Chapter 31 #2
I knelt beside Edmund. His eyes were open, and they were the same grey as his sister's, and they were fixed on the sky with an expression of blank bewilderment that made my chest constrict, because it was the expression of a person who does not understand what has happened to him and who is waiting, with the patient trust of a child, for someone to explain it.
His face was pale. There was blood on his forehead, a thin line of it tracing down from his hairline to his temple, and there was a graze on his left cheek where the cobblestones had scraped the skin away.
His left leg was bent at an angle that legs are not meant to bend, and I recognised, from years of attending accident scenes in Whitechapel and elsewhere, the particular quality of a broken bone, the way the limb looks wrong, subtly deformed, as though it has been made of a different material from the rest of the body.
"Edmund." I spoke his name as clearly and steadily as I could, keeping my voice calm, projecting the reassurance that the situation demanded. "Edmund, can you hear me?"
He blinked. His eyes moved, slowly, from the sky to my face, and I saw recognition dawn, followed by a confusion that was deeper than the ordinary disorientation of a head injury.
He was looking at me as though he could not quite place me, as though I were a familiar object seen from an unfamiliar angle, and then, with a suddenness that startled me, his face crumpled, and he began to cry, not with the theatrical tears of a person performing distress but with the raw, uncontrolled sobbing of a child in pain, great shuddering gasps that shook his body and made the bent leg shift on the cobblestones, and he cried out a single word that cut through the noise of the gathering crowd and the snorting of the horse and the murmured oaths of the wagon driver, and the word was "Cecilia. "
I took his hand. I do not know why I did this.
It was not a professional instinct; holding the hand of an accident victim is not standard procedure at Scotland Yard.
It was something else, something more primitive and less defensible, the simple human response to a person in pain who has called out for the person who matters most to him, and who is not here, and who cannot be reached.
Edmund's fingers closed around mine with a grip that was surprisingly strong, the grip of a person who has found something solid in a world that has suddenly become chaotic and incomprehensible, and he held on, and I let him, and for a moment — a moment that I would later examine with a precision that bordered on self-punishment — the investigation ceased to exist, and I was simply a man holding a frightened boy's hand on a dirty street in Mayfair.
The crowd parted. A woman's voice, sharp and authoritative, called out for a doctor.
A man in the crowd, who identified himself as a retired army surgeon, pushed forward and knelt beside me on the cobblestones.
He was a compact, weathered man with the particular briskness of someone who has spent a career patching up broken bodies and who approaches each new injury with the same efficient detachment.
He examined Edmund's leg with hands that were gentle despite their speed, pressing along the bone, testing the range of motion, and Edmund cried out again when the surgeon touched the break, and his grip on my hand tightened until the bones ground together.
"Compound fracture of the tibia," the surgeon said, and his voice was the voice of a man delivering a diagnosis rather than a prognosis, a voice that communicated information without sentiment.
"Contusions along the left side. Possible concussion — he'll need to be watched.
But he's conscious and responsive, and that's a good sign.
" He looked at me with the assessing gaze of a professional evaluating a non-professional. "Do you know this young man?"
"Yes," I said.
"Family?"
"No. I am an acquaintance of his sister." The word "acquaintance" was absurdly inadequate, a tissue-thin covering for a relationship that had long since passed into territory that no word in the English language could accurately describe. But it was the word I had, and I used it.
"His sister will need to be informed. And he'll need to be moved — carefully. I'll stay with him until a proper physician can be summoned." The surgeon looked around at the crowd. "Someone send for a doctor. And someone find a door for a makeshift stretcher. We'll need to get him off this street."
I reached into my coat pocket with my free hand — Edmund would not release my other hand, and I did not attempt to make him — and withdrew my card case.
I removed one of my cards and handed it to a young man in the crowd who looked capable of running.
"Blackwood House," I said. "The square. Three doors from the corner.
Deliver this to the lady's maid — Dorothea Crewe.
Tell her that Mr. Edmund has been injured and that he needs his sister. Do you understand?"
The young man nodded, took the card, and disappeared into the crowd.
I turned back to Edmund, who was still holding my hand and still crying, though the sobs had subsided into a low, rhythmic whimpering that was, in its own way, more distressing than the full-throated wailing, because it communicated not acute pain but a deeper, more fundamental distress, the distress of a person who has been hurt and who does not understand why and who is, for perhaps the first time in his life, in a situation that his sister cannot immediately resolve.
"Cecilia," he said again, and the word was smaller this time, less a cry than a plea, and I realised, with a sinking certainty, that when Cecilia received the message and came to find her brother injured on a Mayfair street, the encounter that followed would be unlike anything that had passed between us in the five months of our acquaintance.
I had seen Cecilia perform grief, perform tenderness, perform concern.
I had watched her deploy every emotion in the human repertoire with the precision of a musician playing an instrument.
I had never seen her respond to a situation for which she had not prepared, a situation that had not been anticipated and could not be managed, a situation that struck, not at her strategic interests, but at the one thing in her life that existed outside the framework of calculation.
I held Edmund's hand and waited.
The afternoon wore on. The wagon driver, having been reassured by the surgeon that Edmund would survive, was persuaded to move his vehicle to the side of the road, where it sat with the patient immobility of a thing that has caused harm and wishes to be elsewhere.
The crowd, having satisfied its curiosity, began to disperse, the faces dissolving back into the ordinary flow of the street, the faces of people who had seen an accident and would mention it at dinner and then forget it.
The retired surgeon remained, monitoring Edmund's pulse and the dilation of his pupils, and a second doctor, summoned from a surgery on Davies Street, arrived within twenty minutes and confirmed the initial assessment: compound fracture of the left tibia, contusions, probable concussion.
They set a temporary splint using a board procured from a nearby shop, and Edmund, who had been bravely silent through most of the procedure, cried out when they manipulated the leg, and his grip on my hand was so fierce that I felt the small bones of my fingers grind against each other.
I did not let go. I was acutely aware of the significance of what I was doing, the detective who had come to destroy Cecilia Blackwood holding her brother's hand on a public street, and I was aware that this act, more than any evidence or testimony or document, would define what happened next.
When she arrived, she would find me not at a distance, not observing from across the street, but kneeling beside her brother, physically connected to him, a part of the scene of his injury.
The symbolism was inescapable. I was not prepared for it, and I was not sure I wanted it, and I did not let go.
I heard the carriage before I saw it — the rapid clatter of hooves on cobblestones, the urgent grinding of wheels, a sound that communicated haste without regard for the conventions of Mayfair traffic.
And then the carriage was there, a Blackwood House brougham with the family crest on the door panel, and it stopped with a jolt that nearly pitched the driver from his seat, and the door flew open, and she was there.
The word "there" does not do justice to what I saw.
Cecilia Blackwood emerged from the carriage in a manner that I can only describe as uncontrolled.
This was not the measured descent of a woman conscious of being observed, not the graceful unfolding of limbs that characterised her every public movement.
She half-fell from the carriage step, caught herself on the door frame, and ran.
She ran across the pavement and into the street, and she was not wearing a cloak, and her hair was not properly pinned, and her dress — a morning dress of dove grey that I had seen her wear before — was disarranged, the collar askew, the sleeve torn where she must have caught it on the carriage door in her haste to exit.
She was hatless. She was gloveless. She was, in every measurable respect, the opposite of the woman I had spent five months watching, the woman for whom every public appearance was a performance calibrated to the nearest degree, the woman who moved through the world with the deliberate stillness of a person who understands that every gesture is a communication and who permits no gesture to be misread.