Page 61 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

"Always."

"Cosmos never said."

"Cosmos apologizes to wasps. He has never once needed rescuing, and so he has never seen her come about." I rang for a fresh tray of sandwiches, something that wouldn’t offend. “I want you to eat something. Then I am sending you home in our carriage to rest. Remember, my dearest friend, you gave us the thread in Benson. There’s nothing else you need do except care for yourself and that which you carry.”

Once the tray was delivered, we talked about nonsensical things giving her time to regain her equilibrium. She left in a much better frame of mind than the one in which she’d arrived.

When she had gone I stood a long while at the window and let the day assemble itself.

A valet carried out of one house and into another. A hanger-on drawing wages for two years from a source no clerk could trace. And now a man who’d dismissed an entire household, along with his physician, and distanced himself from his previous acquaintances.

Steele had called it a house, not a man. But he was wrong. The gentleman who had waltzed me across my own ballroom, with his hand at my waist and his voice low beneath the music and the invalid at Lady Pembury’s musicale was the same man.

Chapter

Twenty-Two

A Question of Custody

The Assistant Commissioner kept me waiting eleven minutes, which was his way of establishing that in his building a duke waited like other men.

His office was twice the size of Graves’s and half as honest—good carpet, a portrait of the Queen, papers arranged for visitors rather than for work. We performed the openings. Then he folded his hands and waited.

“The Earl of Rosehaven,” I said, “will be held in this building until his trial. I want him to have a clean room with light and air, reasonable access to his solicitors and his family, and Inspector Graves within call.” I put it as a fact rather than a request, which is a thing rank permits and rarely refuses.

“Your Grace.” He had his voice arranged as carefully as his papers. “You are asking me for a thing I cannot give you.”

“You command the Metropolitan Police.”

“I do. The Metropolitan Police arrests men and charges them. It does not keep them.” He said it without any pleasure, which was worse than if he had enjoyed it. “His lordship goes before the magistrate at one today, the same as any common thief, because a peer’s privilege does not begin until he is tried. The magistrate will remand him, and the remand warrant will say where he is taken. That warrant is not mine to write and not mine to alter. And the prison it names is not mine either. Prisons belong to the Prison Commission, which belongs to the Home Office. I could no more give you a room in one than I could give you a berth on a man-of-war.”

“Which prison.”

“Holloway. It is where the untried go.” A pause, correctly judged. “It is a better place than the name suggests, Your Grace, and a good deal better than Newgate. I say that because it is true and not because it will comfort you.”

One o’clock. I had arrived at eleven to arrange a thing already arranged by a warrant not yet written, in a building four streets away, by a man I had never met.

“And afterward?”

“Afterward is not mine either, and it is not the Old Bailey’s.” He let it sit exactly as long as it deserved. “The grand jury will find the bill in the ordinary way, and then the indictment goes up to the House of Lords. You will be trying him yourself, Your Grace.”

My hand had gone to my breast pocket at some point in the last minute, and I took it away again.

The letter from Her Majesty had lived there three weeks. But it had been granted for one purpose. To conduct an investigation touching the public good and desiring that those to whom I presented it extend me every facility consistent with their duty. It would not have moved the superintendent. His duty this morning was to deliver a prisoner to a magistrate and he meant to do so. To lay it on this desk was to say, in front of a senior officer of the Metropolitan Police who would be obliged to remember it, that the Crown’s private business and the murder at Kew Gardens were matters a duke pursued out of the same pocket. And those two tracks had to be kept apart. So I kept it in my coat and did not present it.

“You have gone somewhere, Your Grace.”

“I have arrived somewhere. It is not the same thing.”

He squared the papers he had arranged for visitors. “An untried prisoner may wear his own clothes. He may have his food sent in at his own charge, and his own bedding, and his own books. He may write letters and receive them. He may see his solicitor out of the hearing of any officer and his family within the sight of one. Everything you came here to purchase this morning, the law gives him for nothing.”

“Then give me the one thing you have got. Five minutes with him before the court.”

“The cells beneath the court are not mine either. But the sergeant who keeps them was mine for nine years, and he will read a note in my hand.” He drew paper toward him. “Five minutes, Your Grace. And I shall want it understood that I have given you nothing.”

He walked me to the door himself, which he need not have done.

“A word, if you please. You have been the better part of an hour with me. Chief Inspector Dodson is not clever, Your Grace. He is, however, extremely attentive to slights, and he will hear before long that you were in this room. Whatever it is you have not told me, he will spend the rest of his case trying to guess it.”