Chapter 36
Chapter
Thirty-Six
A Determination is Made
Steele’s note reached me at half past two. Fifteen minutes later, I was standing at his door. One look at me and Milford showed me to his study.
Steele was at the desk with a single sheet of paper before him—the chaplain’s record, I saw as I came closer.
“Colonel Edmund Ashford, widower, of the 14th Hussars,” Steele said without preamble.
“Helena Mary Hadley, widow, of the same station. The eighteenth of March 1873. St. John’s garrison chapel.
The witnesses were a Major and Mrs. Pemberton.
The major is dead. The widow lives in Bath and should be able to identify Helena Ashford on sight. ”
I picked up the paper. Read it. Set it down. “We have her.”
“We have her,” he agreed.
“What was the thing you did not expect?”
“Finch asked a porter at the India Office whether anyone else had called for this record in the last year. A gentleman came in February. No name. He had a copy sent to a box at the Charing Cross post office. Finch is running the enquiry.”
I turned that over. A man looking for Helena Hadley’s marriage four months ago. A man who knew what Steele and I had not known until last night. A man who had stood by, said nothing, and watched.
“The masked man,” I said quietly.
“It is the most probable explanation.”
We glanced at one another across the desk. Whatever the masked man’s purpose had been in procuring that information, it was not today’s problem. Today’s problem was on Curzon Street, composed and self-possessed, taking tea and making plans.
“I want to go to her alone,” I said.
Steele had been reaching for the decanter to pour a glass of whiskey. His hand stopped. “No.”
“Hear the argument before you refuse it.”
“No.”
“Steele.”
He set the decanter down, carefully, and turned to face me. “She has killed twice, Rosalynd. An industrialist and a financier, neither of whom saw it coming. She is patient, she is precise, and she is very nearly finished. I am not sending you into her drawing room alone.”
“You are not sending me anywhere. I am proposing to go.”
“The distinction is immaterial.”
“It is not immaterial. It is the whole question.” I took the chair opposite the desk and sat, because to conduct this argument standing would be to lose it.
“Listen to me. Helena Ashford came to my house of her own will. She sat in my morning room and told me—a woman, younger than her, unmarried, without official standing—a story she had rehearsed for months. Why?”
“Because you are a sympathetic young woman. Because she believed you would be easy to direct. And because she needed to find Verstraeten, so she could complete her mission. She was right on the first. But not the second nor the third. You are not easy to direct, as I have good reason to know. And we did not provide her with Verstraeten’s name. ”
“That is one reading. Here is another. She came to me because she wanted the story told to a woman. She wanted, whether or not she admitted it to herself, to be heard by someone who might understand what losing a son does to a mother. She dressed in mourning, came to my door, and put the story into my hands. That is not the act of a woman who only wants to be clever. That is a woman who wants, somewhere under everything else, to be seen for what she is.”
“A murderer.”
“An avenger. She wanted me to know she was avenging her son’s death.”
“You are making her sympathetic,” he said.
“I am not making her sympathetic. I am making her legible. A woman who wants to be seen will not put a blade in the first person who sees her. If I go to her alone, she will know I have understood. And she will tell me. She will tell me because she has been waiting, I think, since the night at the opera, for someone to require the telling.”
“Or she will kill you in her drawing room and be on a steamer by breakfast.”
“She will not.”
“You cannot know that.”
“I cannot, but it’s what I believe. And I am willing to act on that belief because I was the one she came to, and because some part of what happens next is mine. Not Graves’s. Not Scotland Yard’s. Certainly not yours. Mine.”
The study was very quiet. A carriage passed in the square. Somewhere in the house, a door closed.
“Rosalynd.” Steele’s voice had dropped to the register he used when he was not speaking as a duke but as the man who had stood in a lake with his hand on my waist and said my name and meant it. “I am not capable of this.”
“Of what?”
“Of watching you walk into a house where a woman has killed two men and waiting in a carriage for you to emerge unharmed.”
“You would not be waiting in a carriage. You would be at the mews entrance, within hailing distance, with Finch and whatever arrangement you saw fit to make with Graves. I am not proposing to be reckless. I am proposing to enter the drawing room alone.”
“And if she reaches for the stiletto?”
“She will not.”
“What if she does?”
I let that sit for a moment. He deserved an answer. I did not have a good one, and I was not going to pretend otherwise.
“Then you were right,” I said, “and I was wrong, and I trust that you would not allow the wrongness to stand.”
He looked at me with an expression that was neither resignation nor agreement. It was the expression of a man arriving at the limit of what he could impose on another person by force of argument, and discovering that the limit, when one actually encountered it, was lower than he had thought.
“Let me consider it,” he said.
“Consider it quickly. The day is going.”
He glanced at the clock on the mantel, at the window. And then he looked at the sheet of paper on the desk with Helena’s marriage lines on it as though it might offer counsel. It did not.
“Go home,” he said.
“Steele—”
“I have not refused. I have asked you to go home. There are arrangements I must make. Arrangements I can’t make in front of you because if you’re here, I shall reconsider every one of them. Go home. Wait for my note. When it comes, return to me.”
It was the most honest thing he had said in the course of the argument.
I did not press. I had won what I had come to win, in principle if not yet in practice. Pressing him further would only force him to recover ground he had decided to yield.
“How long?”
“Two hours. Perhaps three. Finch can be reached at his office; Graves is at Scotland Yard. I shall have the answer before the bells of St. Mark’s toll for evensong.”
“I will wait at home until you send for me.”
He nodded once. He did not rise to see me out. It was not discourtesy. It was the small, contained refusal of a man who had decided that any further movement on his part might disturb the arrangement we had just reached.
I walked the forty yards to my own door. I did not look back.