Chapter 39
Chapter
Thirty-Nine
The Queen Has the Last Say
Three days after Curzon Street, Rosalynd and I were summoned once more to Windsor.
This time we travelled by train, leaving from Paddington at noon and due to arrive shortly after one.
A carriage would meet us at the Windsor station—not a royal one, that would have been too much to expect, but one reserved for visiting dignitaries.
I took it as a measure of Her Majesty’s satisfaction with the result.
Rosalynd sat opposite me in the first-class compartment, dressed in a blue silk gown the exact colour of her eyes. I wore court dress; it felt like a uniform, which was perhaps fitting. I had, after all, been in service to the Crown for the better part of a month.
Neither of us spoke much during the journey. There was little left to say between us. There would, however, be much to say to the Queen.
The morning’s papers had carried the arrest of Mrs. Helena Ashford—two columns, factual and short. Graves had given the press exactly what he had been instructed to give them, and not a syllable more.
Neither the Prince of Wales nor Lady Hale had been named.
Sir Edmund’s commercial dealings were referred to only as certain shipping concerns now under separate official enquiry—the phrasing the authorities reserved for men whose cooperation had been purchased with the promise of anonymity.
I had spent yesterday afternoon drafting those notices myself, on House of Lords letterhead, and dispatching them by hand.
The arms shipments to East Africa would stop.
The investors would surrender their shares in Hale’s enterprise and refrain from any interest in similar ventures for the rest of their natural lives.
The whole affair had been wrapped, ribboned, and set neatly aside.
It was not justice. But given what could and could not be tried in an English court in 1889, it was the nearest thing the law allowed.
Helena Ashford herself was at Holloway. She had entered a plea of not guilty on her solicitor’s advice, though she had never denied the killings. The trial would come in the autumn. The verdict was not in doubt. The sentence was another question altogether.
The carriage ride from the station did not take long. Soon the castle rose before us, ancient and unimpressed, exactly as it had risen on each previous occasion.
The equerry on the steps inclined his head with the precision he reserved for ducal arrivals, and a fraction more for Rosalynd. Someone had informed him of her standing, though I doubted he had been told the particulars.
“Her Majesty is in the Oak Drawing Room. She is expecting you.”
The same room. The small one. The one she used when she wished to be frank.
I had thought she might choose differently for a joint audience—the Crimson Drawing Room, perhaps, with footmen and an equerry visibly stationed—but no.
She had chosen the small room, which meant she intended to say things she did not wish witnesses to carry.
Queen Victoria was seated in the same high-backed chair by the same window, in the same unrelieved black. The East Terrace garden beyond the glass was at its high-summer green. She watched us enter, her face giving nothing away.
“Steele. Lady Rosalynd.”
“Your Majesty.” We bowed and curtsied, not quite in unison but close enough.
“Sit. Both of you. I find I have less patience for protocol than I had a week ago, and we have rather a lot to get through.”
Rosalynd took the chair to my right, slightly forward, her hands folded on her lap.
“The investigation,” the Queen said. “The press version is acceptable. The verbal version, please, in detail.”
I gave the account in the order Rosalynd and I had agreed upon.
The arms trafficking, fully reconstructed: Liège to Antwerp to East Africa, returning ivory laundered through the London auction houses.
The consortium investors. The disposition of those investors, as already arranged.
Verstraeten, in custody, awaiting transfer to Belgian jurisdiction under an arrangement the Foreign Office had agreed to expedite.
Hale’s killer—Helena Ashford, née Helena Hadley, widow of two officers, mother of one murdered son.
The motive, in full. The two stilettos. The arrest. Holloway. The trial in October.
The Queen listened without interruption. When I had finished, she was silent for a measurable interval.
“And the personal matter,” she said. “The Prince’s connection.”
“There is no connection, ma’am. Lady Hale’s association with His Royal Highness was entirely personal, predating Sir Edmund’s death by some months and wholly unconnected to the consortium, the arms trade, or Mrs. Ashford’s motive.
The press has not been told and will not be told.
Mrs. Ashford herself never raised it; it was no part of her grievance.
The matter, as it touches the Crown, is closed. ”
“You are quite certain.”
“I am quite certain, ma’am.”
She let out a breath—small, controlled, the only sign she had been holding one. For a moment, she was not the sovereign who had ruled an empire for fifty-two years. She was a mother who had been carrying a particular fear for three weeks and had just been told she could set it down.
“Thank you, Steele.” A pause. “And thank you, Lady Rosalynd. I am aware that the work you have done in the drawing rooms of London has been considerable. Without it, the result would not have come as it has. I do not customarily thank my subjects for doing what is required of them. Today, I am thanking you both.”
“It was our honor, ma’am,” Rosalynd said.
“Mm.”
Her Majesty turned the small ring on her right hand—the gesture I had come to recognise as the prelude to a change of subject. I had been waiting for it. I had been waiting for it since we left Grosvenor Square.
“The other matter.”
I did not pretend not to know what she meant. Neither did Rosalynd.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I have spoken with each of you privately on this subject already. I shall not repeat what I said in those audiences—you both know perfectly well what was said, and I do not believe in repeating myself when the original has been understood. But there is a thing I wish to say to the two of you together, which I could not say to either of you alone.”
The room stilled. The Queen folded her hands in her lap.
“I am going to speak to you not as your sovereign but as a woman of seventy who has lived a long time and watched a great many young people of your particular sort destroy themselves and one another by being—” she paused, searching for the precise word, “—careful. By being restrained. By stepping toward what they wanted and then stepping back from it because they had told themselves, very persuasively, that the stepping back was the right thing to do. It is nothing of the kind. It is, in my observation, extraordinarily painful. The pain accomplishes nothing whatever. At the end of it, the people in question are still in love with one another, and they have wasted a year, or two, or five, that they will never get back.”
She did not raise her voice. She did not lean forward. She did not look from one of us to the other. She regarded the space between our two chairs, which was perhaps two feet of carpet.
“You are going to tell me, both of you, that you have no intention of marrying.”
I waited a half-second to see whether Rosalynd would speak first. She did not. The half-second was on me.
“That is correct, ma’am.”
“Lady Rosalynd?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She nodded slowly. “I am disappointed, but not surprised. You are afraid, Steele, because you lost a wife and are very much afraid of losing another. And you, Lady Rosalynd, fear what marriage will cost the household you have built. We have already discussed each of these privately, and I shall not litigate them again. I am not trying to argue you into anything. I am trying to tell you what I know.”
She turned the ring on her hand once more.
“I have watched you in this room together for three-quarters of an hour. I watched His Grace not look at you as you sat down, Lady Rosalynd, and I watched you defer to him as he gave his account. You belong together. I have rarely been wrong about such matters. I was certainly not wrong about Albert and myself, and I have had occasion to test the instinct on a great many relationships in the years since.”
“Your Majesty—” I began.
“Let me finish, Steele.”
I did not pursue my thought.
“Whatever you do in private is your concern. It is, frankly, none of mine. But what you do in public—how often you are seen together, how clearly the world reads what is between you, how openly your servants and your neighbors and the gossip writers may infer the truth—that is not entirely your concern. At a certain threshold, it becomes a matter of public order, and public order is, as it happens, exactly my concern.”
She let that sit.
“There will come a moment when you are no longer content with the present arrangement. A line will be crossed that cannot be uncrossed. And you will be forced into marriage—by your families, by society, and yes, by your sovereign. I have made such choices for other people in this very room. I do not relish making them. But I have made them, and I shall make them again if circumstances require it. The only alternative is to stay away from each other. Permanently.”
Beside me, Rosalynd made a small sound—barely a breath, barely audible. I knew it for what it was. I felt the same.
“That is what I wished to say to you both. You may take it as a warning, as a piece of advice, or as the maundering of an old woman who should mind her own business. I shall not be offended by any of those interpretations. I shall not offer it again.”
“We understand, ma’am,” I said.
“I am sure that you do.”
The Queen straightened slightly in her chair. The sovereign returned, settling over the woman as a cape settles over a dress. The audience was concluded.
“You have done excellent work for me. Both of you. I am pleased. You may go.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
We bowed and curtsied. The door closed behind us. The corridor was empty save for the equerry, who fell into step three paces behind and saw us as far as the entrance, where he handed us into the carriage with the same precise courtesy he had shown on arrival.
The carriage door closed. The horses moved off.
I had not spoken since the audience ended. I did not yet know what to say. Rosalynd, opposite me, was looking out of the window at the East Terrace as we drew away from it, her face composed and her hands folded on her lap exactly as they had been folded in the Oak Drawing Room.
Whatever she was thinking, she did not yet show it. But she would.