Page 76 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

Steele had told me. Wherever you go, I go, or a man I would trust with my own life goes. Never again from a distance. Never again alone. I had gone up my steps last night with my heart going like a bird in a box. And now here, on an afternoon in July, the whole of it had resolved into three men and a newspaper.

Let him come, then. Let a man who arranges brewers’ drays try Bond Street at two in the afternoon with Caleb Finch on the pavement.

The curtain parted, and a shop assistant stepped through it. “Milady? Lady Chrysanthemum would like your opinion.”

Chrissie stood before the long glass with her hands held away from her sides. The lilac silk hugged her waist, swept over her hips, and fell in shimmering folds about her feet. It put every other gown in the room out of the running.

“Well?”

“It is perfect.”

She turned once, watching herself. “Do you think—” She stopped. She has never in her life been able to ask for a compliment outright, which is the only shyness she has. “Will it do?”

“Every unmarried gentleman who so much as glances at you will fall at your feet.”

Madame laughed. Chrissie laughed. The assistant, with pins in her mouth, made a sound like a kettle.

And then the street cracked open.

One shot. Flat and hard and closer than it had any business being. Then another, and three more on top of it, so fast they ran together.

I raced to the front window as a woman by the fitting room began to scream and could not stop. Out the window the whole pavement came apart, skirts and hats and running men, a bootblack’s stand going over sideways.

Finch was in the road behind an overturned coster’s barrow with his revolver braced across it. He fired once and a man in the doorway of the stationer’s folded at the knee. He was shifting his aim when the answer came from somewhere I could not see. His left arm snapped back, and he went down out of sight behind the barrow.

I ran back into the fitting room, grabbed Chrissie’s wrist and was hauling her toward the back of the shop when the front door burst open.

Two men, and a mountain of another who braced his back against the door and stood there.

I got between them and my sister. Whatever they intended, they would have to go through me.

The first man caught my wrists and dragged them down. I drove my heel into his shin, hard, with everything my weight would lend it. He swore and lost his grip. I twisted loose and took the brass candlestick off the console table by the mirror.

It caught him across the temple and he dropped like a stone. The second man came on me from behind. He was stronger, and there was nothing to be done about it. He folded my arms up behind my back until my vision went white at the edges. The one I had struck got to his knees, took a cloth from inside his coat, shoved it between my teeth, and tied it behind my head while my eyes streamed.

Two men poured in from the back of the shop and grabbed Chrissie. She fought them like something wild. Somehow, she got a hand free and raked it down a man’s face, exactly as I had done. I have never been prouder of anything in my life.

A dress form went over. Then a shelf, and forty pounds of silk came down across the floor in a slow bright landslide. The woman by the fitting room was still screaming, and Madame Delacroix was shouting in two languages at once from behind the counter.

“Enough.” A man’s voice.

The room stopped.

He stood in the doorway, not a hair out of place, as though he were dressed for a soirée. Nothing covered his face. Three lines ran from his cheekbone to his jaw, scabbed dark and drawn a little at the edges. He had made no attempt whatever to hide them.

He looked at the wreckage, at the man on the floor, and last of all at me.

“Lady Rosalynd.” He inclined his head. “I had hoped for kinder circumstances.”

I gave him the only thing I had—a look.

Another volley went up in the street. A man put his head through the open curtain. “We’re wanted away, sir.”

“Bring both of them,” Harcourt said.

They took us out through the ruin of the shop into the back street gone empty. A closed carriage stood at the curb with the door already open and a man at the horses’ heads.

I got my head round once, twice, searching for Finch.