Page 69 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

My brother laughed. It came out of him all at once, unguarded, the laugh from before all of this, and the younger warder started in the doorway as though a chair had spoken. Cosmos folded the drawing with the care he gives his pressed specimens and put it in his breast pocket, and for a moment neither of us managed anything at all.

"And Claire," he said at last. His voice did what it always does at her name now—dropped its cleverness at the door.

"Bearing up. I saw her yesterday and shall see her tomorrow. Grandmother has taken her under her wing."

"God help her. Grandmother's wing has weather in it." But the relief moved through him in plain sight. "She eats? She sleeps?"

"She is being looked after, Cosmos. By all of us, including Steele."

The words rose in me then, and I held them behind my teeth. She is carrying your child. A man in a cell has nothing to do but imagine. Give him a child to imagine and by tomorrow he would have calculated what his life was worth against the two of theirs. And beneath that lay the plainer truth—it was hers to tell, in a better room than this one, with no warder at the door.

I said nothing. It cost more than I would ever tell either of them.

"Rosie." He was watching me the way he watches a specimen that has moved. "Do not let her do anything brave."

"Bravery is under guard from every quarter. I have seen to it personally."

"Time, milady," said the older warder, not unkindly.

Cosmos rose and kept my hands a moment longer. "Give them my love. Claire too. And tell Petunia I shall hold the elephant close to my heart."

Somehow, I kept my composure the length of the corridor, the stair, the yard, and the lodge. And then I spent four miles of the Camden Road getting it back.

Rosehaven House received me with its usual noise, and for once I went gratefully into it. Petunia required a full accounting. Had he liked the elephant? Had he understood about Justice? Had he laughed? When I confirmed the laugh she nodded once. Her drawing had done its work.

It was Fox who sent me into the study, though he did not mean to. He found me at the foot of the stairs before dinner with dirt under his nails and asked, in a voice arranged to be casual, about the green notebook. The study was locked. So he’d been managing the greenhouse on memory and guesswork.

"I shall bring it to you before dinner," I said.

The study was dark. I did not light the lamp because I did not wish to see its solitude. The way to that desk in the dark was in my feet, the way the stairs of one's childhood are.

The green notebook lay exactly where Cosmos had said, in the second drawer, squared to the drawer's edge, because everything of my brother's is squared to something. Beneath it sat the pistol case, flat and black, brass corners dull in the last of the light. Every misery of the past ten days had climbed out of that case. It had waited here through all of it, closed, patient as furniture.

I owed the thing a look. That is the only account I can give of why I did it. I set the notebook down and opened the case. On the velvet, in the pistol-shaped hollow where my father's gift had lain for many years, sat a folded square of paper.

The room went a long way off and came back changed. I made myself breathe twice before I touched it. And then I unfolded it and read it in the gray of the window, because striking a match had become more than my fingers could manage.

Five words, in an even, elegant, unhurried hand.

We will meet again soon

No signature. No initial. The paper was heavy and expensive, unfoxed, unyellowed, its creases sharp. It had not lain in this case for months.

Two things came to me, in the wrong order.

The second arrived first, and it emptied me. Someone had walked into my house. Past Honeycutt, past the footmen, past six children—or been walked in by hands we had paid or trusted or never once looked at—and had opened this drawer and set his note in the one place in London where only I would find it and only I would know what it meant. Here is where you began, the velvet said. I have been inside your beginning all along.

The first took another minute. When it came, it changed the weight of the paper in my hand.

Whitfield had asked for fifteen years of Sir Reginald Harcourt's signatures laid out in order. Nobody could give him a single line of the masked man's writing. There was none. There had never been any. He did not write. He arranged for other men to write.

And here were five words of it. Five words in the masked man's own hand.

I went downstairs with it burning in my sleeve. I found Honeycutt in his pantry over the silver ledger and asked, in the tone one uses for asking nothing at all, whether anyone had called in the last day while I was out. The fishmonger's new boy. Nothing else, milady, excepting the police.

I kept my hand still on the doorframe. The police.

Two of Inspector Dodson's men, yesterday, the morning of the arrest. They had spent an hour in the study with the door shut and the desk turned out drawer by drawer, with Honeycutt in the corner throughout, not being willing to leave them alone in his master's room. He begged my pardon for not mentioning it, but I had been in no condition to be told.