Chapter 35
The Dinner Party
I arrived at Blackwood House at half past seven, punctual to the minute, because punctuality was one of the few things I still controlled, and I clung to it with the desperation of a man clinging to the rail of a ship in heavy seas.
The evening was warm for late May, the kind of warmth that carries the scent of lime blossom and wet stone and the particular London smell of horse dung and coal smoke and expensive perfume, all layered together into something that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant but simply and overwhelmingly the smell of the city at the end of spring.
I had walked from my rooms rather than taking a cab, because the walk was twenty minutes and I needed twenty minutes of forward motion to prepare myself for what was coming.
It had not been enough. I did not think anything would have been enough.
The house was lit as it always was, the windows blazing with gaslight that turned the pale stone facade into a luminous rectangle against the darkening sky, and the door was opened before I could reach for the knocker by a footman whose expression was the expression of a footman who has been trained to betray nothing, and who succeeded in betraying nothing, and whose very success in betraying nothing made the silence more oppressive than any word could have done.
I gave him my hat and my coat, and he took them without looking at me, and I was conducted into the entrance hall, where the air was cool and still and carried the faint aroma of beeswax and lilies, and from somewhere deeper in the house came the sound of a piano, a piece I did not recognise, played with the precise, unhurried touch of someone who practised not for pleasure but for perfection.
The entrance hall was as it had been on every previous visit: the black-and-white marble floor, the staircase rising in a graceful curve to the upper floors, the ancestral portraits in their gilded frames staring down with the blank arrogance of men who had never been required to justify their existence.
But tonight there were additions. Flowers stood in arrangements on every available surface — white roses, cascading from silver urns; deep crimson peonies, massed in porcelain bowls; sprigs of jasmine, their fragrance so intense that it bordered on cloying.
The effect was calculated to overwhelm the senses, to create an atmosphere of beauty and abundance so total that the guest, upon entering, would feel not merely welcomed but enveloped, as though the house itself had opened its arms and drawn him in.
It was very well done. I recognised the technique because I had watched Cecilia deploy it before, at every social function she hosted, every intimate gathering, every strategic dinner party designed to disarm and enchant.
She understood, with an instinct that was almost supernatural, that beauty was a form of control, and that a guest who was overwhelmed by his surroundings was a guest who had been softened, made pliable, rendered less capable of critical thought.
I knew this. I had known it for months. And yet the flowers were beautiful, and the lilies smelled of death and innocence in equal measure, and I felt, despite myself, the faint loosening of vigilance that was their intended effect.
I was not the first to arrive. Lord and Lady Pemberton were already in the drawing room, standing near the fireplace in the attitude of people who have been married long enough to be comfortable with silence.
Lord Pemberton was a large, ruddy man with a military bearing and the slow, deliberate movements of someone who has learned that everything he says will be repeated.
Lady Pemberton was smaller, sharper, with the quick eyes of a woman who misses nothing and comments on everything, and she was wearing a gown of deep blue silk that made her look like a figure from a stained-glass window.
They greeted me with the cordial warmth of people who knew me by reputation and were not entirely certain they approved of what that reputation represented.
I was, after all, a detective inspector at a dinner party hosted by a countess, and the combination of my profession and the setting created a dissonance that no amount of social polish could entirely conceal.
"The Inspector," said Lord Pemberton, shaking my hand with a grip that was firm enough to communicate that he was not intimidated by my presence. "I understand you have been of some assistance to Lady Ashworth during this difficult period. Very good of you. Very good."
I had not been of assistance to Lady Ashworth.
I had been attempting to have her arrested for murder.
But Lord Pemberton's understanding of the situation was shaped by whatever narrative Cecilia had chosen to disseminate, and that narrative, I was certain, bore as much resemblance to the truth as a portrait bears to the sitter after the painter has finished flattering the features and softening the light.
I accepted the handshake and the misapprehension with equal composure.
"Lady Ashworth has been most cooperative with my inquiries," I said, which was a lie so elegant in its construction that it could have been exhibited in a museum of English dissimulation.
Lady Pemberton regarded me with an expression that suggested she was not entirely convinced by this account of events but was too polite to say so.
She was, I had learned, one of the most perceptive women in London society, a woman whose social instincts were so finely calibrated that she could read a room the way a physician reads a pulse, detecting irregularities and disturbances that were invisible to less gifted observers.
If anyone in the room tonight was likely to sense the tension beneath the surface, it was Lady Pemberton, and I found myself hoping, with a fervour that surprised me, that Cecilia's performance was sufficient to deceive her.
Two more guests arrived before Cecilia appeared: Sir Geoffrey Ashworth-Pierce, who was introduced to me as a senior official at the Home Office, and Mrs. Arabella Forsythe, the widow of a distant cousin of Henry Ravenscroft's, who had been included on the guest list, I suspected, as a piece of calculated normalcy, a person whose presence would suggest that the evening was a social gathering like any other and not the strategic operation that I knew it to be.
Sir Geoffrey Ashworth-Pierce was not at all what I had expected.
The letter he had sent me had been formal, bureaucratic, and devoid of personality, and I had constructed, from the tone of the letter, an image of a man who was grey, cautious, and unremarkable.
The man who entered the drawing room was tall, silver-haired, and possessed of a physical authority that had nothing to do with the size of his frame and everything to do with the quality of his stillness.
He moved with the particular economy of a man who has spent his entire career in rooms where every gesture was observed and interpreted, and whose body had learned, over decades, to communicate exactly what was necessary and nothing more.
His face was lean, the bones prominent beneath skin that was weathered but not yet lined, and his eyes were blue-grey and deeply unsettling, because they were the eyes of a man who assessed everything and revealed nothing.
He was perhaps fifty, perhaps a year or two more, and he was dressed with an understated elegance that communicated wealth and authority without drawing attention to either.
He shook my hand with a grip that was lighter than Lord Pemberton's but somehow more effective, because it conveyed not strength but confidence, the confidence of a man who did not need to demonstrate that he could crush your fingers because you both knew he could crush your career, and that was the more significant capacity by far.
"Inspector Aldric," he said, and his voice was cultured, measured, and as uninflected as a sheet of glass. "I have read your reports on the Ashworth matter. Thorough work. Very thorough."
The words were complimentary. The tone in which they were delivered was not.
Or rather, the tone was so carefully neutral that it could have been complimentary or damning, and I could not determine which, and I suspected that the ambiguity was deliberate, that Sir Geoffrey Ashworth-Pierce was a man who communicated through the spaces between his words rather than through the words themselves.
"I appreciate your interest in the case, sir," I said.
"I would not call it interest," he replied, and the correction was gentle and absolute. "I would call it a professional obligation. There are certain patterns that, once identified, cannot be ignored without consequences that extend beyond the individual case. I am sure you understand."
I did understand. I understood that Sir Geoffrey Ashworth-Pierce was telling me, in the carefully coded language of institutional power, that the Ashworth matter had attracted attention at a level far above Scotland Yard, and that the attention was not sympathetic to Cecilia and was not likely to be deflected by the social manoeuvres that had served her so well in the past. Whether this understanding was a comfort or a source of further anxiety, I could not determine. Both, perhaps. At once.