Chapter 41
Chapter
Forty-One
The Crown’s Reply
Milford was waiting in the entrance hall. “Good evening, Your Grace.”
“Milford.” I handed over my hat intending to proceed to my chambers to change out of court dress. But I couldn’t summon the energy to do so. “I’ll be in my study.”
“Would you care for something to eat, Your Grace?”
It was barely five, but I’d missed my luncheon. “Yes, anything would do.”
He inclined his head and withdrew.
The fire in the study was a small one. Milford understood economy as well as care, and a June evening did not call for a Yorkshire blaze. Needing its warmth, I crossed the space toward it and let the heat work on me.
Across the room, the long window faced Grosvenor Square.
I did not go to it. I did not need to. I knew exactly which panes of Rosehaven House were lit at this hour, and which window on the second floor faced mine, and I did not propose to spend the evening looking at her shadow on a curtain.
She would draw it eventually. She would draw it because she had decided we were going to be the people we had agreed to be, and she would do that with the same competence she had brought to everything she had ever set her mind to.
The curtain would close at her hand and not at mine. The matter would be settled.
I stayed by the fire.
After a while, I went to the desk. There was correspondence on it—there was always correspondence on it.
I sat and uncapped the inkwell and drew the first letter from the top of the stack.
It was from a banker in the City. I read three lines and could not have told a court of law what they contained.
A quiet knock sounded at the door. Milford entered carrying a tray with a tankard of ale and a plate of sandwiches.
“Something light, Your Grace,” he said.
“Thank you.”
He set the tray down and withdrew without further comment.
The ale remained untouched beside my elbow. So did the sandwiches.
I set the letter down. I did not pick up another.
I had asked the queen for a thing, and she had said she would consider it. Now that the Hale investigation was concluded, her reply would come. It might already be on the way. Her Majesty was thorough about such matters. She did not approve of loose ends, in her household or in official matters.
I had had three days, since Curzon Street, to think about what I had asked.
A small body of men. Crown authority in the matters where the law could not reach.
A particular man to be hunted, quietly, and brought either to the dock or to a colder finish if a court could not be made to receive him.
The queen had not insisted on the dock, which told me more about the gravity with which she regarded the petition than any of her phrasing had.
The man had been the architect of the Thames affair. He had been the unseen hand in matters before that, and others I suspected but could not yet prove. He had been clever for a long time, and patient. And the law had never come within arm’s reach of him.
That was the public good. That was the language in which I had cast the request. It was true language, as far as it went.
It did not reach as far as the rest of it.
The rest of it was that he had danced with Rosalynd in her own ballroom.
He’d told her she was remarkable, and in the same breath, he’d told her he held her brother’s pistol.
A token of his connection with her. I had stood across a masquerade and watched her hold herself the way a woman does when she does not wish to be touched but cannot refuse.
And I had understood, with a clarity I did not afterward lose, what he was.
Not a rival. A danger. A man who would take what he wanted through whatever means.
And what he wanted was Rosalynd.
I could not pursue such a man with her anywhere near me.
If I hunted him with her at my side, he would come for her first. If I hunted him with her at my back, he would find her second.
There was no version of the work in which her presence did not become his lever and her safety the price he would extract.
I had known this since the conservatory.
I had not said it aloud because saying it aloud would have required offering her the choice.
I had not offered the choice. I had taken it so she would remain safe.
The queen’s warning at Windsor—delivered with the gentleness of a woman who had been seventy long years in the world and had used some of them to become kind—had served as a perfectly serviceable veil.
I had agreed to its terms because they coincided, almost to the letter, with what I had already determined I must do.
Rosalynd believed she had lost me to the Crown. She had lost me to a different bargain entirely.
If she knew, she would never forgive me. But then, she was already lost to me.
The letter arrived a little before ten.
Milford brought it on the silver salver with the same competence with which he had brought a hundred letters before and withdrew.
The seal was the small private one. Not the Great Seal. Not the household. The cipher she used for matters that were not, strictly speaking, matters of state.
I broke it and unfolded the single sheet.
Your request is approved.
That was all. No salutation. No signature beyond the cipher.
No date. The hand was hers; the brevity was hers; the choice to entrust nothing further to paper was hers.
She had granted me, in four words, an instrument I would now spend an indeterminate time learning to wield, against a man whose name I did not yet know.
I read the line twice and then folded the paper along its existing crease and slid it into the breast of my coat.
I sat for a while with my hand on the desk.
The thing was done. The thing I had asked for, and bargained for, and given up everything else I had wanted in order to obtain.
The Crown’s hand was now mine to direct against the man who had touched her and had no business doing so.
He would never touch her again, even if I had to spend every resource I possessed and a portion of my own life to ensure it.
That was the bargain. I had counted it before I made it. The arithmetic had not changed.
What had changed was that, with the letter in my coat, I could no longer pretend the price was theoretical.
I rose and went to the window.
Across the square, Rosalynd’s window was dark.
The curtain was drawn. She had drawn it, perhaps an hour ago, perhaps longer.
She had stood there first—as predictable in her honesty as she was unpredictable in everything else—and looked at my study with the lights burning, and imagined whatever she had imagined.
She would have then drawn the curtain because she had decided that the looking served no purpose, either of us could afford.
I stood at the glass and counted all the things I had given up.
The opera box. The carriage rides. The work, in the sense that we had practiced it together—the late evenings over suppers, the arguments about evidence, the silences in which we had each followed our own thread until one of us looked up and said the thing the other had been about to say.
Her presence in this study, which she had earned.
My presence in her drawing room. The ordinary, unconsidered moments.
The privilege of being the man she chose to be unguarded with.
And all the nights that should have come after.
I had given them up to keep her alive.
It was a price I would pay, and pay again, and pay every morning I woke and did not see her, for as long as the hunt required and however much longer it took afterward to make her safety permanent. I had not been mistaken in the arithmetic. I was not mistaken now.
But I had not, until this moment, understood that paying a price and bearing it were not the same act.
I drew the curtain.
The room contracted to the firelight and the desk and the letter folded against my chest. I stood for a time with my hand still on the heavy fold of velvet, and then turned, and went back to my chair, and sat. I did not reach for the next letter in the stack.
Across the room, the fire burned on.
In the morning, the work would begin.
But tonight, tonight, I grieved.
A queen's command forced Rosalynd and Steele to part. But a murder that implicates her brother compels them to join forces once more—against their better judgment, and at a cost neither is prepared to pay.
Join Lady Rosalynd and the Duke of Steele in their next gripping adventure—A Murder at Kew Gardens, Book 5 in the Rosalynd & Steele Mysteries. Available August 28.
A royal warning. A brother accused. A truth that will change everything.
London, 1889. When Lady Rosalynd and the -’s investigative partnership draws the censorious notice of Victorian society, Queen Victoria herself cautions them to keep their distance, lest they be forced into a marriage neither of them wants.
But distance becomes impossible when Scotland Yard arrives at Rosehaven House with alarming news.
A body has been found near Kew Gardens, and a pistol belonging to Rosalynd’s brother lies at the scene.
With her brother's life and reputation at stake, she has no choice but to seek the help of the man she has vowed to avoid.
As Rosalynd and Steele pull at the threads, the knot leads to patient, careful hands that have been moving pieces into place long before the body appeared at Kew—the hands of a shadowy figure responsible for unspeakable crimes.
Soon they realize, clearing her brother will not be enough.
They must tie the villain to every atrocity he orchestrated and secure justice for the innocents he so cruelly harmed.
All while resisting a longing that threatens to undo them both.
A Murder at Kew Gardens, Book 5 in the Rosalynd & Steele Mysteries by USA Today bestselling author Magda Alexander, sweeps readers into the lush glasshouses of Kew Gardens and nefarious undercurrents of Victorian London.
Perfect for fans of historical mysteries with bold heroines, brooding dukes, and slow-burn romance, this captivating tale will grip readers from the first page to one last, undeniable truth.