Chapter 27 #3
I arrived at Blackwood House as the afternoon light was beginning to fail.
Dorothea was waiting in the entrance hall, her face arranged in the expression of professional attentiveness that she maintained in my presence and that I had long ago stopped trying to see through, because the seeing through was, in Dorothea's case, unrewarding: her thoughts were transparent in their anxiety, her loyalty to Edmund was genuine, and her fear of me was, I suspected, the single most powerful organising principle of her existence.
"The post has arrived, my lady," she said, and she held out a silver tray upon which lay three letters and a visiting card.
I scanned the items without interest. The letters were from people who wanted things: invitations, requests for donations, solicitations of support for causes that I did not support.
The visiting card was from a woman I had no wish to see.
I set the tray aside and climbed the stairs to the first floor, where my study awaited me, and where the notebook lay open on the desk, its pages filled with the plans and countermeasures and contingencies that constituted the architecture of the war I was waging against Sebastian Aldric.
I sat at the desk and reviewed the plans.
The next phase involved the systematic cultivation of Sebastian's colleagues at Scotland Yard, the identification of those who were already predisposed to view his conduct with disfavour, and the careful, indirect reinforcement of their existing doubts.
Sergeant Price, I knew from my intelligence, was concerned about Sebastian's state of mind.
He had mentioned his concerns to at least two other officers, and the mentions had been sympathetic but clear: the Inspector was not himself, the case was consuming him, and someone needed to intervene before he did something that would damage his career beyond repair.
Price was not an ally in any active sense.
He did not know me and had no reason to do my bidding.
But his concerns were real, and they were already circulating through the department, and all I needed to do was ensure that they continued to circulate, gathering weight and authority as they went, until they reached the point at which Superintendent Graves would feel compelled to act.
The mechanism was already in motion. The letters were in the post. The gossip was in the air.
The colleagues were talking. And Sebastian, alone in his rooms or pacing the corridors of the Yard or walking the streets at night in the manner I had observed, was moving through a world that was, hour by hour, becoming less hospitable to his presence, less tolerant of his obsession, and less willing to provide him with the institutional cover that any investigation requires.
I closed the notebook. I opened a fresh page and began to write the letter to Hartwell's widow, the real one this time, the letter that would be read at the funeral and that would demonstrate, to anyone who cared to observe, that the Countess Dowager of Ashworth was a woman of feeling as well as of consequence, a woman who grieved for her friends and who expressed her grief with the dignity and restraint that society expected.
The letter took forty minutes. I read it through, made two small corrections, and set it aside.
Then I sat in the quiet of the study, listening to the sounds of the house settling around me, the distant clatter of pots from the kitchen, the murmur of voices from the servants' hall, the creak of floorboards overhead where Dorothea was attending to Edmund's evening routine, and I thought about the war, and about Sebastian, and about the strange, unclassifiable sensation that his persistence produced in me, a sensation that was not quite admiration and not quite exasperation and not quite anything else I could name, but that was, in its own way, the most persistent and the most interesting of all the phenomena I had encountered in the five months since a lean, dark-eyed stranger had stood at the graveside of my husband and watched me with the unblinking attention of a man who saw too much.
The war was going well. The machinery was operating with the precision I had designed.
And yet, sitting in the quiet study with the evening light fading and the sounds of the house surrounding me, I felt, for the first time since the funeral, the faintest suggestion of something that was not satisfaction, not triumph, not the clean, calculated pleasure of a successful operation, but something quieter and more ambiguous, something that I could not, despite all my training and all my precision, bring into focus.
I did not examine it. The examination could wait. The war came first.
I went upstairs to check on Edmund, who was sitting in his room with a book of Egyptian hieroglyphs open on his lap, the pages turned to a reproduction of a wall painting from the tomb of Seti I, and who looked up at me with the open, unguarded expression that was the only thing in my life that I did not perform for and could not perform around.
His brow was furrowed, and his fingers were tracing the outline of a hieroglyph, a bird with outstretched wings, and the tracing was careful and slow, the movement of a mind that was trying to understand something that was, perhaps, just beyond its reach.
"Cecilia," he said, and the sound of my name in his voice was, as it always was, a small disturbance in the otherwise smooth surface of my consciousness, a ripple that I could not ignore and could not explain and that I had long ago stopped trying to manage.
"The bird means something. But I don't know what. "
"It means 'greatness,'" I said. "Or sometimes 'spirit.' It depends on the context."
"Oh." He considered this. "That is a lot of meanings for one bird."
"Yes," I said. "It is."
He returned to the book. I stood in the doorway and watched him, and the watching was, I acknowledged, another inefficiency, another lapse in the compartmentalisation, because Edmund was not a strategic variable, he was Edmund, the one creature in my world who existed outside the machinery of my calculations, and the fact that I watched him with an attention that was not strategic was a fact that I had never been able to reconcile with the rest of my mental architecture.
I closed the door softly. I went back downstairs.
I sat at my desk. I opened the notebook and read through the plans one more time, checking each element for precision and completeness, and when I was satisfied, I closed the notebook and turned off the lamp and sat in the dark, listening to the house, and thinking about Sebastian, who was somewhere in London, fighting a war he did not know he was losing, and who would, in the fullness of time, discover that the ground beneath his feet had been removed so gradually and so completely that he would not, until the final moment, realise he had been standing on nothing at all.
The dismantling was proceeding. It was elegant. It was thorough. It was, in its own grim way, beautiful.
And somewhere, in the deep, unlit recesses of my mind, the tremor persisted.