Chapter 31
The Fugitive
I had taken to walking past Blackwood House in the afternoons, a habit that served no investigative purpose and that I could not bring myself to abandon.
The rational mind, the part of me that had been trained at Scotland Yard to observe and deduce and draw conclusions from evidence, understood that walking past the house of one's primary suspect in plain view was an act of professional folly.
The other part of me, the part that had been compromised beyond repair in a candlelit drawing room in December and that had grown more compromised with each subsequent encounter, did not care.
It wanted to be near her. It wanted to see the curtains move in the upper windows, to catch a glimpse of Dorothea crossing the front hall, to confirm, through the simple evidence of the building's continued occupation, that she was still there, still functioning, still the immutable centre of the web I could not escape.
I told myself that I was watching Edmund.
This was partially true. After the conversation at the British Museum, in which the boy had mentioned the locked cabinet in the kitchen and the medicine bottles that were not the cook's, I had maintained a closer interest in his movements, and the recent restrictions Cecilia had placed upon him — the curtailed outings, the shortened walks, the increased supervision — had not escaped my notice.
Something had shifted in the Blackwood household, a tightening of the apparatus of control that surrounded Edmund, and I wanted to understand why.
It was possible that Cecilia had learned of my conversation with her brother and was responding by closing the cage more tightly around him.
It was also possible that the restrictions were unrelated to my investigation, a response to some domestic concern that I could not see from the pavement outside her house.
In either case, Edmund was the one variable in Cecilia's calculations that she could not fully control, and watching him was, I told myself, a legitimate extension of the investigation.
The afternoon of the eighth of May was warm for the season, the kind of English spring afternoon that tricks you into believing the winter is over, that the grey and the damp and the interminable chill have been permanently banished, that London has been transported, by some miracle of climate, to a more forgiving latitude.
The sky was pale blue, marbled with thin white clouds, and the light fell across the facades of the Mayfair houses with the particular clarity that comes before the haze of summer.
I was walking north along the eastern side of the square, approaching Blackwood House from the direction of Grosvenor Street, when I saw him.
He came through the front door as though it were the most natural thing in the world, which, for Edmund, it was.
He was wearing the grey suit that Dorothea laid out for him each morning, the one with the slightly crooked collar that he never seemed to notice, and he walked with the particular gait of a person who has no particular destination, no particular purpose, and no particular awareness that the world outside his sister's house is vast, loud, and largely indifferent to his welfare.
He paused on the front step, blinking in the sunlight, and then he descended the steps and turned left, toward the park, and I understood, with a jolt of something that was not quite alarm and not quite sympathy but some uncomfortable fusion of the two, that he was not being accompanied.
I looked at the front door. It was closed. No Dorothea. No maid. No footman. The door remained shut, and Edmund continued walking, and after a moment's hesitation that I would later examine with a scrutiny that bordered on cruelty, I followed.
I kept my distance. This was important. Whatever my intentions, I was a man who had been publicly associated with the household of the Countess Dowager of Ashworth, a man whose name had been spoken in connection with her at social gatherings and in the corridors of Scotland Yard, and the last thing I needed was to be seen accosting her brother on a public street.
I followed at fifty yards, threading my way through the afternoon traffic of carriages and pedestrians with the careful invisibility of a man who has spent eleven years learning to move through crowds without being noticed.
Edmund walked steadily, his head slightly tilted, his hands at his sides, his expression one of mild curiosity, as though he were taking a walk through a gallery and the gallery happened to be Mayfair.
I was not the only person who noticed him.
A nursemaid pushing a perambulator gave him a second glance, and a delivery boy on a bicycle swerved to avoid him, ringing his bell with an impatience that Edmund did not seem to register.
He walked as a person walks when he is accustomed to being guided: without urgency, without purpose, and without the particular awareness of danger that most adults carry with them like a second skin.
The streets of London are not kind to the unwary.
The pavements are crowded, the crossings are treacherous, and the traffic — the hansom cabs, the delivery wagons, the omnibuses, the private carriages — moves with a momentum that does not pause for the confused or the slow.
Edmund walked into this machinery as a child walks into a game whose rules he has not learned, and I watched him with the mounting unease of a person who can see an accident taking shape and who is not yet close enough to prevent it.
He reached the corner of Davies Street and hesitated, looking left and right with an expression of genuine bewilderment, and I realised, with a clarity that made my stomach tighten, that he was lost. He had walked out of Blackwood House without a destination, and now, confronted with the branching geometry of the streets, he had no method of choosing among them.
The British Museum, where I had spoken with him, was his usual destination on outings, and he was walking in its general direction, but the route was unfamiliar, and the noise, and the crowds, and the overwhelming sensory assault of a London afternoon in spring had begun to disorient him.
I saw his shoulders rise, the way they do when a person is gathering himself against a wave of discomfort, and I saw his hands begin their familiar fidgeting, the fingers folding and unfolding, tracing patterns against his thighs.
I closed the distance to thirty yards. The traffic on Davies Street was heavier than on the square, the afternoon deliveries from the West End shops and the returning carriages from the park creating a narrow, fast-moving channel of horses and wheels.
Edmund stood at the kerbside, looking at the road with an expression that I had come to recognise as his version of deep thought, a slight furrowing of the brow and a tilting of the head, as though he were listening to a voice that only he could hear.
The light changed. A delivery wagon, a heavy dray loaded with crates of wine from a Piccadilly merchant, was approaching from the east at a pace that was not excessive for the traffic conditions but was considerably too fast for a confused young man standing at the edge of a busy road.
What happened next unfolded with the terrible clarity of a slow-motion nightmare, each frame sharp and distinct and impossible to forget.
Edmund stepped off the kerb. Not decisively, not with the purposeful stride of a person crossing a road, but tentatively, tentatively, as though he had seen something on the other side that interested him — a dog, perhaps, or a flower in a window box, or merely the other pavement, which was, at that moment, the only feature of the landscape that he could process.
He was halfway across the carriageway when the driver of the wagon saw him.
I saw the driver's face, a broad, sunburned face beneath a flat cap, and I saw the face go through a rapid sequence of expressions: surprise, alarm, and then the grim resignation of a man who knows that his horse is going too fast and his load is too heavy and the distance is too short for any of the available options to be good ones.
He pulled on the reins. The horse protested, its hooves skidding on the worn surface of the road.
The wagon slowed, but not enough, not nearly enough, and the left front wheel caught Edmund a glancing blow on the side of the body and sent him spinning to the ground with a sound that I will hear for the rest of my life, the sound of a person's body striking cobblestones, which is not the sound that the theatre would have you believe but a sound that is duller and more intimate and more terrible, a sound of meat and bone meeting stone with a finality that communicates, in an instant, the full fragility of the human form.
I was running before the wagon had stopped.
I was running with the reckless speed of a man who has forgotten that he is a detective inspector on a public street and who has become, for the moment, nothing more than a person trying to reach another person who is lying on the ground and who is not moving.
I reached Edmund in perhaps eight seconds.
The wagon driver had already dismounted and was standing over the boy with an expression of horrified incomprehension, his hands hovering uselessly in the air, his mouth opening and closing without producing words.
A small crowd had begun to gather, the particular crowd that materialises at the scene of any accident in London, drawn by the primal magnetism of misfortune, their faces arranged in expressions of concern and curiosity that are, in the moment, indistinguishable from each other.