Chapter 24 #4
Suicide. The word was perfect in its application.
Hartwell was a man who had been visibly anxious for weeks, who had been seen in the company of a police detective, who was known to be struggling with the pressures of his professional responsibilities.
A man in that condition, a man who had spent a lifetime looking the other way and who had finally, in a moment of misguided conscience, tried to do the right thing, and who had then been visited by the object of his conscience and reminded, in the most forceful terms, of the cost of doing right, might reasonably choose to end his life.
The narrative wrote itself. It required no fabrication beyond the suicide note, and the note was a small matter, a single page of handwriting that could be produced by a woman who had spent years studying Hartwell's penmanship in the course of reviewing legal documents and who could reproduce his characteristic letterforms with a precision that would fool any but the most expert analysis.
I turned the plan over in my mind during the carriage ride home, examining it from every angle, testing it for weaknesses, identifying the risks and the contingencies.
The risks were manageable. The visit to Hartwell's home, where I would administer the laudanum to his brandy, would require an explanation, but the explanation was ready: a follow-up to our meeting at his offices, a personal call to discuss the details of his recantation, the kind of visit that a solicitor's most important client might reasonably make.
Hartwell, chastened by our earlier conversation and eager to demonstrate his compliance, would receive me.
He would offer me a seat. He would, out of habit and courtesy, offer me refreshment.
I would decline the refreshment, but I would accept a glass of water, and during the few minutes that Hartwell was occupied with the preparation of the water, I would have access to his brandy decanter, which sat on the sideboard in his study, within arm's reach of his chair, exactly where it always sat.
The laudanum itself was already in my possession.
I had purchased it three weeks ago from an apothecary in Clerkenwell, a small shop on a side street that catered to a clientele who did not ask questions and did not receive answers.
I had used a false name, as always, and I had paid in cash, and the bottle, with its distinctive blue glass and its plain paper label, was sitting in the locked cabinet in the stillroom at Blackwood House, nestled among the other working materials that I had accumulated over the years.
The dosage required for a lethal overdose was known to me from my study of pharmacology, a study that had begun with Vivienne's instruction and had continued, independently, through the careful reading of medical texts and the systematic observation of the effects of various substances on various constitutions.
I would need to visit Hartwell's home within the next three days.
The timing was important: too soon after our meeting at the offices, and the connection would be too obvious; too late, and Hartwell might find his courage, or his conscience, or both.
Three days was the optimal interval, long enough to allow the emotional impact of our conversation to settle and short enough to prevent the settlement from hardening into resolve.
I spent the evening at Blackwood House, reviewing my preparations and attending to the domestic matters that required my attention.
Edmund was in good spirits, having spent the afternoon in the garden with Dorothea, and I sat with him for an hour after dinner while he showed me his drawings, which were, as always, rough and clumsy but executed with a sincerity that I found, in my own idiosyncratic way, pleasing.
I did not think about Hartwell while I was with Edmund.
The two compartments of my mind, the domestic and the operational, were kept separate with a discipline that Vivienne had instilled in me from childhood, and the separation was as natural to me as breathing, as automatic as the beating of my heart.
Three days later, on a Tuesday evening, I called at Hartwell's home in Bedford Square.
He was surprised to see me but not alarmed, because I had sent word that morning that I wished to discuss the details of the recantation, and the message had prepared him for the possibility of a visit.
He received me in his study, which was a smaller, shabbier version of his office, lined with legal texts and smelling of old paper and furniture polish.
The brandy decanter was on the sideboard, exactly where I knew it would be, and the glass that Hartwell used for his evening ritual was beside it, washed and dried and ready.
We discussed the recantation. I walked him through the language he would use with Sebastian, the phrases and qualifications that would render his original testimony ambiguous without making his recantation appear coerced.
I suggested that he attribute his earlier statements to a period of stress and anxiety, a time when he was not thinking clearly and had allowed his imagination to run away with him.
I reminded him that the documents, when interpreted correctly, supported the conclusion that the deaths were natural, and that his initial alarm had been the product of an over-active conscience rather than a reasoned assessment of the evidence.
Hartwell listened, nodded, took notes, and gradually, over the course of forty minutes, settled into the comfortable rhythm of a man who is being guided through a difficult task by someone who knows the way.
At ten o'clock, I rose to leave. Hartwell rose with me, expressing gratitude for my guidance and reassurance that he would speak to Sebastian within the week.
I allowed the conversation to wind down naturally, the way a conversation between a solicitor and his most important client should wind down, with pleasantries and expressions of mutual regard and the unspoken understanding that the business between them had been, for the moment, concluded.
"May I trouble you for a glass of water before I go?" I asked, settling back into my chair as though the thought had just occurred to me. "The evening has been rather warm, and I find myself parched."
"Of course. Forgive me, I should have offered earlier." Hartwell moved toward the door, his back to the study, and I watched him go with the patience of a spider watching a fly move toward a web that it cannot see.
He was gone for perhaps ninety seconds. The time was sufficient.
I rose from my chair, crossed to the sideboard, and lifted the brandy decanter.
The stopper came free with a soft, musical sound.
I uncapped the small vial of laudanum from my reticule and tilted it, allowing the dark, viscous liquid to flow into the brandy, where it dissolved almost instantly, the colour of the laudanum blending seamlessly with the amber of the spirit.
The dosage was calculated to produce death within two to four hours, depending on Hartwell's tolerance and the contents of his stomach, and by the time his body was discovered, the laudanum would have been fully absorbed, leaving no visible trace in the glass and no obvious sign of tampering in the decanter.
I replaced the stopper. I returned to my chair. I was sitting, composed and serene, when Hartwell re-entered the study with a glass of water.
"I apologise for the delay," he said. "The kitchen is at the other end of the house."
"No matter at all." I accepted the water with a smile. "I am grateful for your hospitality, Sir William. I know this has been a difficult time for you, and I appreciate your willingness to resolve the matter."
"It is the least I can do," he said, and the phrase, which was a conventional expression of courtesy, carried a weight that Hartwell did not intend and that I recognised with the precision of a woman who collects such ironies the way other women collect porcelain.
I departed. I let myself out of the front door and walked to my carriage, which was waiting at the kerb, and I settled into the velvet interior and gave the driver the Blackwood House address, and as the carriage moved through the dark streets of Bloomsbury toward the brighter squares of Mayfair, I reviewed the evening's work with the same professional detachment I brought to every operation.
The laudanum was in Hartwell's brandy. He would pour himself a glass at eleven o'clock, as he did every evening, and he would drink it, and the laudanum would begin its quiet, irreversible work.
He would feel drowsy, perhaps, and attribute the drowsiness to the emotional exhaustion of the past weeks.
He might sit in his chair and doze, or he might go to bed, or he might simply fall asleep where he sat, his head tipping forward onto his chest, his breathing becoming shallower and slower until it stopped altogether.
The discovery, when it came, would be made by his housekeeper in the morning, and the scene would be consistent with suicide: a dead man in his study, a brandy glass beside him, a bottle of laudanum on the desk, and a note, written in his own hand, expressing despair over business failures and personal shame.
The note was already written. I had composed it the previous evening, in my study at Blackwood House, working from memory to reproduce Hartwell's characteristic letterforms, his slightly angular script, his tendency to dot his i's too high and cross his t's with a faint upward flick.
The note was brief, as suicide notes should be, and it expressed, in language that was consistent with Hartwell's education and temperament, a sense of hopelessness and regret that would be immediately understood by anyone who read it.
It would be found in his desk drawer, placed among his personal papers, where his housekeeper would discover it while searching for the cause of his death.
I arrived home at half past ten. Dorothea met me at the door and helped me with my coat, and I went to my study and sat at my desk and reviewed the ledgers, and the routine of the review was comforting in its normality, a reminder that the world continued to turn and that the machinery of daily life operated according to its own inexorable logic, indifferent to the fact that, twelve miles away in Bedford Square, a man was pouring himself a glass of brandy that would kill him before morning.
I did not think about Hartwell's death with any particular emotion.
I had performed the operation with the same precision and care I brought to flower arrangement and estate management and the other domestic arts that occupied my public life, and the precision and care were expressions of professionalism, not sentiment.
Hartwell was a liability, and the liability had been neutralised, and the neutralisation had been clean and efficient and, so far as I could determine, undetectable.
The system that I had described to Hartwell, the system that protected people like me, would now protect me from the consequences of his death, because the system, as I had told him, was designed to accept the conclusions it was given, and the conclusion it would be given was that Sir William Hartwell, a man under enormous strain, had taken his own life.
I closed the ledgers. I extinguished the gas lamp.
I went upstairs to my bedroom and prepared for bed with the methodical attention I brought to every evening routine, and as I lay in the dark, I thought about the events of the past three days: the destruction of Penelope, which was a work of social engineering; and the elimination of Hartwell, which was a work of a different kind.
Both were necessary. Both were complete.
And both had been executed with a precision that would have satisfied even Vivienne, who had taught me, many years ago, that the measure of a woman's capability was not the size of her ambitions but the precision of her methods.
The clock struck midnight. Somewhere in London, in a study in Bedford Square, Sir William Hartwell was dead, or dying, or preparing to die, and the laudanum was doing its quiet work in his bloodstream, and the brandy glass was empty beside him, and the note was in his desk drawer, and the morning would bring the discovery and the inquest and the verdict of suicide by misadventure, and the world would continue to turn, and I would continue to turn with it, and the thing that Sebastian Aldric needed most — the testimony of the one man who could corroborate his evidence — would be gone, as though it had never existed, dissolved in a glass of brandy and a bottle of laudanum on a sideboard in a shabby study in Bedford Square.
I closed my eyes. I did not sleep immediately, because I rarely did, but I lay still and allowed my body to rest and my mind to settle, and in the silence of the dark bedroom, with the sounds of London filtering through the curtains, I experienced, for a single, unguarded moment, something that I could not identify, a flicker of sensation that was not quite satisfaction and not quite regret and not quite anything I had a name for.
It passed. Everything passes. I lay still and waited for sleep, and eventually, as it always did, it came.