Page 71 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

I pressed her hand. "Don't, dearest. You will make yourself ill. Cosmos would not wish for that."

She let out a troubled sigh. "You're right. But oh how I wish I had something else to do than sit still. I was never any good at needlework, and now it is my entire profession. You investigate. Your grandmother marshals her dowagers. Even Petunia has an elephant. And I sit in this room being efficiently sick and reading newspapers you all imagine I do not see, and the man I love is in a cell for a quarrel he had on my account, and I am told to hold my fire."

I took both her hands now. "Claire. Look at me. You are worth more to Cosmos than all the rest of us put together. Yes, don't protest. Until he is free, you have the only task that matters and the only one none of us can do." I did not look at her middle; I did not need to. "Guard what you are guarding. That is not sitting still. That is holding the citadel."

She breathed out, long, and turned her hands in mine and gripped them. "Tell him—" she began, and stopped, the way she had stopped yesterday and would stop tomorrow, at the edge of everything there was no room to say.

"He knows, Claire. He knows."

I came away before noon with the sun high and the streets gone white with heat, and stripped off my gloves the moment the carriage door shut, because July had made an oven of it and there was no one to see. We went up out of Belgravia at a walk, the traffic thickening as it always thickens where the streets narrow past the mews. I sat with my bare hands in my lap composing my confession to Steele—for I had decided, somewhere between Claire's door and the corner, that the note would cross the square this afternoon.

And then the world ahead of us broke apart in one long crash of wood and iron.

Screams first—a horse's, which is worse than a man's—then the boom and bounce of barrels on stone. Through the front glass, past our coachman's shoulder: a brewer's dray and a hackney locked together across the whole throat of the street, the dray keeled over with its load bursting its lashings, barrels loose and rolling, a horse down in the traces and thrashing, another rearing against its harness while its driver hauled and swore. A wagon behind them stopped. A cart behind that. And the crowd arriving out of nothing, the way London crowds do, boys and porters and idlers appearing between the wheels.

Our carriage jerked, swayed, and stood. Shouting ahead, wheels grinding behind—something coming up close at our rear, boxing us. The coachman's voice, apologetic, through the panel: "Beg pardon, milady. There's no way through nor round, might be a quarter hour⁠—"

The far door opened, and a man stepped into my carriage and seated himself opposite me, as though the seat had been kept for him.

He wore a light summer coat, beautifully cut, and held a silver-headed cane across his knees. Above the white of his collar the upper half of his face was hidden by a mask of black silk.

"Forgive the theater, Lady Rosalynd." The voice from my own ballroom. The voice from the Floralia. "The streets are so unreliable this time of year."

My hand had already moved—a small, sharp, useless motion toward a pocket where no pistol had been for months, and would never be again, because the police had it. He watched the movement complete itself and die, and inclined his head, courteous as a dancing master.

"You see how it is," he said gently. "I have made even your habits mine."

Outside, six feet away, the bedlam went on—the downed horse, the rolling barrels, shouting men. He had built himself a private room out of pure noise, in the open street, at noon, and we sat in it alone.

"I would have preferred almost any other introduction," he went on, when I said nothing. "This is beneath both of us. But Steele has made quieter meetings difficult, and I find I am no longer disposed to wait upon his arrangements." He settled back against the squabs—my squabs, in my carriage, at his ease. "So I will be brief, and I will be plain, because you have earned plainness and very few people in my life have. Your brother did not kill Basil Crane. You know it. I know it—better than anyone living, you will allow. And I can prove it."

I kept my voice level. "Prove it then."

"I can place in Scotland Yard's hands the man who fired the shot. With evidence no jury could look away from—the kind of evidence that does not merely acquit your brother but makes his accusers apologize. Within the week, the Earl of Rosehaven walks out of that building with his name restored and Inspector Dodson's career in ruins about his ankles, which I offer as a gratuity." A pause, measured. "And Lady Edmunds keeps her secrets. All of them, Lady Rosalynd. Every one."

The cold went through me and left my face alone. All of them. Two days—Claire had carried it two days beyond her own walls, and it had already reached him. There was no household he was not inside. There was no room in my life he had not stood in, dusted, and left in order.

"And the price," I said.

"You." No flourish. He said it the way honest men say figures. "Come to me. Not as my wife—I would not insult you by pretending that marriage is what this is. As my mistress. Body and soul. I am a patient man, Lady Rosalynd; I am prepared to remain patient in every other point between us, for years if you require them. Not in this one."

"You are mad."

"I am thorough. Men rarely trouble to learn the difference." He leaned forward, and the mask's empty upper face caught the light. "I have loved you since the river. Since you stood on that deck in a scarlet gown, among women who came for the thrill of it, and you were the only soul aboard who was not looking for a way out for herself. I have watched you across three investigations become what you were always going to become. I do not ask you to feel what I feel. I have never once asked it. I ask you to accept the truth of what we are."

"The truth." I gave the word back to him at its full worth, which was nothing. "You stop my carriage with a manufactured calamity, you sit in it uninvited, you price my brother's life like a fishmonger, and you speak to me of truth from behind a mask. I have dealt with actual fishmongers who showed me more of their faces. You love me, you have watched me, you know me. And I do not know what you look like."

The silence held one beat too long. I had surprised him.

"That is easily mended,” he said a few moments later, and removed the mask.

I had built his face a hundred ways in the dark—scarred, ruined, wrong, some horror the silk existed to hide. The face was handsome. That was the obscenity of it. A man in his early fifties, silver at the temples, the bones clean and strong, gray eyes set level—a face made for trust, for hospital boards and christenings, for standing godfather to other men's sons. He wore it the way he wore the coat, perfectly. He watched me take its measure with something in his expression that, in any other man, I would have called hope.

As I looked, the drawing room at Lady Pembury's assembled itself around those eyes. The old gentleman, coughing in his ring of charitable distance, who had looked up and smiled at me. Strip away the powder and the stoop. Take the cane out of the picture, and the handkerchief, and the terrible chest. Add nothing—only remove—and twenty invented years peeled away like a glove.

Sir Reginald Harcourt was sitting in my carriage with his mask in his hand.

I kept my face still. It cost more than I would ever admit to anyone, and I’d paid it. He saw nothing because he was too busy being seen. Whatever he found in my expression, he mistook it, the way men who plan everything mistake the one thing they cannot arrange.