Chapter 35
Chapter
Thirty-Five
Hatton Garden
Hatton Garden at half past seven in the morning was a street waking up against its inclination.
The jewelers' shutters were still down. A porter was sweeping the pavement in front of the watch repair.
A cat was drinking from a puddle in the gutter with the unhurried dignity of a creature who believed the street belonged to him.
I told the hansom cab driver to wait at the corner. A carriage directly in front of Finch's door would be remarked upon by every neighbor. I’d just as soon avoid the notoriety.
The office door, as expected, was locked. So I went round to the narrow side passage and climbed the wooden stairs to Finch’s private quarters on the upper floor and knocked.
When silence greeted me, I knocked again and was rewarded by the sound of a bedstead creaking and voices. One I did not recognize; the other Finch's—low, apologetic, the tone of a man negotiating a domestic interruption.
Eventually, the door was opened by Finch himself, wearing trousers he had evidently pulled on in haste and a linen shirt he had not buttoned past the third button.
His hair was upright on one side and flat on the other.
His expression, when he saw who stood on the landing, showed the weary resignation of a man who had hoped, against experience, that the knocking would belong to anyone else in London.
"Your Grace."
"Finch."
"It is not eight o'clock, Your Grace."
"No. It is not."
“Did somebody die?”
"None that I know.”
He absorbed this with the stoicism of a man who had learned not to ask follow-up questions on the landing. “Downstairs. Give me five minutes."
"Take ten."
"That is generous of you, Your Grace."
"Not especially."
After he closed the door, I heard the low murmur of a conversation—a woman's voice, I now realized, asking a question I could not make out; Finch answering in a tone that contained apology, practicality, and a kind of rough affection.
Finch's private life was his own. I had never enquired into it.
I had assumed that he did not have one, which was rather condescending of me.
I went down the stairs and waited in the passage, out of sight of the street.
A quarter of an hour later, he joined me. He had put on a proper shirt and coat and combed his hair into something approximating order. He unlocked the office door, and I followed him in.
The office was exactly as I remembered it.
Maps on the wall. Newspapers on the floor.
The teapot on the windowsill. The bottle of my whiskey beside it, the level markedly lower than it had been on my last visit.
Finch set about the stove with the unhurried competence of a man who could make tea in his sleep and occasionally had.
“I apologize for arriving at such an early hour,” I said. “I didn’t know you had company.”
He turned back to me. “And if you did, would you have waited until business hours?”
“Afraid not. What needs to be done cannot wait.”
“That explains it.”
He poured the tea, handed me a cup, and sat down in the chair behind his desk. As he produced his notebook from a drawer, the tired impatience did not leave his face. But the professional attention that had made him the man I trusted with my work came alive.
"Tell me."
I told him about Lady Drummond at the ball. Helena Hadley, widow of Captain James Hadley, married in '73 to Colonel Ashford. The son carried from the first marriage to the second. The story told in Rosalynd's morning room, all of it true, only the pronouns wrong.
As I spoke, Finch's pencil moved in short, precise strokes. When I finished, he tapped the pencil against the edge of the notebook twice. "The marriage," he said. “That’s what you need.”
“Anything that puts the name Hadley and the name Ashford on the same document and signed by the same woman. The India Office holds the registers of military marriages solemnized on the subcontinent. If she married Colonel Ashford in India, the record is there. I need you to find it."
"The India Office opens at ten. I shall be on the step at a quarter to."
"How long will it take to find it, do you think?”
He considered. "A marriage in '73 or thereabouts? Ashford would have been a colonel, probably of the 14th Hussars or a neighboring regiment. The registers are arranged by year and by station. Could be a day’s work, or a week’s."
"We do not have a week.”
“No. I didn’t think you would.” He tapped the pencil against the notebook.
"I will begin with '73 and the stations I know Ashford was posted to.
If that fails, I will widen. I will also see whether the Office keeps a separate index of remarriages of officers' widows.
They sometimes do. A widow remarrying within the service was a matter of some bureaucratic interest, in terms of pension adjustments. "
"Bring whatever you find directly to Steele House. In person, and by hand."
"Understood." He paused. "You think she will run."
"I think she has had every reason to run since the evening she put a blade in Sir Edmund Hale, and she has not. Probably because she has not finished what she wants to do. But she may have realized the walls are closing in. I would rather not give her time to reconsider."
He nodded slowly. "Right. I will start at ten."
I rose. He rose with me and paused.
"Your Grace. The woman upstairs."
"Is no concern of mine, Finch."
"I know. I only mention it because—" he permitted himself the faintest of smiles “—she is a respectable woman. A widow. Her name is Agnes. I have been walking out with her for some months. I had not thought it bore mentioning before now."
"It does not bear mentioning now, either. But I am glad to know of her."
"I thought you might be."
We left it there—two men of professional reticence acknowledging, in the absolute minimum of words, that the other possessed a private life worthy of respect.
I left the office and walked back to the corner where the hansom cab waited. The street was more properly awake now. The jewelers’ shutters were coming up one after another. The porter had finished his sweeping. The cat had gone.
I returned to Steele House, had a proper breakfast, and then proceeded to the library.
I went over the consortium ledgers for the fourth time, looking for anything we had missed that might bear on Mrs. Ashford—any payment, any reference, any appointment noted in Davenport’s papers that coincided with her known movements. I found nothing.
The morning advanced. Milford brought coffee at intervals and more food.
Heaven forbid I should starve. Whitfield arrived at eleven, and I set him to cross-checking any mention of "Ashford" in the papers we still possessed—the colonel's name, obviously, but also any hand or signature.
He took the task without question. His face, when I gave it to him, told me he had understood that something had changed; his discretion told me he would not ask.
By one o'clock, my capacity for patience was exhausted, and my capacity for pretense was not far behind.
I went out into the square and walked—not in the direction of Rosehaven House, because to be seen pacing the pavement between our two front doors would have been its own kind of statement, but across to the gardens in the center.
I circled them twice. The day was warm, the roses at their height, nursemaids with perambulators moving in slow, orderly circuits along the paths. I passed a pair of old gentlemen who inclined their heads and murmured Your Grace. I inclined mine in return but did not stop.
I returned to the house to discover Finch had arrived. I’d missed him while I was smelling the roses.
"I put Mr. Finch in your study, Your Grace. I provided sandwiches and a jug of ale.”
"Thank you, Milford."
Finch was standing at the window when I entered, a sandwich in one hand and a glass of ale in the other. He set both down as I came in and drew a folded paper from his coat.
"I was at the India Office by a quarter to ten," he said, "and in the registers by five past. The marriage took place on the eighteenth of March 1873, at St. John's garrison chapel, Agra.
Colonel Edmund Ashford, widower, of the 14th Hussars.
Helena Mary Hadley, widow, of the same station.
The officiating chaplain was one Reverend Charles Whitley.
The witnesses were a Major Pemberton and a Mrs. Pemberton—probably his wife.
The signatures are all present and in order. "
He handed me the paper. It was a clerical copy, made in a neat hand on India Office letterhead, stamped and dated this morning. I read it twice.
Helena Mary Hadley.
Helena Ashford.
The same woman. Eighteen years apart, two names, two husbands, one son.
"There is more," Finch said. "The Pembertons returned to England in '79. Major Pemberton died five years ago. The widow, Mrs. Pemberton, lives in Bath. She would have known Helena Hadley before and after the remarriage. She could identify Mrs. Ashford on sight. I have her direction."
"A second witness."
"If you want one. Bath is only two and a half hours from Paddington. But you may not want to spend the time."
"I may not need to. But it is good to have." I set the paper down on the desk. "Anything else?"
"The son—Oliver Hadley—sailed for East Africa in '86 on the Andromeda out of Southampton, engaged as a clerk to the Imperial British East Africa Company and, by later accounts, detached almost immediately to the conservation efforts around Mombasa.
His death was reported by the Company two years ago, in the summer of '87.
Shot in a skirmish with a party of poachers.
His effects were returned to his mother in England.
" Finch paused. "One more thing. And this one I cannot account for. "
I waited.
"On my way out of the India Office, I paid a shilling to a porter I know, and asked whether anyone else had called for the Hadley-Ashford marriage certificate in the last year or so.
He thought not. Then he checked his book.
Turns out a gentleman called for it in February of this year.
He would not give a name, but he left a fee and asked that a copy be sent to a box at the Charing Cross post office. "
The room was very quiet.
"Who else," I said slowly, "was looking for this marriage four months ago?"
"I do not know, Your Grace."
"Find out. Use the porter, use the post office, use whatever you must. And Finch—"
"You need it quickly. I’ll do my best.”
He finished the ale, collected his hat, and took his leave. I sat down at the desk with the chaplain's paper in my hand and watched the library clock tick past two in the afternoon.
We had the marriage. We had a witness. We had a name in the Company's files that put Oliver Hadley on the coast of East Africa in the summer before his death.
We had, somewhere in London, a second party who had been interested in this marriage four months ago and whose interest was not accounted for.
And we had Helena Ashford herself, at home on Curzon Street, drinking her afternoon tea, composed and alone, waiting—though she did not yet know it—for the knock at her door.
I drew a clean sheet of paper toward me and wrote a note to Rosalynd.
The marriage is confirmed. I have it in writing. Finch has also found something else I did not expect. Come when you are able. There is more to discuss before we move.
I sealed it, rang for Milford, and sent it across the square.