Chapter 28 #3
Sebastian had spoken to Edmund. At the Museum. While Dorothea was present.
I controlled my response with the precision of a woman who has spent a lifetime controlling her responses.
My expression did not change. My posture did not alter.
My breathing remained even and regular, the breathing of a woman who is receiving routine information and who is processing it with the calm efficiency of a well-managed mind.
But beneath the controlled exterior, in the deep, fast currents of my strategic thinking, the information was being analysed with a speed and intensity that bordered on the ferocious.
What had Sebastian asked? What had Edmund told him? What, precisely, had been said in the conversation that Dorothea had described as "pleasant" and that Edmund had "enjoyed"?
Edmund did not lie. This was not a virtue, in the conventional sense, because Edmund did not possess the capacity for deception.
He said what he saw, what he thought, what he felt, with the unfiltered directness of a child, and the directness was, in the context of an investigation, extraordinarily dangerous.
He would not have understood that Sebastian was asking questions for a purpose.
He would not have recognised the strategic implications of his answers.
He would have responded to Sebastian's attention with the simple, trusting openness that characterised all his interactions with people who were kind to him, and the openness, in the hands of a detective as skilled as Sebastian, was a gift of incalculable value.
I thought of the locked cabinet in the stillroom.
I thought of Edmund's habit of wandering through the house at odd hours, observing things that no one else observed, noticing details that escaped the attention of the servants because the servants were trained not to notice them.
I thought of the way Edmund described the world, in simple, concrete terms that contained, embedded within their simplicity, truths that a sophisticated observer could extract and interpret.
He had told me, once, that he had seen "the medicine bottles" in the cabinet, and that they were "not the cook's," and the observation, innocent as it was, had nearly stopped my heart, because the observation was, in its guileless way, a description of evidence, and evidence, in the hands of the wrong person, was the most dangerous weapon in the world.
Had he told Sebastian about the cabinet?
I turned back to Dorothea. My voice was calm, my expression was composed, and the performance was, I knew, flawless, because my performances were always flawless, and the flawlessness was the product of years of training and decades of practice, and the practice had made the performance so automatic that I no longer needed to think about it, even when the thing I was concealing was not a mild irritation or a social inconvenience but a cold, sharp fear that Edmund, in his innocence, had given Sebastian the one piece of information that could, if pursued with sufficient determination, bring the entire structure crashing down.
"What did they discuss?" I asked.
Dorothea hesitated again. The hesitation was longer this time, two full seconds, and in those two seconds, I read the calculation that was occurring behind her eyes, the calculation of a woman who was weighing the risk of withholding information against the risk of providing it, and who was concluding, as she always concluded, that the risk of withholding was greater.
"The mummies, my lady. And Mr. Edmund's drawings. The Inspector was kind to him. He asked about the household, about how Mr. Edmund spends his days. He was curious about the arrangements. I did not think—"
"You did not think." The words were quiet, and the quiet was more dangerous than a shout, because the quiet was the quiet of a woman whose patience, always considerable, had been reduced, by a single piece of information, to something very close to its limit. "What else, Dorothea?"
"Mr. Edmund mentioned the stillroom." Dorothea's voice was barely above a whisper.
"He said his sister talks to the kitchen in a secret language.
He said the bottles in the locked cupboard are not the cook's.
The Inspector asked him to explain, and Mr. Edmund tried, but he does not understand the arrangements himself, and he could not explain clearly. "
The tremor became a tremor in fact, a physical sensation that I felt in my hands and in the pit of my stomach and in the back of my throat, and the tremor was not fear, because fear was an emotion I did not experience, but it was something adjacent to fear, something that occupied the same neurological territory and that produced the same physical symptoms and that was, whatever its true nature, profoundly unwelcome.
Sebastian knew about the cabinet. He had known, possibly, since Dorothea had first provided information about it, months ago, during the early days of the investigation.
But the information from Dorothea was second-hand, the report of a servant who had observed something unusual and who was, in the eyes of the law, a witness of limited credibility.
The information from Edmund was different.
Edmund was my brother, and the fact that he had confirmed, however obliquely, the existence of the locked cabinet and the nature of its contents gave the information a weight and a specificity that Dorothea's testimony could not provide.
I turned away from Dorothea and walked to the window. The man in the dark coat was still standing near the railings. He had not moved. The watcher was watching, and the watching was, in the context of what Dorothea had just told me, more ominous than it had been ten minutes ago.
"Send word to Pritchard," I said, without turning from the window. "I wish to review the Hartwell file. All of it. Today."
"Yes, my lady."
"And Dorothea."
"Yes, my lady?"
"Mr. Edmund's outings to the Museum are suspended. Indefinitely."
The silence that followed was the silence of a woman who understood the implications of what she had just heard and who was, in the understanding, experiencing something that she did not wish me to see. I did not turn to look at her. I did not need to. The silence told me everything.
When the door closed behind her, I stood at the window and looked out at the square and at the watcher by the railings and at the grey sky above, and I thought about Sebastian, and about Edmund, and about the cabinet in the stillroom, and about the fact that the war, which I had believed was nearly won, had just entered a new and more dangerous phase, a phase in which the thing I valued most in the world was no longer safely behind the walls I had built around it but was, instead, directly in the path of the man who was trying to destroy me.
I stood at the window for a long time. The man in the dark coat did not move. The clouds did not break. The war continued, and the tremor, in the deep, unlit recesses of my mind, grew stronger.