Chapter 18 #3
But this was different. If Hartwell had given him documents, if he now possessed evidence rather than merely suspicion, the calculus shifted.
Evidence changes a man. Evidence gives him something solid to hold, something to present, something that transforms a private conviction into a public case.
Sebastian had been operating on instinct and pattern for three months, and instinct and pattern, however compelling, are not admissible in court.
Documents are. A physician's alarmed letter is.
An insurance policy taken out approximately two months before a convenient death is.
And a solicitor's testimony, supported by those documents, is the kind of thing that convinces magistrates to issue warrants.
I would need to see Sebastian before he acted.
I would need to neutralise the threat posed by Hartwell's evidence before it could be formalised, and the only weapon I had that was capable of neutralising Sebastian Aldric was Sebastian Aldric himself.
Not his body, though that was a lever I had used before and would use again if necessary.
His conscience. His doubt. His terrible, exquisite awareness that the woman he wanted to destroy was the same woman he could not stop wanting, and that the destruction of one would entail the destruction of the other, and that no man, however principled, can willingly destroy the thing he desires most.
I stood and went to the window. The evening was settling over London, a slow darkening that began at the rooftops and worked its way downward, extinguishing the colours of the square and leaving, in their place, the amber geometry of gas lamps and the black silhouettes of bare trees.
Edmund was in the nursery with Miss Hale, working through a picture book I had selected for its simplicity and its capacity to hold his attention without frustrating his limited comprehension.
Dorothea was in the city, making her inquiries.
The house was empty except for the kitchen staff, who were occupied with the preparation of dinner and who knew better than to disturb me when my study door was closed.
I reviewed the terrain. Hartwell had to be managed.
The timing was uncertain; I would know more when Dorothea returned.
But whether Hartwell had spoken yesterday or a week ago, the window of opportunity was closing.
Sebastian would take the documents to his superintendent, and the superintendent would either authorise a formal investigation or decline to do so, and either outcome would restrict my freedom of action.
If the investigation was authorised, I would face the full machinery of the state, and while I was confident in my ability to manoeuvre within institutional constraints, the confidence was not absolute.
If the investigation was declined, Sebastian would be left with evidence he was forbidden to act upon, and a man in that position is the most dangerous kind, because he has nothing to lose.
The plan formed itself with the crystalline clarity that characterised my best strategic thinking.
I would go to Sebastian. I would go to his rooms, as I had gone before, uninvited and unannounced, and I would present myself to him not as the suspect in his investigation but as the woman he could not stop thinking about.
I would use the weapon I had been cultivating since December, the weapon that was more effective than any document or testimony, the weapon of myself.
Not my body, or not only my body. My performance.
The performance of vulnerability, of confusion, of a woman who is frightened by the investigation and wounded by the suspicions of a man she has come to trust. I would allow him to see what he wanted to see: a damaged woman, a victim of circumstance, someone who needed protection rather than prosecution.
And I would watch, as I always watched, for the moment when his suspicion yielded to sympathy and his sympathy yielded to something stronger, and in that yielding, the evidence he had gathered would become, not a weapon, but a complication, a thing he could not use without destroying the thing he could not stop wanting.
It was a gamble. Every strategy is a gamble when the variables are human and the stakes are mortal. But I had been gambling for twenty years, and I had won every time, and the confidence of those victories was a resource that no amount of documentary evidence could diminish.
I turned from the window and sat at my desk and began to compose the letter that would serve as my pretext.
The letter would be personal in tone, apologetic in content, and ambiguous in its implications, the kind of letter that Sebastian could interpret as either an invitation or a confession, and the ambiguity itself would be the bait, because Sebastian Aldric was a man who could not resist ambiguity, who was driven by the need to resolve uncertainty, and who would come to me, as he had come before, because the uncertainty of not coming was more unbearable than the risk of arriving.
I wrote the letter in ten minutes. I sealed it.
I placed it in the hands of my groom, with instructions to deliver it personally to Inspector Aldric's rooms in Westminster and to wait for no reply.
The groom departed at seven o'clock. By nine o'clock, the letter would be in Sebastian's hands.
By ten o'clock, he would have read it three times and be sitting in his chair, staring at the wall, wrestling with the same conflict that had been his constant companion for three months.
By midnight, I expected, he would come.
I went upstairs and prepared myself. The preparation was not merely physical, though the physical was part of it.
I bathed, and I dressed with care, choosing a gown of dark blue silk that I knew suited my colouring and that conveyed, by its cut and its severity, the impression of a woman who had dressed in haste but had not neglected her appearance, a woman caught between vulnerability and composure.
I arranged my hair with the deliberate simplicity of someone who has not had time for elaborate styling, a loose coil secured with a single pin, and the effect was, I knew, more alluring than any ornate arrangement, because it suggested a woman who had been interrupted, who had left something unfinished to come to him, and the interruption itself was a statement of priority.
I sat in my study and waited. The fire burned.
The clock ticked. Edmund was asleep. Dorothea had returned, silently, and had reported, with the economy of words that made her so valuable, that Sir William's carriage had indeed been seen in the vicinity of Great Scotland Yard two days ago.
The driver had been observed speaking to a woman at a coffee house near the market.
The woman had been described as plain and dark-haired.
Dorothea had not needed to tell me the rest. Sir William had gone to Sebastian. Sir William had brought documents. The case was no longer a matter of suspicion and pattern; it was a matter of paper and ink and the slow, grinding machinery of the law.
The clock struck eleven. I heard a carriage on the square and did not move.
Carriages passed constantly; the street was a thoroughfare, and the sound of wheels on cobbles was as routine as the ticking of the clock.
But when the carriage stopped, and the footsteps that followed were the firm, deliberate steps of a man who has made a decision and is committed to seeing it through, I knew.
I stood. I smoothed my gown. I touched my hair, confirming the arrangement of the single pin.
I walked to the front door and opened it before he could knock, and he was standing on my doorstep in his dark coat and his grey hat, with the rain falling lightly around him and his dark eyes fixed on my face with the expression of a man who has come not to interrogate but to surrender.
"Sebastian," I said.
"Cecilia."
The night was cold. The rain fell. And somewhere inside the machinery that had served me so faithfully for twenty years, a tremor ran through the works that I could not identify and could not stop, and I understood, with the clinical precision that was both my gift and my prison, that the game had changed, and that the change had come not from outside but from within, and that the thing I had believed to be a fault in the machinery might, in fact, be something far more dangerous.
It might be the beginning of the end.