Chapter 36 #2
"Sir William Hartwell was, by all accounts, a conscientious man," Sir Geoffrey said.
"His memorandum, which Inspector Aldric obtained prior to his death, is a record of professional failure.
But it is also a record of professional observation, and the observations are, I regret to say, remarkably prescient.
He noted the unusual progression of the late Earl's symptoms. He noted the discrepancy between the stated cause of death and the clinical presentation.
He noted your personal supervision of the Earl's evening brandy.
He noted the locked cabinet in the stillroom.
And he noted, with a candour that does him credit in death even as it condemns him in life, that he did nothing about any of it. "
I said nothing. The wall held. The wall always held.
But inside the wall, behind the blankness and the stillness, something was happening that I had not experienced in a very long time, and the something was not fear, because fear was an emotion and I did not experience emotions in the way that other people experienced them, and the something was not panic, because panic was a loss of control and I had never lost control and was not about to begin now.
The something was closer to the sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down, not with the intention of falling but with the cold, calculating awareness of the distance between the ledge and the rocks below, and the understanding that the distance was real and the fall was possible and the outcome, if the fall occurred, would be final.
Sir Geoffrey turned to the fourth page, and this was the page I had not anticipated.
It was a report, written in French, on the letterhead of a pharmacie in the Rue des Saints-Pères in Paris.
The report was dated October of last year, and it described, in the clinical language of a pharmaceutical record, the sale of a quantity of arsenic trioxide to an Englishwoman who had given her name as Mrs. Helen Cartwright and who had paid in cash and who had described the purchase as being for the extermination of rodents on a country estate in England.
The report included a physical description of the purchaser: approximately five feet seven inches in height, auburn hair, grey eyes, age between twenty-five and thirty-five, speaking French with an English accent.
The description was accompanied by a small carte-de-visite photograph, the kind commonly taken by professional photographers and sold as souvenirs in Parisian studios.
The pharmacist's assistant, the report noted, had recognised the woman from this photograph when she had visited a neighbouring studio the previous week.
The photograph was of me. Not a good photograph, not a flattering one, but recognisably, undeniably me, taken in a Parisian portrait studio in the autumn of 1888, when I had travelled to France under a false name to purchase a compound that was more easily obtained in Paris than in London, where the regulations governing the sale of arsenic, though imperfectly enforced, were at least theoretically in place.
The photograph showed a woman in a dark travelling dress and a veil that was only partially lowered, and the face beneath the veil was my face, and there was no possibility of denial, no scope for misidentification, no avenue of escape through the familiar mechanisms of social performance and strategic ambiguity.
I looked at the photograph. I looked at Sir Geoffrey.
He was watching me with the same expressionless calm he had maintained throughout the evening, and the calm was not a performance, because Sir Geoffrey Ashworth-Pierce did not perform.
He was what he appeared to be: a man of institutional power who had assembled the elements of a case against me with the same methodical patience that he brought to every aspect of his professional life, and who was now presenting those elements with the quiet confidence of a man who knew that the evidence spoke for itself and required no embellishment.
The room was very still. The fire in the grate had burned low, and the coals pulsed with a dull red light that made shadows move on the ceiling, and the curtains were heavy and the books were silent and the air smelled of beeswax and old paper and the faint, clean scent of the man who stood by my fireplace with my fate in his hands.
I sat in my chair behind my desk with my hands folded in my lap and my face arranged in the configuration of stillness that Vivienne had taught me, and inside the stillness, the calculation began.
It began without decision, without volition, the way breathing begins, the way the heart beats, an automatic process that was as natural to me as emotion was to other people and as uncontrollable.
I assessed Sir Geoffrey. The assessment was instantaneous and total, the work of a mind that had been trained, since childhood, to evaluate every person in every room as a potential variable in an equation whose solution was always the same: the preservation of my freedom and the advancement of my interests.
Sir Geoffrey Ashworth-Pierce. Age forty-eight.
Home Office, eleven years. Married, two children.
Lives in Westminster. Drives himself to the office each morning in a brougham that departs at precisely seven-fifteen.
I knew this because I had known, since the moment I learned of his involvement, that he would need to be assessed, and I had spent the past week gathering information about him through the channels available to me: servants' gossip, tradesmen's conversations, the casual observations of people who noticed things and repeated them without understanding their significance.
He was a creature of routine. Routine is a vulnerability.
A man who follows the same path at the same time each day is a man who can be anticipated, and a man who can be anticipated is a man who can be eliminated.
The method presented itself immediately, the way a solution presents itself to a mathematical problem, clean and inevitable and without moral content.
The port. He had been drinking port all evening, the same port I had been serving to the other gentlemen, a vintage tawny that was rich and sweet and which, if contaminated with a carefully measured dose of arsenic trioxide, would produce symptoms consistent with gastric illness within twelve to twenty-four hours, and death within three to five days.
The death would be attributed to natural causes.
A senior official at the Home Office, a man of fifty, dead of a sudden gastric complaint.
It would be a tragedy. It would be noted.
It would not, in all probability, be investigated with any rigour, because the death of a man like Sir Geoffrey would be attributed to the stresses of his position, the demands of his work, the inevitable toll that public service takes on the body.
The port was already decanted. The dose would take thirty seconds to administer.
The decanter was on the sideboard in the dining room, twelve steps from where I was sitting.
I calculated the timeline. Depart the study.
Cross the hallway. Enter the dining room.
Administer the dose to the decanter. Return to the drawing room.
Resume the evening. The entire operation would take less than ninety seconds.
The servants would not notice; they were occupied with clearing the cheese course.
The guests would not notice; they were in the drawing room, engaged in conversation.
Sir Geoffrey would drink the port with the other gentlemen when they rejoined the ladies, and the poison would begin its work silently and invisibly, and by the time the symptoms appeared, I would be in my chambers with an alibi so airtight that not even the Home Office could penetrate it.
The calculation was clean. It was efficient.
It was the calculation I had performed a hundred times before, for each of my husbands, for Hartwell, for every person whose continued existence had become inconvenient to my plans.
The calculation did not require courage or desperation or rage.
It required only the cold, methodical assessment of options and outcomes that was the fundamental architecture of my mind.
Sebastian was in the dining room. I heard it then, or sensed it, the awareness of his presence in the house that was as constant and as involuntary as my own heartbeat.
He was sitting at the table, drinking the port, eating the cheese, making conversation with Lord Pemberton, and he was watching the door, because he was always watching, and his watching was the thing I had never been able to counter, because Sebastian Aldric did not watch with suspicion or hostility or the calculating assessment of a rival.
He watched with understanding. He watched because he saw me, and the seeing was the thing I could not defend against, because every defence I possessed was designed to be deployed against people who did not see, and Sebastian saw.