Chapter 33
Chapter
Thirty-Three
The Beaumont Ball
Steele’s note arrived in the late afternoon, delivered by a footman while I was attempting to arbitrate a dispute between the twins over a missing hair ribbon.
I broke the seal and read it standing in the upstairs corridor, Holly’s indignant protests providing an unlikely accompaniment. The note was brief—Steele’s hand, hurried but legible.
Verstraeten arrested. Caught breaking into Stevens’ auction house—along with hired thugs and pry bars—attempting to steal the Hale ivory. Not our killer. Graves has him at Scotland Yard. Going to question him now.
Finch reports the regimental records show only one officer with a son—a Captain James Hadley, 14th Hussars. Died in India of fever in 1871. After his death, the wife and son vanish from all records. No trace of either. Both leads have collapsed.
The name is Hadley. Mrs. Hadley. If you hear anything—from anyone—send word immediately.
I read it twice. Then I folded the letter and slipped it into my pocket, my mind already working.
Mrs. Hadley. Wife of Captain James Hadley, 14th Hussars. Vanished after her husband’s death in India eighteen years ago, along with her son. Finch had searched every avenue—shipping manifests, pension rolls, church registers—and found nothing. A woman and a boy who had simply ceased to exist.
Except people did not cease to exist. They changed. They moved. They remarried.
The thought surfaced and sank again, too vague to hold. I filed it away in the part of my mind that worked best when I was not watching it too closely, and turned my attention to the more immediate crisis.
“Holly, the ribbon is on your dressing table. I saw it there this morning. Ivy, stop provoking your sister. Now go.”
The Beaumont Midsummer ball, held as it was on June 21, was one of the season’s most anticipated events.
Lady Beaumont was known for her exacting standards and her excellent champagne.
An invitation to this event was considered a mark of social standing that could not be declined without consequence.
I would have preferred to spend the evening with Steele’s note and a pot of coffee, pulling at the thread of Mrs. Hadley until it either unravelled or broke.
But I had promised Chrissie, and Chrissie had spent the entire day in a state of focused preparation that resembled nothing so much as a military campaign.
The midnight blue was everything I had hoped.
When she descended the stairs at half past eight, even Cosmos looked up from his botanical journal.
The deep blue silk caught the light in a way that transformed it from mere fabric into something architectural—a structure built to devastate.
The pearl earrings caught the lamplight.
The chignon exposed the long line of her neck.
And the overall effect was not of a girl playing at sophistication but of a young woman who had arrived at it naturally, as though she had simply been waiting for the right moment to emerge.
“You look beautiful, Chrissie,” Cosmos said, with the genuine surprise of a man who had not been paying attention and was now confronted with the evidence that his little sister had, at some point, grown up.
“Thank you, Cosmos.” She accepted this with the regal composure of a woman who already knew.
The Beaumont residence blazed with light—every window golden, the carriages queuing along the approach, footmen in immaculate livery stationed at intervals along the entrance.
Inside, the ballroom was magnificent—cream and gold, banks of white roses, a full orchestra already playing.
Lady Beaumont received us with the gracious precision of a woman who had been hosting balls for thirty years and would continue to do so until the walls fell down around her.
Chrissie entered the ballroom, and the effect was immediate. Heads turned. Conversations paused. Several young men adjusted their cravats with the unconscious urgency of soldiers straightening their uniforms before inspection.
And across the room, standing near a column with a glass of champagne he did not appear to be drinking, Lord Redmayne looked up.
I watched it happen. The moment his gaze found Chrissie the severity and guarded intelligence in his expression cracked.
It was not dramatic. There was no jaw dropping, no champagne spilling.
It was quieter than that and, for that reason, more telling.
He simply went still. The glass paused halfway to his mouth.
His dark eyes fixed on her with an intensity that had nothing to do with casual observation and everything to do with a man who was seeing something clearly for the first time.
Chrissie, to her eternal credit, did not look at him.
Not once. She moved through the room with the serene assurance of a woman who was aware of precisely the effect she was having and had chosen, deliberately, not to acknowledge it.
She danced with three different partners in quick succession, each of whom looked as though he had won a small but significant lottery.
She laughed. She sparkled. She was, in every particular, the most captivating woman in the room.
And she never once glanced toward the column where Redmayne stood, watching her with the expression of a man who had made a terrible mistake and was only now beginning to understand its dimensions.
It was, I thought, the most effective piece of warfare I had witnessed all season.
I left Chrissie to her campaign and retreated to the edge of the ballroom, where the matrons and chaperones gathered like generals observing the field from a safe distance.
I was looking for a quiet corner and a moment to think about Mrs. Hadley when a familiar voice reached me from the settee by the window.
“Lady Rosalynd! How lovely. Come sit with me, my dear. My legs are not what they were, and I refuse to stand for the sake of politeness at my age.”
Lady Drummond. My grandmother’s oldest friend—a small, bright-eyed woman in her seventies, sharp as a hatpin and possessed of a memory that could produce the name, rank, and regimental posting of every officer she had encountered during her years in India.
Her husband, Colonel Sir George Drummond, had served in the subcontinent for the better part of two decades before retiring to Dorset, where he had died peacefully three years ago in his favorite armchair with a glass of whisky at his elbow and his dog at his feet.
“Lady Drummond.” I sat beside her, grateful for the excuse to be still. “How are you?”
“Old. Stiff. Unimpressed by the champagne.” She surveyed the ballroom with the eye of a woman who had seen better parties and would say so. “Your sister looks magnificent. The blue was an excellent choice. Is she attempting to destroy that young man by the column?”
“I could not possibly comment.”
“Of course, you couldn’t. She gets it from your grandmother. She could reduce a man to rubble at fifty paces simply by adjusting her gloves.” Lady Drummond smiled at the memory. “Now then. You have that look your father used to get when he was thinking about something. What is it?”
I hesitated. Then I decided that directness was the only approach worth attempting with a woman who had spent forty years in military society and could smell evasion like gunpowder.
“Lady Drummond, you and Sir George were in India for many years. Did you ever encounter a Mrs. Hadley? Her husband was Captain James Hadley, 14th Hussars.”
Lady Drummond’s bright eyes sharpened. “Hadley. Hadley.” She tapped a finger against her fan, searching the vast archive of her memory. “Yes. Yes, I remember. A quiet man. Good officer, by all accounts. George thought well of him. He died out there—some wretched fever. Left a wife and a small boy.”
My pulse quickened. “Do you remember the wife?”
“Helena Hadley. Pretty woman. Dark hair, quite tall—striking, really, in that statuesque way. She was devastated when Hadley died. The regiment looked after her, as one did in those days. And then—” Lady Drummond paused, her fan stopping mid-tap.
“Oh, yes. She married again. Another officer in the regiment. A colonel, rather older than her. That would have been, oh, ’73 or thereabouts. ”
The room seemed to narrow. The music, the laughter, the glittering chandelier—all of it receded to the edges of my awareness, leaving only Lady Drummond’s voice and the shape of what was forming in my mind.
“Do you remember the colonel’s name?”
“Good heavens, my dear, that was nearly twenty years ago.” She frowned, concentrating.
“It was—wait. Ashford. Colonel Ashford. Yes, that was it. She became Mrs. Ashford. They stayed in India for some time after the marriage, if I remember correctly. I rather lost track of them after George and I came home.”
Mrs. Ashford.
Helena Hadley had not vanished. She had not ceased to exist. She had married Colonel Ashford and changed her name. Finch had been looking for a woman who no longer was—searching parish records and pension rolls for a Mrs. Hadley who had become, years before the search began, someone else entirely.
And her son. The boy born in Calcutta in 1862.
He would have been eleven when his mother married Ashford—old enough to remember his father, old enough to carry the Hadley name in his heart even if the world knew him by another.
He had grown up and gone to East Africa as a conservationist. And two years ago, at the age of twenty-five, he had been killed—protecting elephants from poachers armed with weapons that had come through the very consortium his stepfather had invested in.
Mrs. Ashford had sat in my morning room and told us a story.
A story about a friend of the colonel’s, a fellow officer, whose son had been killed.
She had been telling us her own story—her first husband’s regiment, her own son’s death—with the details rearranged just enough to send us looking for a man who did not exist.
She had fed us the truth disguised as someone else’s tragedy. And we had believed her, because why would a grieving widow lie about the source of her grief?
Because the grieving widow was the killer.
I became aware that Lady Drummond was watching me with considerable interest.
“My dear, you’ve gone quite white. Are you unwell?”
“No. Forgive me.” I managed a smile. “You have been enormously helpful, Lady Drummond. I wonder—would you mind terribly if I did not explain why?”
“Not in the least. I was married to a military man for forty years. I know when a question is not merely social.” She patted my hand. “Give my love to your grandmother. And tell her I expect her at my card party next Thursday. She has been avoiding me, and I will not stand for it.”
“I will tell her.”
I rose from the settee on legs that felt less steady than they ought.
Across the ballroom, Chrissie was dancing a quadrille with a young man whose name I did not register.
Redmayne had moved from his column to a position nearer the dance floor, where he was pretending to converse with an acquaintance whilst watching Chrissie with an expression that could only be described as pained.
Under any other circumstances, I would have stayed to enjoy the spectacle. But the name was burning in my mind, written in letters as clear and sharp as a stiletto’s edge.
Mrs. Ashford. Helena Hadley. The same woman.
I talked briefly to Cosmos and then found Chrissie between dances. “Cosmos will see you home. I’ve developed another headache.”
“Rosie, you’ve been getting an awful lot of headaches lately.” Chrissie studied me with more perception than I would have credited. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Quite sure. Enjoy the rest of the evening. You look devastating, by the way.”
“I know,” she said, without a trace of false modesty. Then, more quietly: “He noticed, Rosie. He noticed.”
“Of course he did.”
Her smile was not triumphant. It was something softer and more complicated—the expression of a young woman who had wanted to be seen, and had been, and was not entirely certain what to do with the result.
I kissed her cheek and left.
The carriage ride home passed in a kind of watchful quiet, the lamplight sliding across the dark windows of Mayfair, house after house, street after street, the sleeping city unaware that somewhere within its borders, a woman who had poured tea and wept and told a careful lie was waiting—as she had been waiting, perhaps, since the night she drove a stiletto into the man who trafficked weapons that had killed her son.
Honeycutt opened the door to me a little after midnight, a look of surprise on his face. He was not expecting my arrival for another two hours.
"Lady Chrysanthemum remained at the ball. Cosmos will see her home. There’s an urgent note I must write. I’ll ring when it’s done. It needs to be delivered tonight.”
"Very good, my lady."
I went directly to my bedchamber, where Tilly was waiting for me. “My lady.” She knew me well enough not to ask questions.
I sat at the writing desk and drew a sheet of paper toward me.
Mrs. Hadley is Mrs. Ashford. She married Colonel Ashford after Hadley's death in '73. The son is hers. She told us her own story and sent us chasing a man who does not exist. Come at first light. We need to talk.
I read it over, corrected nothing, sealed it, and pressed my seal to the wax without much caring whether the impression was neat. And then I rang for Honeycutt.
Honeycutt appeared. “Deliver this to Steele House, tell whoever receives it that His Grace is to have it the moment he wakes—no later than that."
The set of his mouth communicated a full paragraph of opinion about ducal correspondence at one in the morning without a single syllable crossing his lips. He took the letter on the salver.
"Very good, my lady."