Chapter 28
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
A Widow’s Confession
The note was waiting on the silver salver in the entrance hall.
Honeycutt appeared before I had removed my gloves.
His gaze traveled from my hair—still imperfectly pinned, despite Mrs. Harding’s best efforts—to my dress, which was pressed but bore the faint ghost of a day spent outdoors, and then to my face, where whatever he saw caused him to produce the salver with particular promptness.
“A note arrived for you, my lady. Delivered by hand this afternoon. The messenger said there was no urgency, but the lady hoped for a reply at your convenience.”
I took the envelope. Good paper, a firm hand, no crest. I turned it over. The seal was plain wax, pressed with a signet I did not recognize.
I proceeded to the morning room to read the letter in private.
The note was brief.
“Mrs. Helena Ashford presented her compliments to Lady Rosalynd and wondered whether she might call upon her at a time of Lady Rosalynd’s choosing. The matter was of a private and delicate nature, and Mrs. Ashford would be grateful for Lady Rosalynd’s discretion.”
Mrs. Ashford had been perfectly cordial when I dropped in uninvited and had told me nothing of value. She’d deflected my questions with the ease of a woman who’d decided how much she would reveal. Which was nothing at all.
Something, apparently, had changed.
I penned a note which was even terser than hers. “I’m available tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, if that suits.” I rang for Honeycutt and asked for it to be delivered to her address on Curzon Street.
And then I proceeded to my bedchamber where I did not think about Steele’s kisses, or his hands on my body beneath the water, or the way his voice had dropped when he said my name. I did not think about any of it.
Or so I convinced myself.
The following morning, Mrs. Ashford arrived at two minutes past ten.
She was dressed entirely in black—silk gown, small bonnet, and gloves she removed with careful precision as Honeycutt showed her into the morning room.
I stood, as it was the polite thing to do. “Mrs. Ashford. Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for receiving me, Lady Rosalynd.” She sat, accepted tea, and held the cup in both hands without drinking. Her composure was intact, but there was something underneath it—a tension in her fingers, a tightness at the corners of her mouth.
“You mentioned a private matter,” I said. There was no purpose in circling. She had come here to speak, and the kindest thing I could do was let her.
“I was not honest with you when you called on me.” She set down the cup. “I was polite. I was hospitable. I told you nothing of substance, and I did so deliberately.”
“I know.”
A flicker of surprise. “You knew?”
“You answered every question I asked, Mrs. Ashford, but you did not answer a single question I did not ask. In my experience, people who are forthcoming volunteer information. People who are guarded wait to be questioned and give only what is required.”
She regarded me for a long moment. “You are perceptive.”
“I have had practice.”
“Then you will understand why I was cautious. When you came to my house, I did not know who you were. Not truly. I knew your name and your family, but I did not know whether you could be trusted with what I have to tell you.” She paused.
“I have made enquiries of my own since your visit. I am satisfied now that you can.”
I waited.
Mrs. Ashford drew a breath. When she spoke, her voice was steady, but I could hear the effort it cost her to keep it so.
“My husband invested in Sir Edmund Hale’s shipping enterprise eighteen months ago.
It was not a decision he made lightly. The colonel was a careful man—methodical, cautious, not given to speculation.
” Her hands tightened around each other in her lap.
“But he was ill. He had been ill for some time. A wasting disease. The doctors were not optimistic.”
“I am sorry,” I said.
“Thank you.” She accepted this with the brisk dignity of a woman who had finished grieving in private and had no intention of doing so in company.
“The colonel’s concern was not for himself.
It was for me. His pension was modest. His savings were adequate but not generous.
He wanted to leave me provided for—properly provided for—and Hale’s enterprise was presented to him as a sound investment with extraordinary returns. ”
“Presented by whom?”
“Sir Nigel Davenport. The colonel knew him through his club. Davenport was persuasive—the kind of man who makes risk sound like prudence and speculation sound like certainty. He spoke of trade routes to the Continent, of established markets, of a merchant fleet with an impeccable record. The colonel invested a substantial portion of our savings.”
“And the returns?”
“Extraordinary. Exactly as promised. For the first six months, every quarterly dividend arrived on schedule, each one larger than the last. The colonel was relieved. He believed he had secured my future.” Her voice faltered for the first time. “And then he discovered what was paying for it.”
I set down my own cup. “The arms.”
She looked at me sharply. “You know.”
“We have been investigating Hale’s shipping operations. We know about the weapons—Belgian manufactured, shipped through Antwerp to East Africa.”
“Then you know more than the colonel did, at first. He learned of it in pieces. A conversation overheard at Davenport’s offices.
A reference in a letter that should not have been included with his quarterly statement.
He was a military man, Lady Rosalynd. He had spent thirty years in the service of the Crown.
He knew what rifles looked like on a manifest, and he knew what it meant when they were being shipped to a region at war. ”
“What did he do?”
“What could he do? He was dying.” The words came flat and hard, stripped of self-pity.
“He could barely rise from his bed by then. He could not go to Hale. He could not go to the authorities—he had no proof, only fragments, and he was too proud to make accusations he could not substantiate. But the knowledge destroyed him. Not the disease—the knowledge. That he had invested his wife’s security in blood money. ”
The morning room was very quiet. Snowball—who liked to join me while Petunia was in the schoolroom—had woken and was watching Mrs. Ashford from the window seat with the unblinking attention cats reserve for people in distress.
“But there was more,” Mrs. Ashford continued. “The arms were not the whole of it. Something was being brought back on those ships. From East Africa. Ivory.”
“Ivory,” I repeated.
“Elephant tusks. Shipped back to London and sold through auction houses. The colonel learned of it because of a friend—a man he had served with, years ago. In India.”
I leaned forward.
“This friend had a son,” Mrs. Ashford said.
Her voice had gone very quiet. “A young man. Idealistic. Passionate about the natural world in a way his father—a military man, practical to his bones—had never entirely understood but had always respected. The son had gone to East Africa. He was involved in the effort to protect the wildlife there—the elephants, in particular. He believed it was the work of his life.”
She stopped. I waited. The clock on the mantel ticked.
“The son was killed,” she said. “In East Africa. He was trying to protect a herd of elephants from being slaughtered for their ivory. The men who killed him were armed with rifles. Belgian rifles.”
The room seemed to contract. The connection was immediate and devastating—the consortium’s weapons, shipped to East Africa, were used to arm the very poachers who had killed this young man. The father’s friend. The colonel’s comrade from India.
“The colonel told you this,” I said.
“In the last weeks of his life. He was in great distress—not from the disease, though that was terrible enough, but from the guilt. He had profited from the enterprise that had armed the men who killed his friend’s son. He could not forgive himself for it. I do not think he tried.”
“Mrs. Ashford.” I chose my next words carefully. “This friend of your husband’s—the father. Did you know him?”
“No. Their acquaintance predated my marriage to the colonel.” She folded her hands more tightly in her lap.
“He spoke of them, though. The father and the son. The son was…” She faltered, and for the first time a crack appeared in her composure.
“He was a lovely young man. Full of conviction. The sort of person who made you believe the world might truly be improved.”
A knock at the door. Honeycutt’s voice, low and measured.
“My lady. The Duke of Steele has called. He says you are expecting him.”
He had promised yesterday to come this morning and tell me what the Queen had said. His timing, as it happened, was impeccable—though not in the way he intended.
I turned to Mrs. Ashford. “The Duke of Steele and I are investigating Sir Edmund Hale’s murder together. What you are telling me is of the utmost importance to that investigation. Would you permit me to have him shown in? He should hear what you have to say.”
Mrs. Ashford hesitated. I could see the calculation behind her eyes—the weighing of trust against exposure, privacy against necessity. A duke was a different proposition from a young woman with a sympathetic manner. A duke carried authority. Authority could protect, but it could also compel.
“You trust him,” she said. It was not a question.
“With my life.”
She held my gaze for a moment. Then she nodded.
“Honeycutt, please show the duke in.”
Steele entered the morning room not expecting to find an audience. His gaze went to Mrs. Ashford first—identifying, assessing, adjusting—and then to me. I saw the question in his eyes.
“Your Grace, may I introduce Mrs. Helena Ashford. Mrs. Ashford, the Duke of Steele.”
Steele bowed. Mrs. Ashford inclined her head.
“Mrs. Ashford has been telling me about her late husband’s involvement in Sir Edmund Hale’s shipping enterprise,” I said.
“The colonel invested through Davenport. He discovered the arms trafficking before he died—and something else. The ivory trade. And a connection to a man whose son was killed in East Africa by poachers armed with the consortium’s weapons. ”
Steele sat. He did not speak. His stillness settled over him like a cloak.
“Mrs. Ashford,” he said, after a moment. “This friend of your husband’s. The father of the young man who was killed. What is his name?”
The silence that followed was the wrong kind.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The colonel spoke of him often—his old friend from India, from the regiment. But he never used the man’s name.
Not to me. Soldiers are like that, Your Grace.
They speak of their comrades as ‘my friend’ or ‘a man I served with.’ The bond is understood. The details are assumed.”
“The regiment,” Steele said. “Do you know which one?”
“The colonel served in the 14th Hussars. He was posted to India for eight years.”
“And the son’s name? The young man who was killed?”
Mrs. Ashford shook her head. “The colonel called him ‘the boy.’ He was greatly distressed when he spoke of him. I think using the name would have made it too real.”
Steele and I glanced at each other. We did not need to speak to share the same thought. A grieving father. A military man. A son murdered by men armed with the consortium’s weapons. The motive was not financial. It was not political. It was the oldest motive in the world.
Revenge.
“Mrs. Ashford,” I said gently. “Is there anything else your husband told you? Anything at all that might help us identify this man?”
She thought. The effort was visible—a woman sifting through months of bedside conversations, trying to separate the significant from the ordinary, the clue from the grief.
“The colonel said his friend had taken it very hard. That he was not the same man after the news came. He said—” She frowned, reaching for a precise memory.
“He said his friend had always been a man of action. That sitting still with grief was not in his nature. And that he worried what his friend might do.”
The clock ticked. Snowball stretched on the window seat and yawned.
“Thank you, Mrs. Ashford,” Steele said. His voice was quiet. “You have been extraordinarily brave.”
She looked at him with the direct, unflinching gaze of a woman who had watched her husband die and had survived it.
“I have been a coward, Your Grace. I should have come forward before. But I was afraid, and I was ashamed, and I told myself it was not my concern.” She rose, drawing on her gloves with the careful precision of a woman who had said everything she came to say.
“It is my concern. My husband profited from the deaths of innocents. If what I know can help you find the truth, then it is the least I owe his memory.”
I walked her to the door myself. At the threshold, she paused.
“Find him, Lady Rosalynd. The man whose son was killed. Whatever he has done—whatever he may be planning to do—he deserves to be heard.”
I watched her walk down the front steps and into the square. Then I closed the door and returned to the morning room, where Steele was standing at the window, his hands clasped behind his back, staring at nothing.
“The 14th Hussars,” he said, without turning. “India. A son killed in East Africa. A father who is a man of action.”
“A man who might not sit still with his grief,” I said.
Steele turned from the window. His face was very calm, which meant his mind was anything but.
“I need the regimental records,” he said. “Every officer who served alongside Colonel Ashford in the 14th Hussars during his years in India. It is a finite list. And somewhere on that list is a man with a dead son and a reason to kill.”