Chapter 14
Chapter
Fourteen
Drawing Room Intelligence
Ispent the morning doing what generations of well-bred women had perfected into an art form—paying calls.
The rules were as rigid as any legal code.
One arrived between two and four in the afternoon—the term “morning” being one of society’s more charming fictions.
One left a card. One stayed no longer than fifteen minutes.
One discussed the weather, the latest exhibition, and absolutely nothing of consequence.
Unless, of course, one was investigating a murder.
Steele had provided me with a list of names—men connected to Sir Edmund Hale’s business circle, men who sat on the boards of companies Hale had invested in, attended the same dinners, belonged to the same clubs.
But a list of men’s names was of limited use to me.
What I needed was someone who could tell me about their wives.
Grandmother would have been the obvious choice.
Five decades in society had given her an encyclopaedic knowledge of every family of consequence in London.
But involving her was out of the question.
She was sharp enough to guess what I was doing within five minutes, and protective enough to attempt to stop me within ten.
So I had reached out to Lady Lavinia.
For a woman who had arrived in London scarcely a month ago, she had assembled a remarkable map of society’s terrain.
But then, she was the Duke of Steele’s aunt.
That connection had made her one of the most sought-after guests of the season.
Every hostess in Mayfair had rushed to secure her, each hoping she might let slip some morsel about her nephew’s romantic intentions.
Lavinia revealed nothing of the kind. But she listened.
And over four weeks of accepting every invitation, she had acquired a working knowledge of London’s social geography that would have taken most women years.
When I shared Steele’s list, she supplied the more useful intelligence: which wives would be receptive to a morning call, and which would slam the door. The wives, as wives invariably did, knew things their husbands assumed they did not.
My first call was upon Mrs. Reginald Tate, a stout woman with an impressive collection of Staffordshire spaniels and an even more impressive appetite for gossip. She received me in a drawing room so cluttered with porcelain that I feared every gesture might result in a catastrophe.
“Lady Rosalynd, how delightful.” She settled into her chair with the air of a woman preparing for a thorough exchange. “Such a dreadful business at the opera. I told Reginald—something was bound to happen to Sir Edmund eventually. A man cannot make that many enemies and expect to die in his bed.”
“Enemies?” I accepted a cup of tea. “I had understood Sir Edmund to be widely respected.”
“Oh, respected, certainly. The way one respects a loaded cannon.” Mrs. Tate’s eyes gleamed. “Reginald says he was brilliant in business, but brilliance without scruple makes for dangerous company.”
“Surely that is an exaggeration.”
“Is it?” She leaned forward, china rattling dangerously.
“Mrs. Pemberton-Howe told me just last week that her husband had invested a considerable sum in one of Hale’s ventures and was beginning to regret it.
The way she said ‘considerable’ suggested the sort of sum that keeps a wife awake at night. ”
I filed this away. An investment. Regret. The edges of something beginning to show through the polite fabric of drawing room conversation.
“And she is not the only one.” Mrs. Tate lowered her voice to the pitch that signaled the truly valuable gossip. “Mrs. Helena Ashford—do you know her? Widow of Colonel Ashford. He invested quite heavily before his death. She has been in a fearful state about it.”
Mrs. Helena Ashford. The name had not appeared on Lavinia’s list, but instinct told me it mattered.
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
“She keeps a house on Curzon Street. Quiet woman, generally—not given to complaint. Which is precisely why her present agitation is so remarkable.” Mrs. Tate sat back with satisfaction. “Draw your own conclusions.”
I drew several, none of them comforting.
My second call—upon Lady Bartram, whose husband had served with Hale on a railway board—confirmed the pattern.
Lady Bartram was nervous. She spoke of Sir Edmund’s death as though it were a contagion, her gloved hands twisting in her lap.
“Such uncertain times,” she said, three times in fifteen minutes.
When I inquired whether her husband’s business affairs were causing concern, she changed the subject with a haste that answered the question more eloquently than words.
By the time I presented my card at the house on Curzon Street, I had accumulated a disquieting picture. Hale’s associates—or rather, their wives—were frightened. Not merely shocked by the murder, but anxious in a way that suggested the danger was not confined to one dead man in an opera box.
Mrs. Ashford’s drawing room was a study in restrained good taste—pale walls, well-chosen furniture, a single vase of white roses on the mantelpiece.
The woman who rose to greet me was perhaps fifty, handsome rather than beautiful, and rather tall, with sharp dark eyes in a face that bore the marks of recent strain.
She wore full mourning for her husband, who had died barely six months ago.
Beneath the composed exterior, I detected the tautness of someone who had not slept well in a very long time.
“Lady Rosalynd.” Courteous but wary. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
A direct assault would close this woman like a book. Excessive subtlety would insult her intelligence. I chose something in between.
“I wished to introduce myself,” I said. “Lady Lavinia Thornburn speaks highly of you. In the wake of the terrible events at the opera, I have found myself seeking the company of sensible women. There has been rather too much hysteria and rather too little clear thinking.”
Something shifted in her expression. Not warmth—but the acknowledgement of a fellow pragmatist.
“Please, sit. Tea?”
We observed the rituals—the tray, the pouring, the biscuits. Mrs. Ashford moved through these motions with the economy of a woman who had long since ceased to find them interesting.
“You were at the opera that evening,” she said. Not a question.
“In the next box. With the Duke of Steele and his aunt.”
“The papers have been most thorough in their coverage.” A dry note entered her voice. “One can scarcely open a gazette without encountering the duke’s name. Or yours.”
“The papers are rarely interested in accuracy when sensation will suffice.”
A weighted silence followed. I could see the calculation working behind those sharp eyes—the quiet assessment of risk and benefit that marked a woman accustomed to managing her own affairs.
I waited. Silences yielded more than questions when the person opposite you was this guarded.
“I am not a woman given to indiscretion,” she said at last. “My late husband was a military man. He taught me the value of keeping one’s own counsel.”
She set down her teacup. Her gaze moved to the window, and when she looked back at me, whatever had been gathering behind her eyes had been carefully locked away.
“Sir Edmund’s death was a terrible shock. He was a man of considerable energy and vision. One does not expect such men to be…interrupted.”
An interesting choice. Not killed. Not murdered. Interrupted—as though Hale had been in the middle of something when the stiletto found him, and it was the interruption, not the death, that troubled her.
“Did you know him well?”
“We moved in the same circles. My late husband had business dealings with Sir Edmund a year ago. I maintained the investment after Colonel Ashford’s death.” Her tone offered precisely enough to be polite and not one syllable more. “As one does.”
I tried one more approach. “Mrs. Tate mentioned that some of his investors have been rather unsettled since his death.”
Mrs. Ashford’s expression did not change. But her hand, reaching for her teacup, paused for the briefest instant before completing the motion. Anyone less attentive would have missed it.
I did not.
“People are always unsettled by violent death,” she said. “It reminds them of their own mortality.”
She studied me over the rim of her cup. I had the distinct impression that Mrs. Ashford knew exactly why I had come and had made a deliberate decision not to give it to me.
Not from hostility. But from the careful self-preservation of a woman who had learned that trust was a luxury she could not afford.
We spoke for another ten minutes of harmless things. She was an excellent conversationalist when she chose to be, which only confirmed what I suspected: her reticence on the subject of Hale was not a failure of nerve but a deliberate fortress.
When I rose to leave, she walked me to the door. But as I reached for my gloves, she spoke again.
“Lady Rosalynd.” Her voice was quieter now, stripped of its social polish. “You strike me as a woman of sense. So I will offer you a piece of advice, from one sensible woman to another.”
I turned back.
“Be careful where you tread.” Her dark eyes held mine, and for the first time I saw the emotion she had been concealing—not a crack in the armor, but a deliberate, controlled glimpse, offered as a warning. “Sir Edmund was careful. And it did not save him.”
Before I could respond, the mask slipped back into place.
“Thank you for calling,” she said, and closed the door.
In the carriage back to Grosvenor Square, I turned over what I had learned—and what I had not. Mrs. Tate’s gossip. Lady Bartram’s trembling hands. And Mrs. Ashford’s careful silence—the silence of a woman who knew a great deal and had decided, for now, to say none of it.
She had given me nothing. And in doing so, she had told me something I needed to know.
I needed to speak with Steele. I had no evidence to offer—no names, no documents, no damning correspondence.
Only a pattern: the quiet, spreading fear of women who suspected their worlds were about to collapse, and a widow on Curzon Street who had told me, in everything but words, that she knew why Sir Edmund Hale had been killed.
I would call on her again. And next time, I would bring something more persuasive than sympathy.