Chapter 32 #3
The statement was delivered quietly, without accusation, without judgment, without the triumph that I might have expected from a man who had spent five months trying to find a weakness in my armour and who had just watched that weakness manifest itself in the most spectacular possible fashion.
It was an observation, not a weapon, and the distinction was important, because it told me something about Sebastian that I had suspected but not confirmed: he was not, at this moment, investigating me.
He was seeing me. And the seeing was not strategic.
I looked at him. My eyes met his, and the meeting was unlike any of the previous meetings of our eyes, because in all previous meetings, one or both of us had been performing.
This time, neither of us was performing.
I was too exhausted, too shaken, too raw.
And he — he was something I had not seen before in a man: present, without agenda, simply standing beside the sofa and looking at me with eyes that contained neither desire nor suspicion nor the particular quality of fascinated revulsion that had characterised his gaze for the past five months.
"That is not love," I said.
The words came out before I had decided to say them.
This was unprecedented. Every word I have ever spoken to another person has been selected, calibrated, and deployed for effect.
I do not say things by accident. I do not make unguarded statements.
I do not reveal information about my interior state unless the revelation serves a strategic purpose.
And yet the words were spoken, and they were true, and they were not strategic, and I did not know, at that moment, whether I had chosen to say them or whether they had chosen to be said, and the uncertainty was itself a form of loss of control that I found profoundly unsettling.
"I do not experience love," I continued, and my voice was quieter now, stripped of the cultivated tones I normally employ, reduced to the essential function of communication. "But it is the closest thing my mind can produce."
Sebastian said nothing. The silence that followed was not the tactical silence I deploy, the silence that forces the other person to fill the space with words they did not intend to speak.
It was a different kind of silence, the silence of a person who is absorbing information that changes the nature of what they know, and who needs time to accommodate the change.
He stood in the drawing room of Blackwood House, looking at me with Edmund's sleeping form between us, and he was seeing, for the first time, the thing that I am when all the performances are stripped away, and the thing that he saw was not what he expected to see.
I knew this, not because I could read his mind but because I could read his face, and his face, at that moment, contained an expression that I had never seen on it before and that I could not categorise, because the categories I normally use — suspicion, desire, fascination, revulsion — did not apply.
He left. He walked out of the drawing room and through the hall and out of the front door, and I heard the door close behind him, and then I was alone with Edmund, and the house was quiet, and the evening light was fading, and the lilac scent from the garden was drifting through the open windows, and I sat beside my brother and held his hand and listened to him breathe, and I thought, with the clinical precision that is the one thing that never fails me, about what had just happened.
I had revealed myself. Not the strategic self, not the performed self, not the self that I deploy in social situations and investigative interviews and candlelit drawing rooms, but the actual self, the thing beneath all the masks, the thing that I had spent twenty-nine years concealing from everyone who had ever known me.
I had revealed it to Sebastian Aldric, of all people, the detective who had spent five months trying to see through my masks, and I had revealed it not as a strategy but as an accident, an uncontrolled response to a situation that my mechanisms of control had been unable to manage.
This was dangerous. It was, by any rational assessment, the most dangerous thing I had done since the beginning of the investigation, more dangerous than the nights with Sebastian, more dangerous than the destruction of Lady Penelope, more dangerous even than the elimination of Hartwell, because those acts had been strategic, controlled, directed toward specific objectives, and this act had been none of those things.
This act had been a failure of control, and a failure of control, in a person whose entire existence depends on control, is not a mistake. It is a catastrophe.
But alongside the danger, alongside the cold, analytical assessment of the risk I had taken, there was something else, something that I could not name and that I did not wish to examine, and that manifested, in the quiet of the drawing room, as a faint, unfamiliar sensation in my chest, a tightness that was not physical, a pressure that was not the pressure of corsetry or illness or anxiety but was something else, something that was perhaps related to the experience I had had on the street when I saw Sebastian holding Edmund's hand, and that was perhaps, I thought with a discomfort that bordered on physical pain, the first time in my life that I had felt something that I could not immediately classify, categorise, and file away.
I looked at Edmund. His face was peaceful in sleep, the pain of the injury smoothed away by the laudanum, and his hand in mine was warm and still, and the warmth and the stillness were the only things in the world that I could anchor myself to, the only things that were real and solid and certain in a world that had, in the space of a single afternoon, become unfamiliar and threatening and full of variables that I could not control.
I held his hand and I did not let go, and outside the windows the evening darkened and the street lamps were lit and the city of London continued its indifferent, ceaseless activity, and somewhere in that city, Sebastian Aldric was walking home, and I wondered, with a precision that was itself a form of control, what he would do with what he had seen.