Page 7 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

I took the glass from her shaking hands and brought it to her lips. “Drink. It will make you feel better.”

She took a sip. Then another. Slowly, thankfully, color returned to her face.

I took the space next to her on the settee and chafed her hands to bring warmth and life back into them. “That’s better. Now tell me. Who took Cosmos?”

She drew a shaky breath. “Scotland Yard.”

Scotland Yard was less alarming than what I’d feared. “Why did they take him?”

“A body was found at Kew Gardens. Inspector Dodson came to our door, with two constables behind him and a folded cloth in his pocket. And inside the cloth—” Her breath hitched. “Cosmos’s pistol. The one our father gave him. The one I took from his desk.”

“Where was it found?” It needed to be verified.

“Next to the body.” Her voice trembled. “When Cosmos couldn’t account for its disappearance, Dodson asked Cosmos to accompany him to Scotland Yard.” A tear rolled down her cheek, which she angrily brushed away. “I should have told him, Steele. I should have told him I took it. And that it was taken from me.”

By a masked man during the Thames investigation. “Did Cosmos ask you about the pistol in Dodson’s presence?”

She shook her head. “He glanced at me. That was all. But he knew. He had to know.”

Cosmos was intelligent enough to suspect Rosalynd had taken the pistol, but he did not, in fact, know. That would work to his advantage.

“It was a good thing you didn’t tell him, Rosalynd. He can honestly say he doesn’t know how it came to be missing from where he kept it.”

“Who else would take it but me?”

“He can claim that someone broke into his study.”

“But no one did! I took it. And the masked man took it from me during the Thames investigation. He has had it since the river. He told me as much himself, in my own ballroom at the masquerade ball, with his hand at my waist and a smile on his face.” Her voice held. That was the worst of it—that it held. “And now he has set it down beside a corpse and handed my brother to the Yard.”

She had told me the pistol’s history months ago. And now the man who had taken it had chosen to use it. He’d planned this during the last three weeks while I’d hunted him in the dark. While I’d chased a ghost. The knowledge sat in my chest like a swallowed coal.

I could not give her any of my covert investigation. To tell her I had been hunting the masked man was to tell her why I had gone to Windsor and ended us, and that every cold and deliberate thing I had done since June had been done to keep her far from this man. So I said none of it.

She set down the glass, and a resolute expression rolled over her face. “I will go to Dodson and tell him I took the pistol, and that it was taken from me.”

“He will never believe you, Rosalynd. He’ll think you invented the tale out of whole cloth to save your brother.”

“But it’s the truth!”

“It doesn’t matter. When he asks for the name of the man who took it, what will you say? That a masked man took it? A man whose name you don’t know? All you will succeed in doing is ruining your good name. Because Dodson will use it against you.”

“This is all on me, Steele! I did this!”

“You did not put a body at Kew Gardens.”

“I gave him the means⁠—”

“You were robbed. By a man who has made a long study of taking what is not his.” I crouched to her level. “Listen to me. He chose to kill someone with that pistol because it belonged to Cosmos. Had it not been the pistol, it would have been some other thing—a man like that never wants for instruments. The guilt you are reaching for is the exact article he requires of you, because a woman occupied in hating herself is a woman who makes mistakes. Do not hand it to him.”

She held my gaze. “You speak as though you know him.”

The coal turned over in my chest. “I know the kind.” I walked away before she could make more of it. “There is a little time. Dodson did not lay a charge. No magistrate hangs a case on a peer over a pistol alone. He will want the dead man bound to your brother—a quarrel, a debt, a reason. I’ll find out who the dead man is, and if he has any connection to your brother.”

“How will you do that?”

“I have my resources.”

“Graves?”