Chapter 12
“That one is not purple,” Rose said, holding a skein of thread up to the light with the gravity of a jeweller assessing a stone. “It is claiming to be purple. But it is lying.”
The woman behind the haberdashery counter, Mrs. Fenwick, broad and comfortable, patient and experienced, looked at Rose with the particular quality of attention that Rose tended to generate in people who encountered her for the first time.
“The purple is on the second shelf,” Mrs. Fenwick said. “The lower one. The top shelf is more your lavenders.”
“There is a difference,” Rose confirmed, replacing the skein with precision and moving to the lower shelf with focus. She had been given correct information and would act on it now.
Cynthia stood at the end of the counter, watched her and thought that she needed ten minutes, perhaps fifteen, because Hartley was three doors east. She had established this on the ride into the village, memorising the high street as the gig moved along it with the methodical attention of someone building a map she would need.
“Mrs. Fenwick,” she said, “I wonder if I might ask a favour. I have an errand just along the street, a brief visit to a physician, and I should be grateful if Miss Rose might remain here while I attend to it. She is perfectly well-behaved and she has, as you can see, a great deal of thread to assess.”
Mrs. Fenwick looked at Rose, who was already holding three skeins in one hand and comparing them with a fourth. “Of course,” she said.
“Rose,” Cynthia said, “I will be back within the quarter hour. Mrs. Fenwick will look after you.”
Rose looked up from the thread. Her eyes moved over Cynthia’s face with the quick, complete assessment she deployed when she suspected something was happening that was not being explained to her. She said nothing. She returned to the thread not pressing, and was choosing, for now, to wait.
Cynthia went out into the cold morning.
Mr. Hartley’s office occupied the ground floor of a narrow stone building with a brass plate beside the door and curtains three-quarters drawn, the architecture of a space that had been in the business of private things for a long time and reflected it.
She knocked. A woman of perhaps sixty answered, and Cynthia gave her name, explained she was Rose Heathe’s governess at Lavenham Hall, and asked for a few minutes of the physician’s time regarding Miss Heathe’s welfare and history.
The woman took her card and went away.
She had thought carefully about how to approach this.
She did not have enough, and she was not going to pretend otherwise to herself or to the physician.
What she had was a shape, the outline of something terrible, visible from certain angles, invisible from others, and what she needed to know was whether Hartley had been standing at an angle that had shown him more of it than he had said.
Whether he had seen something in Edmund’s sickroom that had sat with him since.
She was not going to ask him to accuse anyone. She was not going to lead him anywhere. She was simply going to ask what she thought could be asked and listen to what came back.
The woman returned telling her that Mr. Hartley would see her.
He was seventy, or thereabouts, white-haired and solidly built, with the quality of eyes that had looked at suffering regularly enough to have developed a form of compassion that was practical rather than demonstrative. He had a good face. Honest in its lines.
He was also, she noted immediately, cautious. He greeted her with professional courtesy, indicated a chair, and waited.
“Thank you for seeing me,” she said. “I know it is unannounced.”
“Miss Heathe’s governess,” he said. “You mentioned her welfare.”
“Yes.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I have been at Lavenham for a while. Rose is doing considerably better than when I arrived, but there are things I don’t yet understand about her history that I believe would help me to help her.
” She paused. “She has nightmares. About her father’s illness. About the period before he died.”
Something shifted in Hartley’s face. Not much, a slight change in the quality of his attention, but it was the kind she watched for.
“I see,” he said.
“I understand you attended Lord Heathe before he died.”
“For a period, yes. Before Lady Heathe engaged a specialist from London.”
“Mr. Crane.”
“Yes.” The answer was flat and controlled, giving nothing away because he had learned to keep his face neutral long ago.
“I am not here to make any formal inquiry,” she said carefully.
“I am not here on behalf of the duke or any legal party. I am here because there is a child in my care who carries things she doesn’t have language for, and because I believe those things are connected to the circumstances of her father’s death.
And I thought it was worth speaking with the person who knew Edmund Heathe when he first became unwell. Before anyone else was involved.”
A long silence.
Hartley looked at his desk, at the window, which gave onto a narrow strip of the high street and at his hands. Then he said, in the voice of someone stepping across a threshold he had considered for years, “What is it you want to know?”
“What you observed,” she said. “In the early stages of his illness.”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, he did so with the careful, measured pace of someone stepping across uncertain ground, testing each word before placing his weight on it.
“His Grace’s brother was presented with general weakness,” he said.
“Gastric difficulty. Progressive loss of appetite. A quality of the skin, slight discolouration, a texture I found…” He stopped.
He looked at the desk. “There were other things. The hair. A particular quality of weakness that did not behave as I expected weakness to behave.”
She kept very still and did not fill the silence.
“These are symptoms,” Hartley said, slowly and with great precision, “that a physician of my experience has seen before. In other contexts. Not in cases of consumption.” He picked up a quill pen from the desk and set it down again.
“There is a substance, not uncommon, that is available; it has been used in manufacturing and in various domestic capacities. When administered in small quantities over a sustained period, it produces a presentation that can be made to resemble several illnesses.” He looked up at her.
His eyes were very direct. “The symptoms I described are consistent with that presentation.”
“Are you able to say what substance you mean?”
A pause of several seconds.
“Arsenious oxide,” he said. “White arsenic.” He said it in the tone of a man who has been building toward those two words from the beginning of the conversation and has arrived at them with the specific relief of someone setting down something heavy.
“I want to be clear. I cannot say with certainty that this is what Lord Heathe was given. I did not have access to his treatment records because I was removed from the case before I could form any firm conclusion.” He looked at the desk again.
“But I have thought about what I observed in those three months for two years, Miss Browne. I have thought about it a great deal.”
“You raised no formal concern at the time.”
It was not an accusation. She said it the way she said everything that required precision: plainly, without inflection, leaving room for the answer.
He looked at his hands. He was quiet for long enough that she thought he might not answer.
“I had no proof. I had a suspicion I could not substantiate, and circumstances that made…” He stopped.
He tried again. “I told myself I was wrong. I told myself it was an unusual presentation of an ordinary illness and that I was making connections that weren’t there.
” He looked up. “I do not know if I believed it entirely. But I told myself so.”
She looked at him. “And now?”
He met her eyes. He said, quietly and with the full weight of two years of carried doubt: “Now you are sitting here asking me about a child who has nightmares about her father’s illness, and I find I am certain.”
She nodded. She did not push further. She had what she had come for, not a statement, not a formal account, not anything she could put in a document yet, but the confirmation that what she suspected had a physician’s private knowledge behind it.
That Hartley had seen the shape of it, too, and that she was not building on nothing.
“I understand,” she said. “And I am not asking you to say more than you are certain of.” She paused. “I am grateful for what you have said.”
He looked at her for a long moment. His face showed someone on the other side of fear, assessing whether it was better there.
“The child,” he said. “Is she well?”
“She is better,” Cynthia said honestly. “She was not well when I arrived. She is better now.” She paused. “She is loved. She has people who will not leave her.”
Hartley looked at the window and nodded slightly.
“I am glad to hear it,” he said.
She thanked him, crossed to the door, but she stopped. “If you ever wished to speak further about any of it,” she said. “I am at Lavenham Hall.”
He looked at her. Something moved in his face, not resolution, not commitment, but the beginning of the possibility of both. He said nothing.
***
She was back at the haberdashery in thirteen minutes.
Rose had selected seven skeins of thread in varying shades of purple, each chosen with reasons she was prepared to defend, and had also apparently had a conversation with Mrs. Fenwick about needle gauges that had left Mrs. Fenwick surprised.
She had not expected an eight-year-old to be a useful source of technical information.
“I’ve chosen the threads,” Rose said when Cynthia came through the door. She held up the seven skeins.
“They’re excellent choices,” Cynthia replied.
Rose looked at her with the quick, complete assessment. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Cynthia replied simply.
She helped Rose with the purchase, and they went out to the gig, and the high street of Thornwick carried on its morning with the indifference of high streets generally.
Hartley had been precise in his imprecision, careful in his carefulness, and she had understood him exactly.
He had seen something. He had been holding it alone for two years. He was frightened, not of her, but of something, of the weight of it and the direction it pointed or the person it pointed toward and what it would mean to say so.
She did not have enough. That was the honest accounting. She had the shape of the thing, more clearly now, but she did not have proof. She had Hartley’s cautious, deliberately insufficient account of unexplained symptoms. She had Edmund’s letters and Rose’s nightmares.
She did not have enough to bring to Declan. Not yet.
But she had enough to know that she was right to keep looking.
The east wing. She needed to search the east wing because something might be in Edmund’s things.
Rose sat beside her with the thread in her lap, watching the moors go by in the particular way she watched things she was thinking about.
“The physician you visited,” Rose said, after a mile.
Cynthia kept her eyes on the road. “Yes.”
“Was it about my father?”
A pause. She thought about how to answer honestly without saying more than was useful.
“In a way,” she said. “I wanted to understand what his illness was like. From someone who was there at the beginning.”
Rose was quiet. She looked at the moors. She said, “He got sick very fast. That was what everyone said. He was well, and then he wasn’t.”
“Yes,” Cynthia said.
“I remember it differently,” Rose said, matter-of-factly, to the moors. “It felt very slow. When you’re watching, it feels slow.”
Cynthia looked at the road and thought about a child who had been watching very carefully, for a very long time.
“Is Uncle safe?” Rose said.
The question arrived from an unexpected direction, as Rose’s questions tended to, and landed with the weight of something that had been thought about carefully before being asked.
“Yes,” Cynthia said. “And I am making sure of it.”
Rose nodded. She looked at the thread in her lap and said nothing else.
They rode the rest of the way in the particular silence of two people who have said what needed to be said and were now simply sharing the same air, which was, Cynthia had come to think, one of the more underrated forms of company.
***
She said nothing to Declan that evening.
She sat in the library in her chair with the Roman roads open in her lap, and she thought about what she had and what she needed and the distance between them. She thought about Hartley’s careful and controlled face; he was carrying something alone, something he could not say.
He was not ready to speak. He had shown her, precisely and without saying so, the shape of what he was not ready to say.
He might, with time and the right approach, be brought to a point where the carrying alone was less bearable than the alternative.
But she could not force it, and she would not try.
What she needed was something solid. Something in writing. Something that belonged to the case rather than to the impression of the case.
She thought about the east wing.
She thought about Edmund’s rooms, locked since his death. She was not going to ask to go there alone. She was not going to ask at all tonight, because she did not have enough to justify asking.
She was patient. She had always been patient. It was not the easiest quality to possess, but it was the most reliable, and she had found, in the months of Lavenham, that it produced better results than the alternatives.
She waited.