a glove across her knee without looking at it. "I have sat at table with him three times. He carved badly and had opinions no one cared to learn.”

“In other words, someone hardly worth mentioning.”

“Yes. Before the chest, he was a great deal of nothing in a good coat, which describes half the men I have outlived."

"Then what troubles you?" I asked.

“Harcourt shot every October in Norfolk with the Cheswicks, but then he stopped. There were two or three houses he went to in the autumn, and he stopped going to them as well. Went to the sea instead—Torquay. He came back with a new household entire—every servant, top to bottom, the whole establishment turned out and replaced. And he let his physician, Sir Arthur Kelling, go as well.” She stopped. "Do you know, I have not thought of any of that in two years, and I am not certain I ever thought of it at all. One simply says poor Sir Reginald and passes the sugar."

The clock counted through it.

"He became ill," she said slowly, "and then he went away, and then he came back a great deal worse. That is not remarkable. Men go to the sea and come back worse every year of the world. What is remarkable is what lies in between. Attend to me, Rosalynd, because I am going to say it badly." She lifted her chin. "There is a space. On the near side of it there was a man with a physician and a shooting party and a household. On the far side there is a man with none of those things, and nobody who could tell you the difference. Not one soul in London has ever thought that worth a second sentence, because that is precisely what a long illness does to a man's life."

I did not say anything. I could not have improved it.

She set both hands flat on her knees. "I have spent five minutes trying to name one person who knew him. Who physicked him. Who shot with him. Who sat down to dinner in his own house, or dressed him, or kept his accounts. Anybody at all who was ever nearer to Sir Reginald than the width of a drawing room." She looked at me. "There is not one left. Every soul who could tell you whether the man in that invalid chair is the man he was has been let go, and the rest of us are precisely where he left us. Across a room."

"Grandmother—"

"I shall not ask you what he has done." She began drawing on her gloves, finger by finger. "You would tell me, and then I should be obliged to conduct myself like a woman who knows something, and I have never once managed that convincingly. So I will give you what I have, and what I have is a space, and you may put it in your pocket and make of it what you like."

"You are going to do something."

"I am going to take tea." She settled the second glove over her wrist. "He has made himself invisible to men, and I daresay he has been thorough about it. His business people. Bankers. Clever young persons with notebooks. But no man alive has ever troubled to make himself invisible to old women, because no man alive believes he needs to. I intend to spend the coming week with every dreadful creature of my acquaintance in London. Half of them owe me confidences and the other half owe me money at whist. I do not want his history, child. I want the people he shed, and the month he shed them in. I shall have them in a week’s time.” She rose.

"There is something you must hear first, Grandmother,” I said. “Whatever you learn, however you learn it, he must not feel it being learned. He keeps accounts, and he has people killed.”

At her full height, in her second-best carriage dress, my grandmother resembled nothing so much as a ship of the line coming about.

“Noted.” She kissed Claire's forehead on the way to the door, pronounced her a sensible girl who would eat her supper and sleep the night through or answer for it, informed me that she would call on us in two days for tea, and was gone. The drawing room required a moment to recover its proportions.

Claire let out a breath. "Is she always⁠—"