Chapter 11
Chapter
Eleven
A Late Supper
The house in Belgravia—a quiet Georgian terrace on a quiet street, furnished simply—was not widely known to be mine.
In a life lived almost entirely in public, such a place was rare and therefore precious.
I had inherited it from my father, who used it to entertain his highborn mistresses.
Rosalynd was the first guest I had ever brought here.
Tonight, the dining room was lit by candlelight, the table set for two. Cook had prepared a cold supper—poached salmon, asparagus, a sharp cheddar, bread still warm from the oven. The housekeeper had brought it to the table.
Rosalynd arrived a little after eleven, exactly as I’d arranged.
She came through the back entrance, cloaked and hooded.
The sight of her stepping out of the darkness into the candlelit room stirred something in me that I had long since stopped trying to name.
Her copper hair was loose beneath the hood—not the elaborate arrangements she wore in public, but something far simpler and softer.
When she pushed back the hood, her blue eyes found mine with an immediacy that made the room feel suddenly smaller.
“You came,” I said.
“Did you doubt I would?” She glanced around the space. “It’s so quiet here. What have you done with your staff?”
“They’ve retired for the evening. We are quite alone.”
Her blue eyes found mine. “Privacy. How rare that is.”
I took her cloak. Beneath it, she wore a deep green gown, one less formal than the one she’d worn to the opera, but just as fetching. I led her to the dining room where she settled into her chair with the grace that had first caught my attention a lifetime and several storms ago.
I had been managing people my entire adult life. That I could not manage Rosalynd was, I had come to understand, one of her chief virtues.
“You look tired,” she said, studying me across the candlelight.
“I have been at White’s. Gathering intelligence. Sitting in a leather chair while an elderly man dispensed gossip over whiskey.” Tongue firmly in cheek, I said, “It’s exhausting work.”
She smiled. “And did the elderly man dispense anything useful?”
I poured wine for us both and considered how best to frame what Marchmont had told me. “Baron Marchmont has made it his business to know things for fifty years. He was…suggestive rather than definitive. But the suggestion itself was interesting.”
“In what way?”
“Hale was an ambitious man who built his fortune in shipping. A year ago, Marchmont heard talk of a consortium. Some manner of development scheme involving significant capital. The details were kept unusually close. Marchmont attempted to discover more information. But could not. Recently, Hale had grown unusually quiet. So much so, his partners in the City had noticed.”
Rosalynd set down her glass. “He feared something.”
“Perhaps.” I reached for the salmon and served it to her along with the asparagus. And then I served myself.
“So we have a secretive consortium no one will discuss. And the small matter of the Prince of Wales conducting an affair with the dead man’s wife.”
“That is a fair summary, yes.”
“It is a terrible summary. We know almost nothing.”
“We know where to look. That is not nothing.” I set down my knife.
“Marchmont pointed me toward Sir Nigel Davenport, who manages Hale's financial affairs. Whatever Hale’s finances entail, Davenport would know. But he’s gone to ground since the murder—absent from his usual haunts, which suggests either fear or calculation. ”
“Or both.”
“Or both,” I agreed. “I intend to find him.”
I would pursue Davenport—his townhouse first, then his offices if necessary.
Simultaneously, I would engage a forensic accountant, a man named Whitfield, whom I had used in previous investigations.
Whitfield had a bloodhound’s instinct for following money through the labyrinth of shell companies and offshore accounts that men of means employed to disguise their dealings.
We ate in companionable silence for a time. The bread was excellent. The salmon was better. And across the table, Rosalynd’s presence filled the room in a way that had nothing to do with sound or movement—a warmth, a gravity, as though she bent the air around her simply by existing.
“Lady Hale was terrified that night at the opera,” Rosalynd said. “Not merely shocked—terrified. There is a difference. Shock looks backward at what has happened. Fear looks forward at what might come.”
“You think she knows something.”
“I think she is protecting something. Whether it is herself, the prince, or something else entirely—that is what I need to discover.”
We spent the next hour laying the foundation.
Rosalynd would begin with a condolence call on Lady Hale—an entirely appropriate gesture that would also allow her to gauge the widow’s state of mind.
If possible, she would learn what Lady Hale knew about her husband’s business affairs.
I suggested Lady Lavinia should accompany her.
She would provide not only propriety but the social credibility that came with the Thornburn name.
“I intend to bring in Caleb Finch as well,” I said.
Rosalynd smiled. We’d both worked with him before. “Your enquiry agent.”
“And so much more.” Finch operated from a cramped office in Hatton Garden.
He was not a gentleman. He would never be admitted to White’s.
But he could find out things in a week that Marchmont’s whisper network never had.
“Davenport can tell me about Hale’s financial affairs.
But there will be things he can’t or will not say.
Hale’s shipping offices, his warehouses, the men who worked for him—that is Finch’s territory. ”
“The below-stairs of the business world.”
“Precisely. Finch has a talent for persuading people to talk. Clerks, dockworkers, junior partners—the sort of men who see everything and are assumed to notice nothing. If Hale’s affairs were in disarray, his employees would know. They always do.”
“Finch can be trusted to be discreet.”
“And invisible, which is considerably more useful.” I refilled her glass. “He also has the good sense not to ask questions I would prefer not to answer.”
“Such as why a duke is investigating a murder the Queen has told him to investigate?”
“Exactly.”
Rosalynd smiled—the particular smile she reserved for moments when my careful arrangements amused her. “So. You will pursue Davenport and unleash Finch upon the city. I will call on Lady Hale with your aunt. Is there anything else?”
“The social rounds. Morning calls. Afternoon teas. You will hear things in those rooms that no man ever could—not because women are indiscreet, but because they observe what men are too arrogant to notice.”
“How flattering.”
“It is not flattery. It is fact.” I met her gaze. “You are the most observant person I have ever met, Rosalynd. Present company very much included. If there are secrets to be found in the drawing rooms of London, you will find them.”
The color that rose in her cheeks had nothing to do with the wine. She looked away, then back, her expression softening into something unguarded.
The candles had burned low. The supper plates lay nearly empty between us. And in the quiet that followed, the room seemed to narrow until it contained nothing but the two of us and the fragile, charged space between.
I loved her. I had stopped pretending otherwise somewhere between the first investigation and the last. Between the arguments that sharpened us both and the silences that softened everything.
I loved her with a certainty that frightened me precisely because it offered no solution.
I would not marry again. I would not put another woman through the danger of childbirth.
And Rosalynd—fierce, independent, ungovernable Rosalynd—had no wish to be married, which ought to have been a relief and was instead a particular kind of ache.
So we had this. Candlelight and conspiracy. Late suppers in a house no one knew about. The occasional warmth of her hand against my chest and the taste of Burgundy on her lips. It was not enough. But it would have to be.
"Steele," she said quietly. Just my name. No demand. No expectation. Simply an acknowledgment that she was here.
I turned the wineglass in my hands. The Burgundy caught the light, dark as old blood.
"This evening," I said at last. "With you. It matters to me more than I know how to say."
Something moved in her expression—not surprise, exactly, but the recognition of a thing she had perhaps suspected and now heard confirmed, however obliquely. Her eyes were very bright.
"It matters to me too," she said.
The evening ended as it had before—reluctantly, with the awareness that we needed to return to our separate lives and the performances those lives demanded.
I helped her into her cloak at the back door.
Her fingers brushed mine as she drew the hood over her hair, and the touch lingered—deliberate, I thought.
I kissed her. Not careful, measured kisses. Here, in the quiet of a house where no one watched and no one judged, I kissed her the way I wanted to. Slowly. Thoroughly. With the whole of my attention and none of the restraint I wore like armor in every other room of my life.
She tasted of Burgundy and warmth. Her hand came up to rest against my chest—over my heart, though I doubted she knew it—and then her fingers curled into the fabric of my waistcoat, not pushing me away but holding me there.
I deepened the kiss and felt her breath catch, felt the smallest sound escape her, barely more than a sigh.
My hand found the curve of her waist beneath the cloak, drew her closer, and for a moment she leaned into me, warm and real and impossibly close.
It would have been easy—dangerously easy—to let the moment carry us further. The house was empty. The night was dark. And the woman in my arms was everything I had spent months wanting.
When she drew back, her eyes were bright. Her hand remained against my chest a beat longer than necessary before she let it fall.
“Thank you for supper,” she said. “And for the intelligence. I shall put it to good use.”
“I have no doubt.”
“Goodnight, Steele.”
“Goodnight, Rosalynd.”
She disappeared through the back gate, her dark cloak swallowed by the night, and climbed aboard the unmarked carriage waiting in the lane beyond. I listened until I heard the door close, the driver’s murmur to the horses, the rattle of wheels on cobblestones carrying her back to Grosvenor Square.
Then I returned to the dining room, where the candles guttered in their holders, and her wineglass still bore the faint impression of her lips.
For a long time, I sat in the empty room with the memory of what haunted me and a future that could never be.