Chapter 34
Chapter
Thirty-Four
First Light
Steele arrived at dawn.
“My lady, the Duke of Steele has arrived.” Tilly’s voice eased me out of a deep sleep.
“What?”
“The Duke of Steele, my lady.”
“What time is it?”
“A little after six. Mr. Honeycutt has put him in the morning room.”
I sat up. What was he doing here at this ungodly hour?
Well, my conscience supplied, you did say at first light. It was that. Barely.
“Thank you, Tilly.” I made for the washroom while calling over my shoulder, “The pale green muslin. The plain one. And the short summer corset.”
After I performed my morning ablutions, Tilly helped me into the corset and gown. And then she reached for my hair.
“There isn’t time to dress it,” I said. “Just tie it back.”
Her reflection in the mirror told me precisely what she thought of that notion. I did not blame her. Having spent the night loose, my hair had thrown off any influence of civilization and returned to its natural state—an unrepentant copper riot.
“Very well, my lady.” She loosely tied a green ribbon at the nape of my neck and stepped back.
The effect was not what a proper lady of the house presented to a caller, much less a duke. But then a proper lady would not be receiving a caller at dawn.
I went down in house slippers; boots would have taken too long.
Steele stood at the morning room window with his back to the door, his hat in his hand—a hat I suspected Honeycutt had refused to take. Honeycutt himself was across the hall, pretending to inspect a vase that required no inspection.
“Your Grace.”
He turned.
For a moment, he said nothing. His eyes moved across me—the plain dress, the green ribbon, the unpinned hair.
Something I had not seen in his face before passed across it, and was swiftly mastered.
Not desire. That I would have recognized.
Something quieter, and more unguarded—something that had quietly undone him.
“Rosalynd.”
I turned back to Honeycutt. “Coffee, please. And something light to eat.”
“Of course, my lady.”
I closed the door behind me.
“I apologize for the early arrival,” Steele said. “Your note was rather urgent.”
“The note said first light. It is first light.”
“It is five minutes past, by my watch.”
He was being precise. But then he was a precise man.
I gestured to the chairs by the fireplace. “Please.”
We sat. Between us, the morning light lay pale and flat across the low table, on the wood without warming it. The fire had not been laid. The air held the faint mineral cool of a house not yet fully awake.
“How did you discover Mrs. Ashford was Mrs. Hadley?” he asked.
“From Lady Drummond, one of my grandmother’s oldest friends.
She was at the Beaumont Ball. Her husband was Colonel Sir George Drummond—forty years in military service, many of those in India.
I asked her, on the chance she might have known a Mrs. Hadley.
As it turned out, she remembered her clearly.
Helena Hadley. Pretty, dark-haired, widowed young, well looked after by the regiment.
And then, in ’73 or thereabouts, she married again. Another officer. A colonel.”
“Ashford.”
“Ashford.”
Steele was very still. I had come to know this stillness—the outward sign of a mind moving at considerable pace and determined not to broadcast the movement. I gave it room.
“Every word she told us was true,” he said at last. “The regiment. The friend. The son. The weapons. East Africa. The elephants. The knowledge that broke a man. All of it true. She simply gave us the story with the pronouns wrong.”
“Yes. She referred to him as the colonel’s friend. We believed her because it was a grieving widow speaking of her dead husband’s distress. We never thought to question who truly owned the grief.”
“Because if it was hers, she had a motive. If it were someone else’s, she did not.”
I nodded. “She gave us the whole of it, Steele. She put the entire shape of the conspiracy in our hands. She knew we would investigate—she counted on it. And while we hunted a man who did not exist, she remained untouched. A sympathetic widow who had volunteered painful information at some personal cost. She made herself, in the same conversation, both the source and the one beyond suspicion.”
A knock interrupted. Honeycutt entered with the coffee service and a covered dish that, when he lifted the cloth, revealed buttered muffins still steaming from the oven. Cook had risen to the occasion, as Cook always did.
“Thank you, Honeycutt. Could you please see to the duke’s hat?” I handed it to him.
“Of course, milady.” After taking it, he withdrew with his usual swift economy.
Steele said nothing while I poured. Only when I handed him his cup did he speak. “You have to admit, it is an extraordinary piece of work. Under any other circumstances, I would admire it.”
“Under any other circumstances, I would have seen through it sooner.”
“No.” He looked at me directly. “You would not. It was perfectly constructed. It played on every instinct a decent investigator has—the sympathy one owes a widow, the weight of testimony voluntarily offered, the particular sound a true story makes when it is told. She knew exactly what she was doing. You caught it because an older woman’s memory surfaced at a ball. Nothing else would have caught it.”
I did not answer. I was not yet sure what I thought of it.
“And then there is the stiletto,” he went on.
“Italian, professional. Everyone who has looked at this case has read it as the work of a hired assassin. A man.” He paused.
“But a slim blade can be carried in a muff. In a sleeve. In an evening reticule. It leaves a small wound. A woman in a crowded opera house, slipping into a box—”
“She would have to know the box was Hale’s.”
I plated a muffin for him. “She would have to know a great many things. When he would be there. Who would accompany him. And she would have known of Davenport because Davenport managed the consortium’s finances—the quarterly payments would have come from his office.
She has had more than a year to plan these murders.
From the moment she learned how her son died. ”
I thought of Helena Ashford sitting in this very room, on a chair not ten feet from where Steele now sat.
The composure. The careful cadence of a story rehearsed until it had become indistinguishable from truth.
And the single moment her voice had cracked—he was a lovely young man—which I had taken for the first genuine note in a careful performance, when in fact it had been the only note in the whole of it she had not had to manufacture.
“She loved her son,” I said. “Whatever else she is, she loved him. And she was not finished.”
“No, she was not. Verstraeten would have been next.”
“She would have known about him from the consortium dinner. But not his name. That is why she came to us, Steele. Not only to send us in the wrong direction. She came to learn the Belgian’s name.”
“Well, at least she did not succeed in that.”
“Where is he now?”
“In a cell at Scotland Yard, where she cannot reach him.” He returned the empty plate to the tray and picked up a napkin which he used to wipe the butter from his hand.
“She would have gone after Jessop as well,” I said.
“Perhaps. But Jessop is a clerk. I think she would have been satisfied with the Belgian. Once she had dealt with him, she would have disappeared. If she has any sense, she is preparing to do so already.”
“She has every sense. That is precisely the problem.” I poured more coffee for him.
He was quiet for a moment. “We cannot go to Graves yet. Not on a society matron’s memory of another officer’s widow from twenty years ago. The magistrate will laugh us out of Bow Street. We need something a court can recognize.”
“The marriage,” I said, taking a sip of the coffee. “If the record of Helena Hadley’s marriage to Colonel Ashford exists in the India Office archives, Finch can find it. A matron’s memory is a beginning. A marriage certificate is evidence.”
“And anything else Finch can turn up. The passage home for Mrs. Ashford and the boy after the remarriage. Whatever can be found.”
“How long will it take him?”
“The India Office opens at ten. Finch is efficient. With what we know now, he should have the marriage within the day.”
“And until then?”
“We do nothing she can observe. We do not call on her. We do not pass her house in the square. We do not let Graves put a man on Curzon Street, because she will see him. This is a woman who has planned a double murder without being suspected. She will see a watcher long before he sees her.”
He rose. I stood as well.
“I’ll go to Finch now,” he said. “A note will not do for what I need from him, and I would rather not put any of this in writing I cannot retrieve.”
“Very well.”
“I shall send word the moment he has anything.”
“Please do.”
He had reached the door and laid his hand on the latch when he stopped. He did not turn. He simply stood for a moment with his back to me, the line of his shoulders very straight, and said, to the door itself, “Rosalynd, we need to talk.”
About us. “Not yet,” I said quietly. “There will be time when this is finished.”
He nodded once. I could not see his face.
Honeycutt was waiting in the hall with Steele’s hat. He presented it with a bow that was precisely the correct depth for a duke and not a quarter-inch more. Steele accepted it with the same grave courtesy.
The front door closed behind him, and he was gone.