Chapter 28 #2
I made a mental note of the watcher's presence and returned to the desk.
The letter from Dr. Hale was still there, and beside it, arranged in a neat stack, were the other items of correspondence that had arrived that morning.
I sorted through them with the practised efficiency of a woman who receives a great deal of post and who has learned to extract the essential information from each item in seconds.
An invitation from the Marchioness of Tavistock.
A request from the committee of the Foundling Hospital.
A note from my banker confirming the receipt of funds from the Suffolk estate.
A pamphlet from a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, which I had not requested and which would be consigned to the waste paper basket.
And a letter from Hartwell's widow.
I had written to her six days ago, the letter of condolence that I had composed on the same morning I had dispatched the anonymous missives to Scotland Yard.
She had replied now, and her reply was, I noted with a flicker of something that was not quite amusement and not quite contempt, precisely the kind of letter I would have expected from the widow of a weak man: effusive in its gratitude for my "kind words," trembling with the fragility of a woman who had lost not only her husband but the social standing that his position had provided, and desperately eager to maintain a connection with a person of consequence who might, in the uncertain future that widowhood had thrust upon her, prove useful.
She thanked me for my "generosity" in arranging for Hartwell's affairs to be managed after his death.
She expressed her hope that we might "continue our acquaintance.
" She asked, with the naked needfulness of a woman who has no one else to ask, whether I might be able to assist her in finding a suitable lodger for the rooms above Hartwell's former offices in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
I read the letter and set it aside. Lady Hartwell was not a threat.
She was not anything. She was a woman who had been married to a weak man and who had, by that marriage, inherited nothing but his debts, his shame, and his absence, and who would spend the remainder of her life in the diminished circumstances that weak men bequeath to their survivors.
I felt nothing for her, or nothing that I recognised as feeling, and the absence of feeling was, I reflected, one of the advantages of my condition, the ability to regard the suffering of others with the same detached attention I brought to the study of a specimen in a glass case.
I turned my attention to the next phase of the operation.
With Hartwell dead and Dr. Hale neutralised, the evidentiary war was effectively won.
Sebastian had no witnesses, no authenticated documents, and no institutional support.
The remaining task was to ensure that his professional position deteriorated to the point at which he could no longer sustain even the pretence of an investigation, and this task was well in hand.
The anonymous letters to Scotland Yard had been received, I had confirmation of this through a channel that need not concern us here, and their effect had been precisely as I had predicted: a seed of doubt planted in the institutional mind, a nervousness among Sebastian's superiors that manifested as increased scrutiny and diminished tolerance.
The gossip in society was performing its parallel function, eroding Sebastian's reputation from without while the letters eroded it from within, and the two erosions, converging, were producing the kind of cumulative pressure that no individual, however determined, could withstand indefinitely.
I reviewed the situation with the cold precision of a general reviewing a battlefield.
The enemy was retreating. His supply lines were cut.
His allies had deserted him. His position was untenable.
The question was not whether he would fall but how long he would take to fall, and how much damage he might do in the process of falling, and whether the damage, if any, could be contained within acceptable parameters.
Sebastian was a force multiplier. I had acknowledged this to myself, in the quiet hours, in the privacy of my study, with the notebook closed and the lamp extinguished and no one watching.
A force multiplier was a unit whose effectiveness exceeded what its material resources would suggest, and Sebastian's material resources were, by any objective measure, negligible: no evidence, no witnesses, no institutional support, no credibility.
But his determination was not negligible, and his intelligence was not negligible, and his capacity for persistence in the face of overwhelming disadvantage was not negligible, and these three qualities, combined, made him more dangerous than a man with ten times his resources and none of his tenacity.
I had seen men like Sebastian before, in the histories I had studied and in the rare, uncomfortable encounters with individuals who refused to accept the verdict of circumstances.
They were men who believed beyond evidence, who persisted beyond reason, and who could not be managed by the usual mechanisms of incentive and consequence because the mechanisms did not operate on the axis that governed their behaviour.
Sebastian was not motivated by self-interest, and a man who is not motivated by self-interest cannot be controlled by threats to his self-interest. He was not motivated by fear, and a man who is not motivated by fear cannot be controlled by the things that frighten other men.
He was motivated by something else, something I had not yet fully identified, and the uncertainty about the nature of his motivation was, I acknowledged, the single remaining gap in my strategic assessment.
But the gap was closing. The pressure was increasing.
And Sebastian, whatever his motivation, was operating within a system that was designed to crush precisely the kind of persistence he was demonstrating.
The system was bureaucratic, institutional, and relentless in its indifference to individual determination, and the system, unlike Sebastian, could not be outlasted or outmanoeuvred or outwitted, because the system was not a person but a process, and processes do not tire, do not despair, and do not stop.
I allowed myself a small, precise measure of satisfaction.
The satisfaction was genuine, as far as it went, which was not very far, because the pleasure I derived from strategic success was always attenuated, always tempered by the awareness that success, like failure, was merely a state, and that states, by their nature, were temporary.
But the attenuation was acceptable. I had not built my life on the pursuit of pleasure.
I had built it on the pursuit of control, and control, unlike pleasure, was a reliable and renewable resource, and the control I was exercising over the trajectory of Sebastian's professional destruction was, by any standard, substantial.
I stood and went to the door and opened it and called for Dorothea, who appeared within seconds, her face arranged in the familiar expression of professional attentiveness, and who waited, with the patience of a woman who had learned that silence was the safest response to any statement her employer might make.
"Dr. Hale has written," I said. "He will not be testifying."
Dorothea's expression did not change. She had known about the pressure being applied to Dr. Hale, because she knew about everything that occurred within the orbit of Blackwood House, and because I had allowed her to know, because Dorothea's knowledge was a tool, and tools, when properly maintained, were useful.
"I see, my lady," she said.
"You may inform the kitchen that I will be taking my supper in my study this evening. And please see that Mr. Edmund has his drawing materials ready. I have promised to sit with him while he works on his Egyptian pictures."
"Yes, my lady."
She turned to go. I stopped her.
"Dorothea."
She turned back. Her face was still arranged in the expression of professional attentiveness, but her eyes, behind the arrangement, held something else, something that I recognised as the particular quality of a woman who is carrying information she does not wish to impart and who is waiting, with the dread of a person on the edge of a precipice, for the moment when the information will be demanded of her.
"The Inspector has been seen near the house," I said. "You mentioned this to me last week. Has there been any further contact?"
The hesitation was brief, no more than a second, but I registered it with the precision I brought to all observations of human behaviour.
The hesitation was the hesitation of a woman choosing her words, and the choosing was the choosing of a woman who knew that the words she selected would have consequences, and the consequences were the consequences of a servant who was caught between her employer's authority and her own conscience, and the conscience, I knew from long observation, was the more powerful of the two.
"He approached Mr. Edmund at the Museum, my lady.
Three days ago. While I was chaperoning.
He was pleasant. He asked about the mummies.
Mr. Edmund enjoyed the conversation." Dorothea's voice was steady, but her hands, at her sides, had tightened, the fingers interlacing in the gesture of a woman who was holding on to something, and the something was not, I suspected, merely the fabric of her apron.
I felt the tremor again. It was stronger this time, less a tremor than a shift, a displacement in the geological substrata of my mental architecture, and the shift was produced by a single piece of information that had, in an instant, reconfigured the entire strategic landscape.