Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Gossip and Golden Eggs
The house was quiet when I returned from Stevens’ Rooms, which should have been my first warning. A quiet Rosehaven was an unnatural state of affairs, and experience had taught me it would never last.
I gave my hat and gloves to Honeycutt, who received them with his customary efficiency and the faintest suggestion that he had something to report.
“The household, Honeycutt?”
“All accounted for, my lady. Lady Laurel is reading in the library. Master Fox has been persuaded, with some difficulty, to attend to his Latin. The twins are in the schoolroom, practicing their watercolors. Lady Petunia is in the garden with Snowball, whom I am given to understand has committed some offense against a cushion in the morning room.”
“Which cushion?”
“The blue silk, my lady. I regret to say the damage is extensive.”
I closed my eyes. The blue silk cushion had belonged to my maternal grandmother. “And Chrissie?”
“Lady Chrysanthemum has gone to Mudie’s lending library. She departed at half past eleven with her maid.”
I thanked him and made my way to the morning room, where the remains of the blue cushion confirmed Honeycutt’s assessment.
Snowball had not merely scratched it. She had disemboweled it with the thorough enthusiasm of a creature who believed silk stuffing to be her personal enemy.
Feathers lay scattered across the carpet in soft drifts.
I picked up the ruined cushion, held it for a moment, and set it aside. It could be repaired. Maybe.
I sat down at my writing desk and opened my notebook. The morning’s work at the auction house needed to be recorded while the details were fresh. I wrote quickly, in the private shorthand I had developed for investigative notes—a precaution against the possibility of curious siblings.
Ivory. The word appeared three times on the first page. I underlined it twice and then stopped myself from underlining it a third time.
The shape of the conspiracy was now clear, or nearly so.
Belgian weapons shipped south through Hale’s merchant fleet to East Africa—Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, the coastal stations where the Abushiri Revolt had created an insatiable demand for arms. And ivory shipped north in return, sold through London auction houses at prices that validated the consortium’s income.
The consignment papers bore Jessop’s signature.
The financial architecture had been built by Davenport.
And at the center of it all, Sir Edmund Hale, who had used his legitimate shipping business as the vehicle for an operation that stretched from the factories of Liège to the shores of East Africa.
I set down my pen and looked at what I had written.
Something did not fit.
The consortium was profitable—extraordinarily so.
Every lady I had spoken to confirmed it.
The returns were exceptional. The investors were growing rich.
The operation, whatever its moral failings, was working.
So why would anyone inside it want Hale dead?
He was the man who made it all possible.
His ships, his routes, his contacts at both ends of the trade.
Without Hale, the entire enterprise was at risk.
No rational conspirator murders the man upon whom his profits depend. The consortium had every reason to keep Hale alive and none to kill him.
Which meant either someone outside the consortium had killed him, or someone inside it had a motive that had nothing to do with money. Exactly what the man in the mask had told me.
I turned to a fresh page and wrote: Who benefits from Hale’s death? Underneath, I added: Not the investors. Not anyone who depends on the trade continuing.
The masked man at the masquerade had told me we were pursuing the wrong thread.
I questioned his motive. It was the kind of misdirection a villain offers to slow an investigation.
But what if he had been telling the truth?
What if the consortium was indeed the wrong thread—not because they were innocent, but because they were not the killers?
I was still turning this over when the morning room door opened in a rather dramatic fashion.
I’d rather expected Petunia since she was drawn to such entrances.
But much to my surprise, it was Chrissie.
She was still in her pelisse, her cheeks flushed from the June air, and her eyes bright with the unmistakable gleam of intelligence gathered.
“Rosie!” Her voice carried the urgency she reserved for matters of supreme importance—gown emergencies, social triumphs, and gossip of the first order. “You will not believe what I overheard at Mudie’s.”
I closed my notebook. “Tell me.”
She crossed the room and sat down beside me in a rustle of skirts and urgency. “I was in the periodicals alcove, looking through the new issue of The Queen, when two women sat down on the other side of the shelf. They didn’t see me. They were talking about Lady Hale.”
My attention sharpened. “What about Lady Hale?”
Chrissie leaned forward, her voice dropping to the confiding register she employed when sharing information of genuine consequence.
She had always possessed this quality—the ability to distinguish between idle chatter and talk that mattered.
It was one of her better instincts, though she would have been offended to hear it described in those terms.
“They said she had been seen in the company of a very elevated personage. Those were their words—a very elevated personage. And one of them said it was common knowledge in certain circles that the association predated Sir Edmund’s death by some months.”
A very elevated personage. The phrase was unmistakable. In the coded language of society gossip, it pointed in one direction only.
“Did they mention a name?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“No. But they didn’t need to, did they? The way they said it—elevated, Rosie—there is only one man in London whose position makes that word a necessary substitute for his name.”
Chrissie was not wrong. The Prince of Wales had been conducting his affair with Lady Hale with the discretion that characterized all of his liaisons, which was to say, not enough.
The Queen had summoned Steele and me to Windsor precisely because she feared the connection would become public.
And now it was surfacing at Mudie’s lending library, of all places, overheard by my eighteen-year-old sister between the periodicals and the penny novels.
If the gossip had reached Mudie’s, it had spread well beyond the drawing rooms of Mayfair. It would reach the newspapers soon. And when it did, the investigation would become a great deal more complicated.
“Who were these women?” I asked. “Did you recognize them?”
“I didn’t see their faces. But one of them had a voice I think I’ve heard before—at the Carlisle musicale, perhaps. High and rather nasal. She spoke as though everything she said was a confidence of the most thrilling nature.”
That described approximately half the women of the ton, but I made a note of it nonetheless.
“Was there anything else?”
Chrissie frowned, concentrating. She took gossip seriously—not from malice, but from a genuine fascination with the mechanics of social life. She understood how information moved through London’s drawing rooms and what it meant when certain things were said in certain ways.
“One of them mentioned Sir Edmund’s business affairs. She said her husband believed the murder was connected to money—that Sir Edmund had been involved in something shady. She used the word ‘consortium.’”
I kept my expression neutral, though the word landed with considerable force. The consortium was no longer a secret held by frightened wives in private drawing rooms. It was circulating openly. The walls were closing in.
“And the other woman said—this is the part that struck me, Rosie—she said it was a shame, because Sir Edmund had always been so generous with his wife’s entertainments, and now Lady Hale would have to find another protector.”
“Another protector,” I repeated.
“Yes. And they both laughed. It was not a kind laugh.”
No. It would not have been. The cruelty of women toward other women in these matters was something I had observed many times and never grown accustomed to.
Lady Hale, whatever her failings, was a widow whose husband had been murdered.
That her grief should be the subject of amusement at a lending library spoke to something I preferred not to dwell on.
“You did well to tell me,” I said. “Thank you, Chrissie.”
She looked pleased. “I knew it was important. The moment I heard ‘elevated personage,’ I thought—Rosie needs to know this.”
“You have good instincts.”
She beamed, then caught sight of the ruined cushion on the side table. Her expression shifted to one of horror. “Snowball?”
“Snowball.”
“Oh, Rosie. Grandmama’s cushion.”
“I know. It can be mended.”
Chrissie picked up the cushion and examined it with the critical eye she brought to all matters of fabric and trim. “I’ll take it to Madame Delacroix. She can work miracles with damaged silk. Though I cannot promise she won’t lecture me about the barbarity of keeping cats indoors.”
“That would be appreciated.”
She tucked the cushion under her arm and rose, her mission accomplished and a new one adopted. At the door, she paused.
“Rosie? Be careful with this. Whatever is happening with Lady Hale, it feels dangerous. I don’t mean the gossip. I mean what’s underneath it.”
I looked at my sister—eighteen, strawberry-blonde, dressed for a season of dances and courtship—and saw, for a moment, the woman she was becoming. Not merely pretty. Not merely charming. But perceptive, in the way that mattered.
“I will be careful,” I said. “I promise.”
She nodded and left, taking the ruined cushion and her considerable instincts with her.
I sat alone in the morning room. The afternoon light was fading. Somewhere in the garden, Petunia was scolding Snowball in a voice of firm but loving reproach.
I opened my notebook again and added two lines beneath the questions I had written earlier.
The gossip is spreading. The Prince of Wales connection will not stay buried.
And then, underneath: The masked man said we were wrong about the purpose behind Hale’s murder. What if he was right?
I closed the notebook, but the questions did not close with it.