Chapter 14 #2
The headstone was small. The inscription was brief.
"At Rest." Vivienne Blackwell was not at rest. Vivienne Blackwood was in my blood, in my brain, in the architecture of my consciousness, and everything I was, everything I had built, everything I had accomplished, was a monument to her teaching.
I did not mourn her. I did not grieve for her.
But I respected her, in the way one respects a teacher whose lessons have proved correct, and the grave in Highgate was not a site of sorrow but a site of pilgrimage, and I visited it not to honour the dead but to remind myself of what the dead had made me.
I turned to leave. As I did, I noticed a man standing at the far end of the path, half-concealed by a large elm.
He was watching me. He was not trying to conceal himself, but he was not making his presence obvious either, and the ambiguity of his positioning suggested either casual curiosity or deliberate surveillance.
He was dressed in a dark overcoat and a bowler hat, and his posture was the particular posture of a man who stands for a living: weight evenly distributed, shoulders slightly forward, attention fixed.
I did not recognise him. He was not one of Sebastian's colleagues from the Yard, nor was he familiar from any of the social gatherings I had attended.
He might have been a journalist, or a private investigator hired by one of my enemies, or simply a stranger who had paused to watch a woman weeping at a graveside.
The possibilities were numerous, and most of them were harmless.
I filed his face in my memory and walked past Dorothea and along the path toward the cemetery gate. I did not look back. Looking back would have suggested awareness, and awareness would have confirmed that his presence was significant, and significance was a card I preferred to hold close.
In the carriage on the way home, I reviewed the morning's work.
The visit to the cemetery served a dual purpose.
It reinforced, in my own mind, the narrative I was constructing for Sebastian's benefit: the daughter of a madwoman, damaged by her upbringing, capable of cruelty but not of the cold calculation he attributed to me.
And it provided a visual prop for the social narrative I was about to disseminate.
A woman visiting her mother's grave is a sympathetic figure.
The sympathy would attach itself to the story of Vivienne's institutionalisation and travel through the social network until it reached Sebastian, who would hear it not from me but from a dozen independent sources, each confirming the others, each adding detail, until the story acquired the weight of truth.
That was the plan. The plan was elegant, and the elegance of it gave me the same satisfaction I derived from a well-executed faro hand or a perfectly calibrated dose.
But as the carriage rattled through the streets of London, carrying me south toward Mayfair, I found my thoughts drifting not to the plan but to the night before, to the private room at the Ouroboros, to Sebastian's hands on my body and his mouth against mine and the roughness of him, the urgency, the anger that was not really anger but something closer to desperation.
He had tried to take control. He had failed.
The failure was instructive, not because it demonstrated my superiority, which was already established, but because it revealed the depth of his frustration and the specificity of his need.
A man who grabs a woman and pushes her against a wall and takes her with that kind of force is not a man who is in control of himself.
He is a man who has lost control and is trying to reclaim it through the only channel available to him, and the channel is physical, and the physical is the most transparent of all channels, because it reveals what the rational mind is trying to conceal.
I had allowed him to believe he was dominant.
I had stood against the wall and let him enter me and let him drive into me with the fury of a man who is punishing himself as much as the woman he is fucking, and I had watched him with the detached attention I bring to all experiences, and what I had seen was this: Sebastian Aldric wanted me, and the wanting was destroying him, and the destruction was visible in every movement, every breath, every sound he made, and the visibility of the destruction was both the evidence of my success and the source of something I could not identify.
I did not enjoy the sex. That is not precisely true.
I experienced physical sensation, and the sensation was not unpleasant, and the orgasm I had allowed myself at the end was genuine, in the sense that it was produced by physical stimulation rather than performance.
But the physical sensation was secondary to the psychological observation, and the observation was the thing that interested me, and the interest was not sexual but strategic.
I was studying him. I was cataloguing his responses.
I was mapping the architecture of his desire so that I could navigate it more efficiently in future encounters.
This is what Vivienne taught me. This is what she meant when she said, "Be careful.
" Not that I should be careful of others, but that I should be careful of myself, because the study of other people's desires can become a desire in itself, and the desire to understand can become indistinguishable from the desire to possess, and possession is a form of attachment, and attachment is the thing that kills.
I was attached to Sebastian Aldric. I had known this since December, when the residue of our first encounter had lingered in my mind longer than strategy could account for.
I had acknowledged it, briefly, in the aftermath, and then I had set it aside, because acknowledgment is not the same as understanding, and I did not understand why a man who saw through my performance should occupy my thoughts with such persistence.
The carriage turned into Grosvenor Square.
Blackwood House loomed ahead, its windows bright against the January sky, its portico gleaming with the polish that the footman applied every morning regardless of weather.
The house was mine. Everything in it was mine.
The wealth, the title, the position, the accumulated assets of three marriages: all mine, all secured, all beyond the reach of anyone who might try to take them.
Except Sebastian.
He could not take the wealth. He could not take the title.
But he could take something else, something that had no name and no legal status and no market value, and the taking of it would be more damaging than any material loss, because it would expose the one flaw in my construction: the attachment I could not sever, the fascination I could not explain, the interest in a man who saw me with a clarity that was simultaneously my greatest threat and my most compelling experience.
I stepped from the carriage and walked up the front steps.
Dorothea followed, carrying the empty basket that had held the chrysanthemums. The footman opened the door.
The hall was warm, and the fire in the drawing room had been lit, and the smell of beeswax polish and fresh flowers greeted me like the embrace of an old friend.
Edmund was in the morning room, I could hear him through the half-open door, talking to Miss Hale about something that involved a great deal of laughter and the word "elephant" repeated at intervals.
I paused outside the door and listened to him for a moment.
His voice was high and clear and completely without deception, and the sound of it was a relief, a respite from the intricate calculations that occupied the rest of my hours.
Edmund did not calculate. Edmund did not perform.
Edmund simply was, and the simplicity of his being was the one thing in my life that I did not control and did not wish to control.
I walked to my study and closed the door and sat at my desk.
The correspondence of the morning waited: a letter from Hartwell about the Ashworth estate accounts, a note from Lady Pemberton inviting me to a small gathering on the twenty-eighth, a bill from the florist. I opened Hartwell's letter first, scanned its contents with the rapid attention I brought to all documents, and noted, without surprise, that the accounts were in order and that Hartwell's tone was, as always, one of professional deference barely concealing professional anxiety.
I set the letter aside and turned to my personal journal.
The journal was locked, coded, and kept in the drawer of my desk, and it contained, among other things, a detailed record of every interaction I had had with Sebastian Aldric, every word I had spoken to him, every gesture I had calculated, every response I had observed.
The journal was the most dangerous document in the house, more dangerous than the locked cabinet in the stillroom, because it revealed not merely what I had done but how I had thought about what I had done, and the thinking was the evidence that even I could not explain away.