Chapter 31
Chapter
Thirty-One
An Audience with the Queen
The carriage was black, gleaming, and entirely unmarked—the same carriage that had collected me the first time, or one so like it that the distinction was immaterial. It arrived at Rosehaven House shortly before noon.
I had been ready since ten, having slept badly and risen worse, my headache replaced by a tight, watchful unease that no amount of coffee could dissolve.
Tilly had dressed me in the dove-grey silk with jet buttons—the same dress I had worn to Windsor the first time.
It felt appropriate. One ought to face a queen in something familiar.
The difference, this time, was the empty seat across from me.
The first journey to Windsor had been made with Steele beside me—his presence a steadying weight, his composure a model I could borrow when my own ran thin.
He had known the corridors, the protocols, the precise calibration of deference required when speaking to a woman who ruled a quarter of the world. I had followed his lead and survived.
Now I was alone. And the Queen had not summoned Steele. That fact sat in the carriage with me like a third passenger, taking up rather more room than I would have liked.
I watched the countryside pass—the outskirts of London giving way to Surrey’s gentle green, the hedgerows bright with late summer growth.
I tried to organize my thoughts. The investigation: Verstraeten identified, Finch searching the regimental records, two suspects and no certainty.
The Prince: rumors spreading, the gossip now beyond Mayfair’s drawing rooms. These were things I could report clearly. These were safe.
But the Queen had not summoned me alone to discuss the investigation.
Windsor rose from the landscape as it had before—ancient stone against a pale morning sky, the towers catching the early light.
It was no less imposing the second time.
If anything, it was more so because I understood now what those walls contained.
Not merely history and power, but a woman who wielded both with the precision of a surgeon’s blade.
The equerry who met me at the entrance was young, polished, and efficient. He did not make conversation. I appreciated this.
The corridors were familiar—the same portraits, the same suits of armor, the same footmen pretending not to notice. But I noticed things I had missed the first time, when I had been too overwhelmed to observe properly.
We stopped before a door I recognized. Small, by Windsor’s standards. A private audience chamber.
I had learned something, since my first visit, about the Queen’s rooms. Large rooms meant diplomacy. Witnesses. The careful theatre of monarchy. Small rooms meant frankness. No witnesses. No escape.
The equerry opened the door and announced me. I entered, curtsied, and waited.
Queen Victoria was seated in the same high-backed chair by the window, dressed in the same unrelieved black.
“Lady Rosalynd.” Her voice was clipped but not unkind. “Sit down.”
I sat. She had not invited me to sit the first time—Steele and I had stood throughout that audience. Whether this was a sign of favor or merely an acknowledgment that what she intended to discuss would take longer than a reprimand, I could not tell.
“The investigation,” she said. “Briefly.”
I gave her what I could. The arms trafficking confirmed.
The Belgian broker identified. Two lines of enquiry being pursued—one through the Foreign Office, the other through regimental records.
The financial trail partially reconstructed.
I presented it as I had learned to present information to Steele—clearly, without embellishment, letting the facts carry their own weight.
“And the personal matter?”
“The rumors have spread beyond Mayfair, ma’am. They have not reached the press, but they are circulating more widely than we would wish.”
She received this without visible reaction. “Steele told me much the same. Several days ago.” A pause. “He is thorough. I will grant him that.”
The way she said it—as a preamble, not a conclusion—told me we had arrived at the real purpose of the summons.
“I did not bring you here to discuss the investigation, Lady Rosalynd.”
“No, ma’am.” My voice was steady. I was not.
“I spoke with Steele about you when he was last here.” She adjusted the black silk at her wrist—a small, habitual gesture. “He was evasive. He is always evasive—it is one of his more exasperating qualities, though I confess it serves him well in other arenas.”
I said nothing. There was nothing safe to say.
“I asked him about the nature of his regard for you. He told me you were a remarkable woman. Which is true, but entirely beside the point.” Her dark eyes fixed on mine with the same penetrating quality I remembered from the first audience. “I do not think you will be as evasive.”
It was not a question. It was an assessment—delivered with the quiet confidence of a woman who had been reading people for longer than I had been alive.
I could have tried Steele’s approach. I could have offered something diplomatic and precise, a response that answered without revealing. But I was not Steele. Honesty was the only currency she would accept.
“Your Majesty, I am not certain I can answer the question you are asking. Not because I wish to be evasive, but because I do not entirely know the answer myself.”
Something shifted in her expression. Not surprise—I doubted anything surprised Victoria anymore—but interest. The particular interest of a woman who had expected a performance and received, instead, the truth.
“Try,” she said.
I drew a breath. “Steele and I are partners in this investigation. That partnership has become—” I searched for a word that was accurate without being improper.
“It has become something more than professional. I cannot tell you precisely what, because we have not spoken of it plainly. There are things between us that remain—unresolved.”
“Unresolved.” She repeated the word as though testing its weight. “Young men and women have been calling it ‘unresolved’ since the beginning of time. It is, in my experience, a word people use when they are afraid to call it by its proper name.”
The heat rose in my face. I could feel it—the curse of fair skin, every emotion written plainly for a queen to read.
“You are blushing,” Victoria observed. “Which tells me rather more than your words did.”
“Yes, ma’am.” There seemed to be no point in denying it.
She regarded me for a long moment. “Steele is a man who has already lost one wife. He carries that loss the way a soldier carries an old wound—invisibly, until the weather changes.” Her gaze was steady and unsparing.
“He will not make this easy for you. He will retreat. He will evade. He will persuade himself that distance is the same as protection. It is not. It is cowardice dressed in noble clothing.”
The words landed with a force that surprised me—not because they were harsh, but because they were precise.
She had described exactly the pattern I had watched Steele repeat for months.
The step forward, the step back. The warmth followed by the withdrawal.
The kiss at the lake, and then the careful silence on the train afterward.
“But I suspect,” Victoria continued, and her tone shifted—quieter, more considered, as though she were examining something she had not entirely expected to find, “that the reluctance is not entirely his.”
I went still.
“You are six-and-twenty,” she said. “Unmarried. The eldest daughter of a dead earl, with seven younger siblings in your care. Your brother is the head of the family in name, but it is you who manages the household. You who shepherds the younger ones. You who holds it all together.” She paused.
“And you are afraid that if you marry, that household falls apart.”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. She had reached into the center of me and extracted the thing I very much feared.
“Your oldest brother is a botanist,” Victoria said flatly. “A good man, by all accounts. But not a man equipped to manage children, a London household, and the expectations of society. You know this. And so you remain where you are, because duty demands it.”
“It is not only duty, ma’am.” My voice was barely above a whisper. “They are my family. Petunia is eight. The twins are nearly ten. Laurel is twelve. They need—”
“They need their sister,” Victoria said. “Yes. But do they need their sister at the cost of their sister’s happiness?”
I could not answer. The tightness in my throat would not permit it.
Victoria was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had changed—stripped of its imperial edge, reaching toward something raw and unguarded that I suspected very few people had ever been permitted to hear.
“I married Albert when I was twenty,” she said.
“I was the Queen. He was a prince of a minor German duchy. The world told me it was an excellent match. The world knew nothing.” She looked toward the window, her gaze resting on something beyond the glass.
“What the world did not know—what no one knew—was that I loved him before I understood what the word meant. And that he loved me in a way that made the Crown feel small.”
I did not move. I did not breathe.
“He has been dead for twenty-eight years.” She turned back to me. “I have worn black every day since. Not because convention demands it. Because I wish to. Because the grief is the last thing I have of him, and I will not surrender it.”
Her hands, small and lined, rested in her lap. She looked down at them as though seeing something I could not.
“Twenty-eight years of mourning, Lady Rosalynd. Twenty-eight years of waking in an empty bed in a palace full of servants and knowing that the one person who understood me is gone. Twenty-eight years of ruling an empire alone, when I was meant to rule it with him beside me.” She raised her eyes to mine, and in them I saw something I had not expected—not the hardness of a sovereign, but the naked honesty of a woman who had nothing left to protect.
“And if I could go back—if I could stand again in that chapel at St. James’s and know, with perfect certainty, every moment of joy and every moment of agony that lay ahead—I would do it again.
Without hesitation. Without condition. I would endure every hour of this grief, gladly, for the years I had with him. ”
The silence that followed was absolute.
“You are afraid of what you will lose if you marry,” she said. “Your household. Your authority. Your role as the one who holds things together. These are not small things. But they are not the largest thing.” She held my gaze. “The largest thing is what you will lose if you do not.”
A tear slid down my cheek. I did not wipe it away. There seemed no point in pretending, in this room, before this woman, that I was anything other than what I was—undone.
“I will also say this.” She straightened in her chair, the sovereign reasserting herself over the woman, though the seam between the two was still visible.
“The Rosehaven family has served this Crown faithfully for generations. Your father was a man of honor. Your brother, for all his botanical eccentricities, is a man of integrity. And you—” She paused.
“You are the most capable woman I have encountered in some years. That is not flattery. I do not flatter. It is an observation.”
“Thank you, Your Majesty.” My voice was barely above a whisper.
“Do not thank me. Prove me right.” She settled back in her chair.
“Find the killer. Conclude this investigation. And when it is concluded—” Another pause, this one weighted with something that was not quite a command and not quite a blessing but occupied the territory between the two.
“Do not allow what you are afraid to lose prevent you from claiming what matters most.”
“You are dismissed, Lady Rosalynd.” The imperial manner had returned—crisp, final, the audience concluded. But as I rose and curtsied, she added, almost as an afterthought: “The carriage will return you to London. You will use the time to compose yourself before you arrive.”
I curtsied once more and withdrew. The corridor outside was cool and quiet, the afternoon light falling in long shafts through the tall windows.
I walked through it with my spine straight, my chin raised, and my hands clasped tightly together so that no one—not the equerry, not the footmen, not the portraits of dead kings watching from their frames—would see that they were shaking.
In the carriage, alone at last, I pressed my hands to my face and allowed myself the luxury of feeling everything I had held in check.
The Queen of England had looked at me and seen not a subject, not an instrument, but a woman standing at the edge of her own life, afraid to step forward.
And she had told me, from the depth of twenty-eight years of grief, that the stepping forward was worth it. That love—even love that ends in loss, even love that costs you everything you thought you could not bear to pay—is worth it.
By the time the rooftops of London appeared on the horizon, I had composed myself. My hands were steady. My eyes were dry. My thoughts were clear.
Victoria was right. About Steele’s fear. About my own.
But first, we had a killer to find.