Page 63 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“Your Grace. A long morning at the Yard, I hear.”

“An instructive one.”

He stepped aside with exactly the correct depth of bow, and let me get four stairs down before he observed, to nobody, that interest from Grosvenor Square was becoming quite the feature of his case.

I filed it where I file the things I cannot mend.

The van came up out of the yard behind the court a few minutes later and turned north into the traffic. I stood on the steps and watched until it was out of the street. Holloway was four miles from Grosvenor Square. I had never in my life had occasion to learn that. I did not expect to forget it now.

Chapter

Twenty-Three

A Thing Worth Crying About

Honeycutt announced Steele at two. I had his news before he was through the door. Everything in Steele’s expression was carefully arranged. But he carried bad news in his shoulders, and the weight of the world was upon them.

“I’m sorry, Rosalynd. I couldn’t manage a Scotland Yard cell. Cosmos will be held at Holloway.”

“Why?” I cried out.

“I was wrong about what the Yard has the power to do. The police charge men. They do not keep them. A magistrate remands those charged. The warrant names the prison, and the prison belongs to a department I cannot reach. I went into that building believing rank would answer. I came out having learned that it does not.”

“Tell me the rest. All of it. Do not sort it for me.”

“I had five minutes with Cosmos in the cells beneath the court. He is well.”

“What did he say?”

“He asked after you. He asked me to see to Claire. He warned me that I shall be one of his judges, and apologized for it, as though the arrangement were his doing.” Steele’s voice did something I had not heard it do. “And he asked me to tell you that the fern on the south bench wants misting and not watering. He says you will drown it out of kindness. He says you drown everything out of kindness, and that there is a green notebook in his desk with the regimen written in it. And to give it to Fox who will see it through.”

I have been told my brother was arrested. I have been told he was charged. I took both of those standing up. The fern took my legs.

I collapsed on the nearest chair without meaning to, putting my hand over my mouth like an actress in a melodrama while tears rolled down my cheeks. The worst of it was that I could not stop. Cosmos had been confined to a cell in Holloway, and he was thinking about a fern.

Steele crossed the room and crouched down in front of me, put a handkerchief into my hand, and did not say a single word. When my overwhelming grief had passed, he used the handkerchief to brush away my tears.

It was then, with perfect timing, that the door flew open.

Petunia, of course. She looked from my face to the duke’s hand to my face again. Behind her, Chrissie appeared with Laurel at her shoulder. Then Fox, who had more than likely come up from the greenhouse as he had not troubled to wash the dirt from his hands. Then Holly and Ivy, arriving together at a dead run and stopping in exactly the same place at exactly the same moment, as they have done since they could walk.

“Why is Rosie crying?” Petunia asked Steele, her lower lip trembling.

I have watched that man command a room, face down a chief inspector, and confront a murderer. I had never once seen him at a loss for words until he was looked at by a small girl in a pinafore.

But then he gathered his will, walked toward her, and put himself at her height. “Your sister is crying because your brother has been sent to a prison called Holloway, and it is a thing worth crying about. I should have found a gentler way to tell her. I am sorry to say I did not manage it.”

“Is he coming back?”

“I am working at it, and so are a great many other people. I will not tell you it is certain, because I do not think you would believe me.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Petunia, brushing her own tears away.

“No. You are difficult to deceive.”

“Is it a bad prison?” one of the twins asked.

There was the lie that would let her sleep, that would let them all sleep. But it was best to give them the truth. “It is not a good one,” I said. “No prison is. But I will see to it that he has his own clothes, his own food, and his own books. And his solicitor will see him every day.”