Page 90 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“I shall have it put in your obituary.”

“I should like something flattering in there as well, Your Grace, if there’s room.”

I laughed.

It came out badly and hurt somewhere under my ribs. I could not stop it once it had started. I put my hand over my mouth and laughed on a wrecked deck with a dead man under canvas twelve feet away, and neither of them said one word about it.

Finch waited until I had finished. “There she is,” he said.

“What?”

“The one that laughs.” He looked at Steele. “I’d begun to think she’d mislaid it.”

“So had I,” Steele said, and he brushed back one of the many curls that had fallen across my face.

Graves would not promise me Cosmos that night.

The papers Mercer had given him were enough to begin pulling Harcourt’s organization apart. Men were already being sent to the wharf at Wapping and to the addresses in the files. By morning there would be officers going in half a dozen directions.

But Cosmos was still at Holloway charged with murder.

“Give me a little time, my lady,” Graves said.

“How much time?”

“Days. Not weeks.”

I did not like it. But I accepted it. There was a difference.

We went back upriver on a police launch with the light going long and yellow across the water.

Steele put his coat round me as we had boarded it for the river air was cold, even in July. I did not argue. Not only did it warm me, but I got to breathe the scent of him. Finch slept sitting up with his mouth open, which he would have denied if he’d been told. But neither Steele nor I did. The man deserved his rest.

Once we arrived at Wapping, we boarded Steele’s carriage which had waited for him. Finch chose to hail a hansom cab, rather than ride with us. I imagined he slept during that ride as well.

On the way back to Grosvenor Square, I had a great deal to say. First and foremost, my sister. “Chrissie reached you, I gather?”

“She did. She was perfect, Rosalynd. She told me you’d been taken from the modiste. I invited her to stay at Steele House, but she refused. She said she needed to return to Rosehaven because somebody had to hold the house. I had Milford escort her, along with one of my pistols, which I instructed him to give to Honeycutt. And then I sent additional footmen. You will have a grand reception once you arrive home.”

For the first time in many hours, I breathed easy. “She ran across the square in a torn gown.”

“Yes.”

“In front of every window in Mayfair. She knew exactly what it would cost her, and she did it anyway.”

“I hardly think she would deem it too high a price to pay.”

“Her entire season, lost. And she’s worked so hard to be a success.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I have a mother who has been waiting years for a reason to go to war with somebody.”

That made me laugh. “And then there’s grandmother and her battalion of dowagers.”

“There you go.”

I gazed out the window and watched the city come back to us by degrees. Marshes, then yards, then warehouses and finally the bridges. It looked no different. I had half expected it to.

It was evening when we arrived at Grosvenor Square.