Chapter 5 #3
The morning passed. I wrote letters, reviewed accounts, and considered the question of Sebastian Aldric with the methodical attention I brought to every problem that required solution.
The information I had was insufficient for a comprehensive assessment, but it was sufficient for a preliminary one, and the preliminary assessment was this: he was more capable than I had initially believed, more persistent, and more dangerous.
His visit to Dr. Hale was not the action of a man conducting a routine review.
It was the action of a man who was following a trail, and the trail, wherever it led, began or ended with me.
The question was how far he had progressed along it.
I could not know this without additional intelligence, and the acquisition of intelligence required resources that I could not deploy without risking exposure.
I could not, for example, approach Dr. Hale directly, because any contact with the physician on the subject of the investigation would be noted and potentially reported.
I could not question the servants, because the servants would talk, and the talking would reach Aldric's ears through the same network of gossip by which his activities had reached mine.
I could not confront Aldric himself, because confrontation would confirm that I had something to hide, and a woman who has something to hide is a woman who invites scrutiny.
What I could do was wait, and watch, and gather information from the sources that were available to me.
The social network of Mayfair was an intelligence apparatus of remarkable efficiency, a web of connections and obligations and mutual surveillance that conveyed information with a speed and thoroughness that rivalled the telegraph system.
If Aldric was asking questions, the questions would be reported to me, not immediately and not in detail, but soon enough and with sufficient particularity to allow me to assess the direction of his inquiry and the urgency of the threat it posed.
I finished my correspondence and went to change my clothes for the afternoon.
The weather had cleared, the December fog lifting to reveal a sky of pale, watery blue, and I decided to walk in Hyde Park, partly for the exercise, which I took regularly, and partly because the park, in my experience, was a useful place for observation.
It was, in the afternoons, a theatre of social performance, the Rotten Row and the Serpentine and the broad gravel walks filled with people who were, by their presence, announcing something about themselves, their status, their intentions, their availability.
It was also a place where one could be observed without the observer being observed, the crowds providing cover for the kind of discreet surveillance that would be conspicuous in the more intimate setting of a drawing room.
I put on my walking dress, a sensible garment of dark grey with a black bonnet, and set out on foot from Blackwood House.
The December air was cold and sharp, carrying the mingled scents of coal smoke, wet leaves, and horse dung, the particular perfume of London in winter that I had grown so accustomed to that I no longer registered it consciously.
The streets were busy with carriages and pedestrians, the afternoon traffic of a city that never fully quieted, and I moved through it with the efficient grace of a woman who knew where she was going and did not wish to be delayed.
Hyde Park was crowded despite the cold. Carriages lined the drives, their occupants wrapped in furs and heavy coats, their breath misting in the frigid air.
Riders moved along Rotten Row at the measured pace prescribed by convention, their horses stepping through the churned mud with the high-headed elegance of animals bred for display.
Pedestrians walked the paths in pairs and groups, their voices carrying across the open grass in fragments of conversation that were, for the most part, uninteresting.
The weather talk, the health talk, the gossip about who had been seen with whom and who had said what to whom and who was wearing what, the eternal small currency of social exchange that lubricated the machinery of London society.
I walked for perhaps twenty minutes, keeping to the quieter paths at the edge of the park, where the trees were bare and the grass was silvered with frost and the crowds thinned to occasional figures moving at a distance.
I was not, as I have said, a woman who enjoyed exercise for its own sake, but I recognised its practical benefits, both physical and psychological, and the discipline of a daily walk provided a structure to my afternoon that I found reassuring.
It was on the return path, near the Serpentine, that I saw him.
He was standing at the edge of the lake, half-concealed by a bare oak tree, and he was watching me.
His disguise, if he had intended one, was inadequate.
A dark overcoat, a hat pulled low, a newspaper held loosely in one hand, the standard accoutrements of a man pretending not to be doing what he was doing.
I would have recognised him by his silhouette alone, the angular build, the slightly too-intense posture of a man who cannot fully relax, but it was his eyes that confirmed it.
They tracked my approach with the focused, assessing quality I had observed at the graveside, and they did not waver when I looked directly at him.
I did not alter my pace. I did not acknowledge his presence.
I continued walking along the path as though I had not seen him, my expression arranged in the distant calm of a woman occupied with her own thoughts, my hands clasped before me in the manner prescribed for a mourner taking the air.
As I passed within thirty feet of his position, I allowed my gaze to drift, casually, in his direction, and I saw, with a clarity that his inadequate disguise could not obscure, that his expression was one of frustrated concentration, the look of a man who is trying to understand something and is not succeeding.
I walked on. The path curved away from the Serpentine toward the park gate, and the oak tree and the figure behind it receded from my peripheral vision. I did not look back.
But I smiled.
It was not a smile that I intended or that I could have explained.
It rose to my lips unbidden, a slight curving of the mouth that lasted perhaps two seconds and then vanished, leaving my expression as controlled and unreadable as before.
I did not examine it. I did not ask myself why the sight of Sebastian Aldric, standing in the cold December afternoon watching me walk through Hyde Park, had produced in me a response that was more akin to pleasure than to alarm.
The game, I reflected, as I passed through the park gate and turned toward home, had become interesting.