Chapter 23
A letter had gone out to Mrs. Holt the night they moved against Lord Graystone.
Her reply arrived two days later. It came in the morning post, addressed to Sophia in a careful, unsteady hand.
The paper was cheap. The seal was in plain wax with no impression.
Sophia took it up to Margaret’s sitting room before she opened it.
Madam, it read. I have been waiting for someone to ask. I will meet you wherever you say.
That was all. The signature was a single initial. H.
Sophia replied that afternoon, by a footman she trusted, naming a tea room she had walked past once on a charitable errand with Eleanor. The tea room was on a quiet street near the city’s eastern boundary, more than two miles from the Cavendish house.
She told Edmund what she intended to do.
She told him on the morning of the meeting, at the breakfast table with Catherine present, evenly. “I am going to meet Margaret’s nurse this afternoon.” She watched his face go through three small adjustments and arrive at the one he was determined to wear in front of his elder sister.
“I shall send the carriage.”
“You shall not. She will not come if she sees a carriage like ours in the street.”
“You will go alone?”
“I shall go with Eleanor. Eleanor has agreed to wait at the corner.”
Catherine, seated at the head of the table, did not look up from her toast
“Sophia.”
“Yes.”
“Be careful.”
It was not what he had been intending to say. She could see that. She nodded.
“I shall.”
He let her go.
***
The tea room was small and dim and quiet. The proprietress knew Eleanor by name, and the back parlor had been arranged with two cups and a pot before Sophia had quite taken off her bonnet.
Mrs. Holt was already there.
She was perhaps no more than fifty. She was petite, neatly dressed, and very frightened.
Her hands were folded immobile in her lap, in the way of someone who had been waiting for several minutes and had not wished to be observed waiting.
She had been carrying something for four years and had been, the entire time, waiting to be asked.
Sophia did not ask.
She poured the tea. She passed Mrs. Holt a biscuit. She inquired, gently, after the woman’s lodgings, and her sister, and a small detail of a cough Mrs. Holt mentioned in passing, and at the end of a quarter of an hour Mrs. Holt’s hands were no longer entirely white at the knuckles.
Then Sophia said, quietly, “Will you tell me what happened?”
Mrs. Holt put down her cup.
“Yes.”
She spoke without performance and without evasion. She had been employed as Margaret’s nurse in the autumn of her illness, on a recommendation she had been grateful for at the time and had subsequently spent four years trying not to think about.
The lady’s tonic was prescribed by the physician. The instructions for the tonic had been changed, after a fortnight, by a man who came to the back door with a folded paper, a small reticule, and an explanation Mrs. Holt had been too tired and too willing to be useful to question.
A powder, in a small twist of paper. One pinch to be added to the evening tonic. The powder, she had been told, was a physician’s secondary prescription for the lady’s nerves, and the physician preferred the instructions not be conveyed to the family because the family was easily alarmed.
“I administered it for six weeks.” Mrs. Holt’s voice was steady. Her hands were not. “She did not improve. She got worse. I did not, at the time, understand what I was doing. I understood by perhaps the fourth week. I did not stop.”
“Why?”
“Because I was frightened. The man who had brought the powder had come back twice. The second time he had been very explicit about what would happen to my sister if I told anyone. He named her village. He named her landlord. He named her child, who was six. I could not stop.”
Sophia did not answer.
“Will you tell me the name of the man?”
“I do not know the name of the man who gave the original order. I will swear it. He did not come to the door. The man who came to the door was an intermediary. He was the same man both times. His surname I do know.”
“Tell me.”
“Haddon. Thomas Haddon. He was a clerk, by his speech and his hands. He had been a debt collector also. He was nondescript. I had reasons to remember him.”
Sophia sat very still.
She knew the name.
She had seen it written in the margins of two of Lord Graystone’s social letters from the previous year, in a list of names he had marked with small inked dots beside them. She had not, at the time, recognized any of the names. She recognized that one.
Sophia thanked Mrs. Holt and paid the bill. She arranged for Mrs. Holt to be sent home in a hackney that would not be traceable to the Cavendish house. Sophia walked out into the late afternoon light with Eleanor at her elbow.
When she did speak, she said, “Eleanor. I am going home. I am not going to sit with this alone.”
“Good.”
Eleanor squeezed her hand. She helped Sophia into the carriage and closed the door, and Sophia rode home through the late afternoon traffic of London with Mrs. Holt’s voice in her ears and Thomas Haddon’s name in the front of her mind.
***
Edmund was in his study.
Sophia did not give the footman her bonnet in the entrance hall. She did not stop to change. She crossed the entrance hall, walked down the corridor to the study, knocked once, and let herself in without waiting.
He was at the desk. He looked up when she entered.
He read her face within half a second and rose. He came around the desk and crossed to her and stopped within reach.
“Sophia.”
“Sit with me. I need to tell you all of it.”
He took her hand. He led her to the chairs by the fire. He sat down beside her, very close, with his knee almost touching hers. He kept her hand in his.
Edmund listened.
His jaw set. His hand on hers tightened by degrees. When she had finished, he sat in silence for a few seconds. Then he reached for her with both hands and pulled her against him.
Her face pressed against his shoulder. His hand found the back of her head, and he held her there, steady and absolute, and she understood that he was not going to let her go.
They sat like that for several minutes, the fire ticking quietly in the grate. She had brought him the whole thing. She had not protected him from any of it.
The clock on the mantel struck five.
Edmund, with his face still against her hair, said, very quietly, “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not carrying this alone. For coming back from Mrs. Holt, and coming home, and finding me before you sat with it alone.”
She closed her eyes and nodded.
***
The note from Jonathan arrived an hour later.
The footman brought it to the study quietly. Edmund broke the seal with one hand. He read and his face went still.
“Sophia.”
“Yes.”
“Jonathan has it.”
“Has what?”
“The blackmailer.” Edmund did not look up from the page.
“The blackmailer is Haddon. Thomas Haddon. The intermediary you have just named. Jonathan has spent two days running his inquiries through the banks, and the man Lord Graystone has been paying every quarter for five years is the same man who brought the powder to Mrs. Holt’s back door. ”
Sophia did not react.
“Haddon is terrified of him. He knows what Lord Graystone has done to people who became inconvenient, and he would rather answer for his own part before a court than wait to become one of them. He is, according to Jonathan, willing to testify.
He has been keeping originals of every document that has passed through his hands.
He has been the source of the anonymous notes.
He has been trying, in his own way and at his own pace, to bring Graystone down for nearly a year, and he is willing to come into the open and testify now.
But only if we move before Lord Graystone discovers that he has turned. ”
“How long?”
“Jonathan says we have until tomorrow morning. Perhaps the evening after, if Lord Graystone is slow to register the betrayal. Perhaps less.”
He looked up.
She was already on her feet.
Edmund stood. He kept her hand in his. They went out of the study together, and the household, which had been moving through the late afternoon at its usual unhurried pace, began very quietly to gather itself for the last night before they moved against Percival Cummings.