Chapter 6 #2
Edmund drew for perhaps forty minutes, his pencil moving across the paper with the confident strokes of someone who is not conscious of being observed, and the result, when he held it up for my inspection, was a rendering of the winged bull that captured, with remarkable fidelity, the massive, staring authority of the original.
The proportions were not perfect, and the perspective was slightly flattened, as though the bull had been pressed against the page rather than receding into it, but the quality of attention was evident in every line.
Edmund saw what was there, without embellishment or interpretation, and his hand reproduced what his eye perceived with a directness that I, for all my cultivated skills, could not have matched.
"That is excellent, Edmund."
"Do you really think so? Miss Hale says I should practise drawing things that are smaller. She says the bulls are too big for the page."
"Miss Hale is correct about the proportions. But the quality of the drawing is excellent nonetheless."
Edmund beamed. The smile transformed his face, softening the angular features that he had inherited from our father and replacing the habitual expression of mild confusion with something that was, for a moment, genuinely radiant.
I looked at him and felt, as I often did in such moments, the particular pull of an attachment that I could not classify and did not wish to relinquish.
He was mine. Not through strategy or effort or calculation, but through the accident of birth and the accumulated years of care that had made him, in every way that mattered, an extension of myself.
Dorothea, who had been following us at a discreet distance through the galleries, approached as we prepared to leave the Assyrian room.
She was carrying Edmund's coat, which he had removed in the warmth of the gallery, and her face wore the particular expression of professional attentiveness that she maintained in my presence, watchful and neutral and unrevealing.
"It's past noon, my lady. Mr. Edmund's luncheon."
Edmund looked up from his sketchbook. "Already? But I haven't drawn the cats yet."
"The cats will be here tomorrow, darling. They are not going anywhere. They have been here for three thousand years; they can manage one more day."
Edmund considered this argument and found it reasonable.
He allowed Dorothea to help him with his coat, and we made our way through the museum toward the entrance, passing through the gallery of Roman Britain and the gallery of medieval antiquities and the long hall of casts that Edmund always hurried past because, as he had once explained to me with great seriousness, copies were not as good as the real thing, and he did not see the point of looking at something that someone else had already looked at.
At the entrance, while Dorothea went to summon our carriage from where she had left it waiting in Montague Street, Edmund and I stood beneath the great portico and watched the traffic on Great Russell Street.
An omnibus rumbled past, its upper deck crowded with shoppers and clerks.
A costermonger's barrow stood at the corner, its owner shouting the prices of apples and pears in a voice designed to carry above the din of the street.
A group of children, presumably from one of the charity schools that dotted the neighbourhood, marched past in formation, their uniforms drab and their faces pinched with the particular hunger of children who were not receiving enough to eat.
Edmund watched the children with an expression that I recognised as the precursor to a question I would rather not answer.
"Cecilia, why are those children marching?"
"They are going to school."
"Are they happy?"
"I don't know, darling. I expect some of them are and some of them are not."
"I would not like to march to school. I like the carriage. The carriage is comfortable. Mrs. Branwell always puts a brick in the foot-warming pan, and the bricks are very warm."
"The bricks are warm because Mrs. Branwell heats them in the oven before she puts them in the pan."
"I know. I asked her once how they got warm, and she told me. She is very kind. I think she is the kindest person in the house, except for you and Dorothea."
"That is a generous assessment."
"Is it? I don't know what generous means. Not exactly. Miss Hale tried to explain it, but she used a lot of words, and I got confused."
"It means that you are willing to think well of people, even when they may not deserve it."
Edmund considered this. "Do people deserve it? To be thought well of?"
"Some of them, some of the time."
"And some of them not?"
"That is generally the case, yes."
Our carriage arrived, the brougham's horses stamping and snorting in the cold air, the footman descending to open the door.
I handed Edmund in and followed, and Dorothea climbed to the seat beside the driver, and the carriage lurched forward into the traffic of Great Russell Street, the horses' hooves striking a steady rhythm on the cobblestones.
We rode in comfortable silence for several minutes.
Edmund had returned to his sketchbook, adding details to the drawing of the winged bull that he had not had time to complete in the gallery, and I sat opposite him and watched the streets of London pass the window in a slow, grey procession.
The carriage turned south toward Bloomsbury Square and then west toward Mayfair, and as we passed through the quieter streets near the British Museum, Edmund looked up from his drawing and said, without any apparent connection to the silence that had preceded it, "Cecilia, do you remember the old doctor? "
I did not move. I did not alter my expression. I continued to look out the window with the same composed tranquillity I maintained at all times, and inside, with the speed and precision of a card player recognising a dangerous hand, I assessed the question and its implications.
"Which old doctor, darling?"
"The one who came to see the lady in the kitchen.
Before Richard went to bed for the last time.
I saw him from the stairs. He had a black bag, like doctors do, and he went into the stillroom.
I wasn't supposed to be on the stairs, but I was looking for Dorothea because I wanted to show her the drawing of the horse I made, and I saw him. "
I turned from the window and looked at Edmund with the calm, direct gaze I used when I wished to appear attentive and reassuring.
His face was open and guileless, his attention on his drawing, his question already fading from his mind as a new detail in the winged bull's beard claimed his interest. He had no idea what he had said.
He had no idea of its significance. He had observed something, filed it away in the vast, disorganised archive of his memory, and retrieved it now, weeks or months later, because some association or other had brought it to mind, the way a leaf caught in a current surfaces unexpectedly on the surface of a stream.
"I don't recall that, Edmund," I said, and my voice was steady and warm and carried no trace of the cold calculation that his words had provoked. "The doctor may have been visiting Mrs. Branwell about something in the kitchen. Doctors visit households for all sorts of reasons."
"He didn't go to the kitchen. He went to the stillroom.
The one behind the kitchen where the flour is kept.
I know because I went in there once to look for the ginger, and Dorothea told me I mustn't go in there because it wasn't my place, and I remembered because Dorothea is always kind about things like that, even when she's cross. "
The stillroom. The locked cabinet. The arsenic. The memory of Edmund on the stairs, watching Dr. Hale or someone else enter the stillroom with a black bag, and my own careful movements in that same room, in the small hours, with my key and my jars and my precision.
I said, very gently, "You have a very good memory, Edmund. But you must not worry about things you saw a long time ago. The past is the past, and there is nothing in it that can trouble us now."
"Is there?"
"No, darling. Nothing at all."
Edmund nodded, satisfied, and returned to his drawing.
He had already forgotten the exchange, or rather, he had ceased to assign it any importance, because Edmund's mind did not dwell on things that were not immediately interesting to him, and the winged bull was more interesting than an old doctor with a black bag.
I sat back in the carriage seat and looked out the window.
The streets of London passed in their grey procession, the buildings and the people and the horses and the carriages, all of them moving through the December afternoon with the particular urgency of people who had places to be and things to do and no understanding of the conversation that had just taken place inside a brougham on Great Russell Street.
The old doctor. Edmund had seen someone enter the stillroom.
The stillroom where the locked cabinet stood behind the flour sacks.
The cabinet with its jars of white powder and dark compound and the slim French text that described, in clinical detail, the methods by which one might kill and the means by which one might avoid detection.
It was possible, I told myself, that Edmund had misremembered.
His memory, while remarkably detailed on certain subjects, was selective and unreliable on others, and the sequence of events he described, a doctor with a black bag entering the stillroom, could have referred to any number of routine visits.
Physicians called on households for all sorts of reasons.
The stillroom, while primarily a storage space, had been used for the preparation of medicinal compounds in the past, and it was not inconceivable that Dr. Hale had visited it for some legitimate purpose connected with Richard's care.
But the possibility that Edmund had seen something significant, that his guileless observation had recorded a detail that, in other hands, might become evidence, was a possibility I could not afford to dismiss.
Edmund did not lie. He did not embellish.
He did not interpret. He saw what was there and reported it with a fidelity that was, in the context of my situation, more dangerous than any deliberate act of betrayal.
I made a mental note to ensure that Edmund did not repeat this observation to anyone else.
It would not be difficult. A word to Dorothea, a gentle reminder that Edmund was not to discuss household matters with visitors, a suggestion that his lessons with Miss Hale might usefully include instruction on the difference between private and public conversation.
Edmund, who trusted me completely and who had no reason to question anything I told him, would accept these restrictions without resistance, because Edmund accepted everything I told him without resistance, and the observation would be buried in the archive of his memory, unlikely to surface again unless some future association brought it to mind.
But the incident was a reminder, and not a comfortable one, of the vulnerability that Edmund represented.
He was, by virtue of his innocence and his inability to dissemble, a potential witness to things he did not understand, a recorder of moments whose significance he could not assess.
Every movement I made in this household was potentially visible to him, every visit to the stillroom, every careful unlocking of the cabinet, every preparation of compounds that were not what they appeared to be.
He did not understand what he saw. But he remembered it, and memory, in the hands of the wrong person, could be a weapon.
The thought of Sebastian Aldric interviewing Edmund sent a cold current through me that I had not expected and did not welcome.
Aldric was intelligent enough to recognise the value of an unguarded witness.
He was persistent enough to seek out such a witness and patient enough to earn his trust. And Edmund, who could not distinguish between a man who was kind and a man who was manipulating him, would answer any question Aldric put to him with the same guileless honesty that had just produced, in the safety of a brougham, a remark that could, in other circumstances, have been devastating.
I would not allow that to happen. Edmund was mine. His trust was mine. His words were mine. And no detective from Scotland Yard, however intelligent or persistent, would be permitted to take from me the one creature in this world whose protection I valued above my own.
The carriage turned into the square and drew up before Blackwood House.
Edmund gathered his sketchbook and his pencils and climbed out with the careful, slightly clumsy movements that characterised his physical interactions with the world, and I followed him up the steps and through the front door and into the warmth of the hall, where Dorothea waited to take our coats and Mrs. Branwell's voice could be heard in the kitchen, giving instructions about luncheon in the authoritative tones of a woman who understood that the management of a household was, in its essence, the management of appetites, and that appetites, when properly managed, produced contentment.
Edmund went to wash his hands before luncheon, as I had trained him to do, and I stood in the hall and listened to the sounds of the house settling around me, the ticking of the clock on the landing, the murmur of voices from the servants' quarters, the clatter of dishes from the kitchen, and the distant, rhythmic sound of Edmund's footsteps on the stairs above.
Mine, I thought. And the thought, as always, carried with it a weight and a clarity that I could not explain and did not wish to examine more closely than necessary.
But beneath it, faint and persistent and unwelcome, ran another thought: Sebastian Aldric was out there, somewhere in the fog and the cold of London, and he was asking questions, and some of those questions, if he was clever enough to ask them and persistent enough to pursue the answers, might lead him to the stillroom, and the cabinet, and the jars that contained everything he needed to destroy me.