Chapter 38
Chapter
Thirty-Eight
Curzon Street
The bells of St. Mark’s were tolling the half hour as I climbed the steps to Mrs. Ashford’s door. The reticule had a weight I was not accustomed to. I pushed it from my mind and drew the bell.
The butler who opened the door was the same man who had shown me in some days before. He recognized me at once. A small lift of his brow—the only sign he allowed himself—marked the irregularity of the hour.
“Lady Rosalynd.”
“Good evening. I am sorry for the hour. I must speak with Mrs. Ashford on a matter of some urgency.”
He did not ask whether I was expected. He had already concluded that I was not.
“If your ladyship will step inside, I shall enquire whether Mrs. Ashford is at home.”
He could hardly do otherwise. One did not leave a lady standing on the stoop while one went to determine her welcome.
He drew the door wider, and I crossed the threshold into the front hall.
He withdrew along the corridor toward the back of the house and returned a few minutes later.
“If your ladyship will be so good as to follow me.”
He led me down the hallway to the drawing room I had been shown to before. Rather than knock, he opened the door and announced me.
“Lady Rosalynd Rosehaven.”
Helena Ashford rose from a chair by the fire. It might have been June, but the evening had turned chilly. She was wearing a mourning gown. A book lay face-down on the table beside her chair. A single lamp burned on the mantel.
“Lady Rosalynd.” She inclined her head.
“Mrs. Ashford.”
“Please. Sit.” She gestured to the settee opposite her chair. “Harris, will you bring tea?”
“Very good, madam.”
She smoothed the black silk at her knees as she sat, and looked at me with an expression that was neither fear nor defiance, but something quieter than either.
“You are earlier than I expected,” she said. “I had thought you might come tomorrow morning.”
I had prepared a great deal for this conversation. I had not prepared for a woman who opened with such a sentence.
“If I may,” I said, “why did you think I would come?”
“I have eyes and ears on Grosvenor Square. One does not spend years married to military men without learning something about surveillance. They watched, and listened, and then they came to me. From that, I was able to deduce the progress you were making. Once you sent your enquiry agent to research the regimental records, I knew it was only a matter of time before you reached the truth.”
If she knew that much, there was no sense in prefacing my words. “You were married to Captain Hadley.”
“I was.”
“And you had a son with him.”
This answer came more slowly. “Oliver. Oliver James Hadley.
He was born in Calcutta in the spring of ‘62. His father, my first husband, was a captain of the 14th Hussars and the best man I have ever known. James died of fever when Oliver was nine. I married Colonel Ashford eighteen months later, chiefly because he was kind to my boy, and a boy of eleven needs a man in the house.”
“I see.”
“May I ask a question?”
“Of course.”
“How did you tie Helena Hadley to Helena Ashford?”
“Lady Drummond. At the Beaumont ball. She had known you in India, before your remarriage.”
Helena closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, her mouth moved in a way that was not quite a smile.
“Emmeline Drummond. Of course. She was at Mrs. Pemberton’s wedding breakfast in ’70. She wore an extraordinary hat. I remember thinking it would fall off if she laughed.” She shook her head faintly. “I have not seen her in nearly twenty years.”
Harris entered with the tea tray. He set it down on the low table between us, placed the pot so that it stood at Helena’s right hand, and withdrew without speaking. Helena did not pour. The ritual had not quite closed over the scene.
“You know what I did,” she said. “Or you would not be here.”
“Yes.”
“May I tell you why? I prefer that you hear it from me. I do not wish this to be read out in a courtroom as a prosecutor’s story. I would rather you have it as the thing it was.”
“Please do.”
She sat very still for a moment, gathering something. Then she began.
“Oliver grew up reading his father’s books.
His father had loved animals. He had read Darwin, and the naturalists, and he had taught Oliver, before he died, that a man’s measure was in what he protected.
Oliver took that with him. When he was twenty-four, he went out to East Africa, on his own subscription, not on ours; he took a small position with the Imperial British East Africa Company as a clerk, and detached himself almost at once to work with a small group attempting to keep the elephant herds above Mombasa from being shot out entirely.
He wrote to me every week. He had become—” she stopped for a moment, not to compose herself, but as if to find the word that was accurate rather than the word that was convenient, “—a very serious young man. Not solemn. Serious. He had found the thing he had been born for, and he had taken hold of it. There was a light about him in his letters. You would have liked him, Lady Rosalynd. I think you would have liked him very much.”
“He sounds like a wonderful young man.”
“Yes. He was that. In his last letter, he wrote that he had seen a calf, only a few weeks old, walk into the shade of her mother. The mother lowered her trunk, laid it across the calf’s back, and held it there.
I received that letter three weeks after I received the telegram informing me of his death. ”
“I am so sorry, Mrs. Ashford.”
She did not acknowledge the condolence. I had not expected her to.
“He was killed by poachers. That is what the Company reported. What the Company did not report was where the poachers had gotten the rifles. It was not public knowledge at the time. Belgian manufacture. Cheap, reliable, shipped in by the crate through Zanzibar. Oliver’s superior in the conservation party wrote to me privately, six weeks after the Company’s official telegram.
He had kept one of the weapons. He had the serial number and the maker’s mark.
He had traced the chain as far as he could.
He sent me what he had found, and he wrote that if I wished to pursue the matter, he would swear to what he knew. ”
“Hale,” I said.
“And Davenport. And the Belgian who arranged the sale of those rifles. It took me five months. I began with Liège. I wrote to a cousin of my first husband in the Antwerp office of a shipping firm. He was willing, for his cousin’s sake, to make enquiries.
The weapons had come through Hale’s merchant fleet.
That is how I knew. And then I discovered that my own husband—my second husband, Colonel Ashford, who had sat up with Oliver when he had scarlet fever at thirteen and taught him to ride—was an investor in that enterprise.
Unknowingly. I did not accuse him. He was already very ill when he found out.
That knowledge took him sooner than was expected. ”
She looked into the fire as one looks into a thing one has not yet mastered.
“When he died, I had a choice. I could have taken what I knew to the papers. I could have taken it to the Home Office, to the Foreign Office, or to any of a dozen other places. I thought about it for two months. And I concluded that what I knew would be politely received and quietly buried, because in the summer of 1888, there was no appetite in any government office for a scandal about British ships running Belgian guns into Africa. The Brussels Conference was pending. The negotiations were delicate. A baronet’s widow with a dead son and a captain’s letter would have been thanked and shown out. ”
“So you chose the stiletto.”
“So I chose the stiletto.”
“Two of them,” I said. “You used each of them once, and you left them where they were.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She met my eye.
“Because what I had done was not a thing to be carried off. A paid killer takes his weapon with him because his work is a piece of business. It finishes when he leaves the room. Mine did not finish when I left the room. I left the blade in the wound because the wound was the point. I wanted the men who found Hale and Davenport to understand that someone had chosen to do this deliberately, and had chosen not to hide it. I wanted the blade in evidence. I did not intend ever to be caught, Lady Rosalynd. But I did intend to be unmistakable.”
“The opera. Rigoletto.”
“A father’s daughter killed in his arms.” She permitted herself the smallest of acknowledgments—a tilt of the head, not a smile. “It was perhaps theatrical of me. I do not apologize. I spent twenty years in military garrisons. One learns to take one’s pleasures where one may.”
“Davenport?”
“Davenport was easier. He was frightened already. He had known for some months that there was something wrong. I arranged a temporary diversion for the driver before I climbed into the cab on Threadneedle Street. I did not speak to Davenport. He was a weak man. His face when he saw the blade was—”
She stopped. Something in her did not want to finish the sentence. I did not press her. There is a line in every confession of this kind beyond which the confessor will not go, and one does not owe a prosecutor access to it.
“There was to be one more,” I said.
“Yes. I did not know his name. I had hoped to obtain it from you.” She lifted one shoulder, the smallest of gestures. “It was not to be. Hale and Davenport will have to be enough. I have avenged my boy.”
She sat across from me, an avenging angel—voice calm, eyes blazing with something I had never seen in another face.
“What happens now?” I asked.
The fire in her eyes banked. “The authorities, I imagine. One does not kill two men without paying for it. Even when it was entirely justified.”
“The authorities. I can arrange it.”
“Oh, you have arranged it already, haven’t you?” A small smile cut across her mouth. “The Duke of Steele would never have allowed you through my door without making arrangements.”
She rose to her feet. “But that is not the price I shall pay. Not in that coin.”
I slipped my hand into the reticule.
Helena saw the movement and laughed—softly, almost kindly. “There is no need for that, Lady Rosalynd. I do not intend to harm you.”
Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed half past seven. The last chime had barely faded when pounding began at the front door.
Not a polite knock. A fist.
Helena’s eyes flickered—not to the door, but to the small writing desk that stood against the far wall, beneath the window.
A commotion broke out in the hall. A moment later, Steele was at the drawing-room door.
Helena was already moving. She crossed to the writing desk in three quick steps, pulled the drawer open, and drew out a blade—a third stiletto, the twin of the others. She had it raised to her own chest when Steele caught her wrist.
The resistance went out of her the instant he touched her. Steele gently took the blade from her hand.
In the next instant, the room flooded with men. Finch. Two constables. And Inspector Graves.
Helena stood with her empty hand still raised. She looked at it as though it belonged to someone else.
“It was the last piece of planning I had,” she said, to no one in particular. “I did not intend to accept a courtroom.”
“No,” Steele said. “I see that you did not.”
“Mrs. Helena Ashford.” Graves did not raise his voice. He did not need to. “I am arresting you for the murders of Sir Edmund Hale and Sir Nigel Davenport. You are not required to say anything, but anything you do say may be taken down and given in evidence. Do you understand?”
“I understand, Inspector.”
“Will you come with us of your own will?”
“I will.”
He nodded once to the constables. One of them moved to her side. She adjusted her cuffs—a small, habitual gesture—and looked around the drawing room with the calm attention of a woman taking her last look at a house she had lived in for twenty years.
“I am ready.”
She passed within a foot of me as she left. She did not stop. At the doorway, she paused and looked back.
“Thank you for coming, Lady Rosalynd. I needed to tell someone. I am glad it was you.”
Her gaze moved to Steele.
“There is a signed confession in the desk, Your Grace. Use it as you will.”
Then she was gone along with Graves, his constables, and Finch. The front door opened and closed. A carriage moved off down Curzon Street.
The drawing-room clock ticked in the silence.
Steele crossed to the writing desk and opened the top drawer. The confession was there, exactly as she had said—several pages, in a steady hand. He glanced at the first page, refolded the sheets, and slipped them into his coat.
Then he crossed the room in three strides and gathered me into his arms. I felt the breath he had been holding leave his chest as I let go of mine. As his hand curled around the back of my head, neither of us spoke.
Standing close like this was enough.