Chapter 20 #2
"That is a serious accusation, Sebastian." I kept my voice light, conversational, the voice of a woman who is politely confused by a statement that does not make sense. "I am not certain I understand what you are suggesting."
"I am suggesting that you murdered three men.
I am suggesting that you married them for their money and their position, and that when you had extracted what you needed, you killed them with a precision that would be admirable in any other context.
" He lifted the first document from the table, Dr. Hale's earliest letter, and held it so that I could see the physician's careful handwriting.
"This is a letter from the Earl's physician, written in January of 1887, in which he describes symptoms that are consistent with arsenic poisoning.
He writes here that he considered the possibility of poisoning but declined to pursue it out of deference to your feelings.
He was afraid of upsetting you. And while he was being afraid of upsetting you, you were putting arsenic in your husband's brandy. "
I looked at the letter. I recognised Dr. Hale's hand, the cautious, qualified script of a physician who did not wish to commit himself to any statement that could not be retracted.
The letter was genuine. It was also, in isolation, insufficient.
A physician's speculation about the possibility of poisoning was not proof of poisoning.
It was a suggestion, an anxiety, a private concern that had never been formalised into a diagnosis.
"Dr. Hale was a cautious man," I said. "He considered many possibilities. The possibility of poisoning was one of them. It was not confirmed. The Earl died of natural causes, as his death certificate attests."
"The death certificate was signed by a physician who did not perform an examination.
Who accepted your account of the Earl's final illness at face value.
Who buried him without a post-mortem examination because you requested it.
" Sebastian's voice was rising, the control he had prepared beginning to fracture under the pressure of the words he was saying.
"You managed his medical care. You declined the specialist. You controlled who saw him and what they were told.
And when he died, you made sure there was no body to examine and no evidence to find. "
I allowed a careful expression of distress to cross my features.
Not grief, not yet. The distress of a woman who is being accused of something monstrous by someone she believed she could trust. I let my lower lip tremble, slightly, the way I had been taught, and I dropped my gaze to my hands, which were folded in my lap with the deliberate stillness of a woman who is too hurt to move.
"Sebastian. You cannot believe this. You cannot truly believe that I am capable of what you are suggesting."
"I can believe it because the evidence is on this table.
The physician's letters, which document a pattern of symptoms entirely consistent with arsenic poisoning.
The insurance policy on Ravenscroft, taken out two months before the riding accident that killed him, specifying death by equestrian accident as the trigger for payment.
Hartwell's notes, which describe the unusual terms of your marriage settlements and the statistical improbability of three husbands dying within three years of marriage.
" He set the letters down and picked up the insurance policy.
"Fifty thousand pounds, Cecilia. You insured your husband's life for fifty thousand pounds two months before he died in an accident that you had insured against. How do you explain that? "
I looked at the insurance policy. The paper was thick and official, the company's seal affixed in the corner, and the language was the language of the actuarial mind, precise and bloodless, calculating the value of a human life in pounds and shillings.
It was damning on its surface. But the surface was not where battles were won or lost.
"Henry was a careless rider," I said. My voice was quiet, measured, the voice of a woman explaining something that should have been obvious.
"He rode every morning, regardless of weather, regardless of condition, and he took risks that frightened me.
I discussed my concerns with Sir William, and he suggested the policy as a means of providing for me in the event of an accident.
It was a precaution. A wife's precaution.
If you wish to construe it as evidence of premeditated murder, you may do so.
But a jury of reasonable men and women might see it differently. "
"A jury of reasonable men and women might see it as exactly what it is: a woman insuring her husband's life against the specific method she intended to use to kill him."
He was pacing now, the documents abandoned on the table, his body moving with the restless energy of a man whose composure is disintegrating.
I watched him pace, and behind my careful expression of distress, I was calculating.
He was angry. The anger was real, and it was not merely professional.
It was the anger of a man who has been deceived, who has given himself to someone and discovered that the giving was to a void, and the discovery has not diminished the desire but has instead transformed it into something darker and more dangerous.
He wanted me. He also wanted to destroy me.
And the collision of those two wants had produced a state of raw, exposed emotional volatility that was, at this moment, the most dangerous weapon in the room.
Not his weapon. Mine.
I stood. The movement was slow, deliberate, the movement of a woman rising from a chair because she can no longer remain seated, because the emotions she is experiencing are too large for the contained posture of sitting.
I let my hands fall to my sides. I let my shoulders drop.
I let my face arrange itself into an expression of such genuine-seeming anguish that it would have moved a stone.
"What do you want from me, Sebastian?" My voice broke, slightly, on his name.
I allowed the break. I had practised breaks.
I knew precisely how much vibration to introduce into the vocal cords, precisely how much air to allow into the voice, precisely how to shape the sound of a woman on the edge of tears.
"A confession to crimes I did not commit? Or something else?"
He stopped pacing. He turned to face me, and the look on his face was the most exposed I had ever seen it, the look of a man who has been stripped of every defence and who is standing naked before the thing he both hates and desires.
His jaw was clenched. His hands were fists at his sides.
His dark eyes were bright with the particular brightness of a man who has not slept and who has been drinking coffee and staring at documents and thinking about a woman he cannot stop thinking about, and the combination of exhaustion and arousal and fury had reduced him to a state of elemental vulnerability.
"I want the truth," he said.
"The truth." I repeated the word as though it were a foreign object, something I had encountered but could not identify.
"You have been investigating me for four months, Sebastian.
You have examined every aspect of my life, every marriage, every death, every financial transaction.
You have spoken to physicians and solicitors and servants.
You have assembled documents and patterns and suspicions.
And in all that time, in all those months of scrutiny, have you once asked yourself why you are doing this?
Have you once considered the possibility that what you are pursuing is not justice but something else entirely? "
He stared at me. The fury in his eyes was not diminishing. It was intensifying, fed by the accusation in my words, by the suggestion that his investigation was driven by something other than professional integrity. And the accusation was true, which was what made it so devastating.
"Don't," he said. "Don't try to turn this into a discussion of my motives."
"Your motives are the only thing worth discussing, Sebastian.
Because your motives are the reason you are standing in this room with those documents instead of standing in a courtroom presenting them to a magistrate.
You have had evidence for weeks. You have had enough to justify a formal investigation since February.
And yet here you are, in your rooms, at half past nine in the evening, confronting me privately instead of publicly, and the question is not whether I am guilty or innocent but why you cannot bring yourself to act on what you believe. "
He moved toward me. The movement was fast, abrupt, the movement of a man whose control has shattered, and in the instant before he reached me I understood that the confrontation had shifted, that the words I had chosen had struck something deeper than his investigative resolve and that the thing they had struck was now rising to the surface with a violence that neither of us could contain.
His hand closed on my arm, not gently, and he pulled me toward him, and his face was inches from mine and his breath was hot against my skin and his eyes were the eyes of a man who has been destroyed and who is responding to the destruction with the only weapon he has left.
"You have ruined me," he said. "You have taken everything.
My career. My judgment. My ability to look at myself in the mirror without seeing a man who has been complicit in his own destruction.
And I cannot stop wanting you. Do you understand that?
I cannot stop. And the fact that I cannot stop is the most damning evidence of all, because it tells me that whatever you are, whatever you have done, I am something worse.
I am a man who knows the truth and chooses the lie. "