Chapter 37
Chapter
Thirty-Seven
The Shape of a Plan
She was prompt. Of course she was.
The note had gone across the square at half past five. By twenty to six Milford was at the study door announcing her. She was wearing a dark blue gown with a reticule larger than fashion allowed and a cloak over her arm. Practical. Composed. Already, in some measure, on her way.
“Please sit.”
She sat on the chair she had more than once occupied, the one across from my desk, and waited.
I had spent the intervening three hours making arrangements I had no wish to make. Finch had been at his office, and had grasped the situation in the time it took him to close his notebook.
Graves had been more difficult.
He had wanted to send four uniformed constables to Curzon Street and arrest Mrs. Ashford on the steps of her house.
It had taken me twenty minutes and the better part of my patience to persuade him that a uniformed arrest on a Mayfair pavement would produce a scandal the Crown had asked us specifically to prevent.
Eventually, he had yielded. On terms. Plain clothes. Two men in the news-agent’s at the corner. Two more with the carriage at the mews.
Looking at Rosalynd now, I understood that I had spent three hours preparing for a conversation I was not certain I could conduct.
“You found Finch?” she asked.
“I did. He is on his way to the news-agent’s at the corner of Curzon Street and Half Moon Street. Graves has two men with him. Two more will be at the mews entrance with the carriage. I shall be at the mews with Finch.”
“And Helena’s house?”
“Is being watched. She will not slip out of a back door while you are at her front.”
“Good.”
I drew breath. The next part was the part I had spent three hours not preparing.
The Bulldog pistol lay on my desk. I had taken it from the safe hidden behind the Constable painting, where I had placed it after Richmond. It was cleaned, oiled, and loaded.
“Before I give you what is on this desk, I need you to listen to me. Not to argue. To listen. After which you may argue all you wish, and we shall settle whatever you wish to settle, and then we shall go. But first, listen.”
“I am listening.”
I walked to the window. The square was quiet—the lamps not yet lit, the light just beginning to turn.
I did not look at her while I spoke.
“You believe she is what you have described to me. A woman of justice. A soldier’s wife and a soldier’s widow. She has set out to do a particular thing and intends, when it is done, to stand for it. You may be entirely correct. You may have read her better than anyone has read her.”
I paused. I could feel her, behind me, listening.
“But you may be wrong as well.”
I turned at last. She was watching me with that steadiness she had, the one that asked nothing, offered nothing, and simply received.
“You are not going in there to test a theory of moral character. You are going into a house where a woman who has killed two men with a stiletto will receive you, and what she does in the next hour will be determined by factors neither of us can see. I am giving you the room because you have made the case for it and because I am not, in the end, the man who decides where you go. But you will not enter that room unarmed, and you will not enter it without a means of summoning every man I have placed within a hundred yards of her front door.”
I picked up the pistol from the desk.
The weight of it was a thing she and I both already knew.
I had taught her to shoot with this same revolver in the meadow at Richmond—an afternoon in cotton and shirtsleeves, lemonade, and the lake.
A teaching exercise, I had told myself at the time.
A reasonable precaution for a woman who insisted on investigating murder in my company.
I had not, in any version of that afternoon, imagined handing it back to her for this.
"The Bulldog. You know it. Six shots, double-action, heavier than it looks. Loaded."
She took it without ceremony—right hand high on the stock, left hand bracing, thumb along the seam. No flinch. No wasted motion. The grip she had earned across eighteen shots in the heat, while I stood two paces behind her and tried not to notice the line of her throat.
"You will carry it in the reticule. You will not draw it unless she attacks you first. If she does, you will aim at the centre of her body, and you will fire, and you will keep firing until she is on the ground."
I dropped down to my knees in front of her.
I had not intended to do it. The action arrived ahead of the decision, and once I was down I found I could not have stood again if my life had depended on it.
"Tell me you understand, Rosalynd."
"I understand."
Her voice was steady. The pistol rested in her lap, her hand curled round the grip with the quiet competence of a woman who had practiced until it ceased to frighten her.
"Tell me you can do it."
She lifted her empty hand and rested it against my face. "I can do it, Steele.”
I held her gaze. I had to be sure. There would be no second telling once she was through Helena Ashford's door.
"Without hesitation?"
She did not look away. "Without hesitation."
For a moment neither of us moved. Her thumb traced the line of my jaw, once, with the same deliberate steadiness she had brought to every word. Then she set the pistol down on the table beside her, freed both her hands, and used them to lift my face to hers and kiss me.
It was not the kiss of a frightened woman seeking reassurance, nor the kiss of a woman saying farewell. It was something graver and more particular than either—slow, deliberate, the whole of her attention bent on telling me, without recourse to any word in the language, that she meant to come back.
When she drew away, her palm stayed against my cheek a heartbeat longer. Long enough that I felt the small breath she took before she let it fall.
"Without hesitation," she said again.
I believed her.
I could only hope she would.
"What time am I supposed to arrive?"
“Half past six. Graves's men will not be in position before then."
She glanced at the clock on the mantel. "Half an hour from now."
"Yes."
"We need to leave."
“The carriage is in the mews. I shall ride with you as far as Half Moon Street and walk the rest. By the time we arrive, every man will be in place.
You will go to her front door alone. From the moment you ring the bell, you have one hour.
Not a minute more. If you are not out by half past seven, we are coming in. "
"Understood."
I came to my feet—slowly, because I was not certain my legs were entirely my own—and held out my hand for her. She took it. Her grip was light and certain, and the certainty went through me like cold water.
"Tell me what you will do if she attacks first."
"I will fire at the center of her body and keep firing until she is on the ground."
"Tell me what you will not do."
She held my gaze. "I will not hesitate. I will not aim for the head. I will not wait to be certain. And I will not stay in that house one minute longer than half past seven."
She had said it in the cadence I used. The way I had said it to her. I had wanted that—had drilled it into her precisely so that it would come out in that flat, ordered way under pressure. And now that I had what I’d asked for, it nearly undid me.
I lifted her cloak from the chair and held it open for her. She turned, and I settled it across her shoulders. My hands lingered a fraction longer than the act required at the place where the wool met her throat. She picked up the pistol from the small table and slipped it into her reticule.
Together we walked to the back door of Steele House. Milford was waiting in the corridor, his composure perfect, his eyes on Rosalynd in a way that told me he had understood everything that had been said behind the study door, and a good deal that had not.
"Everything is ready, Your Grace. My lady." He bowed. "Godspeed."
Rosalynd stopped and laid her gloved hand briefly against his sleeve. "Thank you, Milford."
Something moved in his face—quick, suppressed, gone before any but the two of us would have caught it.
She nodded to him, and went out into the mews.
I handed her up into the unmarked carriage. I kept hold of her hand a beat longer than the action required, while she settled the reticule against her side. I felt the weight of the Bulldog through her glove. It steadied me and it did not.
I climbed in after her and pulled the door closed. The driver had his orders.
The carriage pulled away. The wheels found the cobblestones and the lamps of the mews swept past the windows, one and then the next.
Rosalynd sat opposite me, her hands folded on her lap, her face turned toward the glass. The lamp at the corner caught the copper of her hair where it had escaped its pins, the way it always did.
In twelve minutes I would step down at Half Moon Street and walk away from this carriage on legs I would have to instruct. So I made myself look at her, and look at her, and look at her, and prayed that would not be the last time I would gaze upon her face.
The carriage turned out of Grosvenor Square and into the future that awaited us.