Chapter 25
Mrs. Holt had sent word the morning after they met.
There was one more thing, she wrote, that she had not been able to bring herself to say at a tea table in a public room, and that she would put into Sophia’s hands and no one else’s.
So, the meeting was arranged a second time, in the same small back parlor, and that time it was part of the plan.
Eleanor waited in the carriage at the corner, and Edmund in his own carriage at the curb, until Sophia emerged. Mrs. Holt’s confidence was contingent on Sophia arriving alone. They had calculated the risk and judged it acceptable.
There was little left to say that had not been said already. When Sophia named Lord Graystone aloud, Mrs. Holt only nodded, the steady acknowledgment of a long-suspected fact at last spoken between them and said she would swear to it before any magistrate they brought her to.
Mrs. Holt rose. She crossed to a battered workbasket against the wall, lifted out the lining at the bottom, and withdrew from beneath it a folded paper.
The paper was sealed in plain wax. The outside was inscribed, in a hand Sophia had been reading for weeks in the small leather notebooks of Margaret’s letters.
Give this to someone you trust.
That was all.
“She gave it to me four days before she died,” Mrs. Holt said quietly.
“She had her senses then. She had her senses to the end. She had been hiding it, she told me. She gave it to me because no one would ever think to ask the nurse, and because she trusted me. I have kept it for four years. I had not, until last week, known who to give it to.”
Sophia took the letter.
She turned it over once in her hands. Margaret’s handwriting on the outside was steadier than it had been in the last of the letters in the writing box.
She broke the seal.
It was not long. It was, in Margaret’s careful steady hand, an account, in chronological order, of the arrangement Percival had drawn Robert into the summer of his twenty-second year.
The nature of the dealings. The names of two men in the city who had been involved with Lord Graystone in the matter.
The specific evening Robert had tried to withdraw. The specific conversation that had followed. Margaret had been present. Margaret had heard him, in her own drawing room, tell Robert in language she rendered word for word that withdrawing was no longer one of the options available to him.
The letter went on.
Margaret had set down, with the same care, the three things she had observed about Robert in the fortnight between that conversation and his accident. He had not been sleeping.
He had been writing to a solicitor without telling Edmund. He had said to Margaret, on the evening before the accident, that he was going to speak to Edmund about the entire matter on Sunday. The accident had taken place on Saturday.
Sophia continued to read.
I do not believe my brother-in-law died by misadventure. I believe he was killed because he had decided to tell his elder brother the truth. I am writing this down because I am increasingly certain that the same person will, in some manner, arrange the same outcome for me.
I have begun to feel unwell in a way I do not believe is natural. I do not know how to prove what I know. I am setting it down here so that someone, in the fullness of time, may do so for me. Margaret Cavendish, Countess of Ashfield, the twenty-third of September, eighteen and one.
Sophia folded the letter. Her hands were steady.
She thanked Mrs. Holt and paid the bill. She arranged for Mrs. Holt’s safe journey home, put the letter inside her reticule, put on her bonnet, and walked out of the tea room onto the street.
Lord Graystone was standing twenty feet away.
He was on the opposite side of the street, in the small space between a milliner’s and a bookbinder’s, leaning on his walking stick. He had paused on his way somewhere, or so anyone watching would have assumed. His expression, when she saw him, was pleasant.
He had been expecting her. He showed not the smallest surprise.
Sophia stood on the pavement and looked in both directions.
She did not see Edmund’s carriage. The cross street was quiet.
There was a shopkeeper visible in the open doorway of the haberdashery three doors down, and a woman with a pram coming slowly along the pavement from the South, but no carriage. No Edmund.
She had, perhaps eight seconds to decide what to do.
She did not panic. She had begun, in the past month, to recognize the quality of her own composure when it was no longer ornamental.
She felt it arrive in that moment. Sophia set the reticule firmly in her right hand.
She positioned the letter against her wrist and turned to walk in the direction of Eleanor’s carriage at the corner.
Lord Graystone crossed the street.
He did it unhurriedly. He was beside her by the time she had taken three steps, walking in the same direction at her shoulder, and his voice when he spoke was the pleasant social voice he had been using with her in public rooms for two months.
“Lady Ashfield.”
“Lord Graystone.”
“I had hoped to find you. I was passing. I confess I had thought to take tea myself, and was disappointed to find the parlor occupied. I trust you enjoyed yours.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“And how is the dear Mrs. Holt? I have been concerned for her health. She is so very frail. I should hate to think she had been troubled by visitors. A woman of her age in her condition does not benefit from being asked to recollect old griefs.”
Sophia did not answer. She kept walking. He kept pace beside her. They had, perhaps fifteen yards to where Eleanor was meant to be waiting.
Percival’s voice dropped by perhaps half a register, and the pleasant social quality went out of it. What lay beneath was an entirely different voice. It was lower. It was perfectly controlled. He had stopped pretending.
“You are going to give me what you are carrying.”
“I am not.”
“You are. Lady Ashfield, you are going to walk with me to my carriage, which is around the corner to the right, and you and I are going to have a very quiet conversation about what happens next. You are going to do this because I am asking you to. You are also going to do this because the alternative is much worse for the people in your husband’s household than it is for you. Do I make myself clear?”
His hand closed around her wrist.
He did it through the fabric of her sleeve, not so anyone passing at a distance would necessarily see.
His grip was practiced. He knew exactly how much pressure was required to keep a small wrist where it was.
His face had not changed. Anyone glancing across the street would have seen a gentleman of her acquaintance offering her his arm.
Sophia looked at his hand on her wrist. She looked at his face.
“You will take your hand off me immediately.”
She did not raise her voice. It was, however, pitched. She had learned, since she was sixteen, the precise tone required to make a sentence audible to a quiet street without appearing to have raised her voice to begin with.
The shopkeeper in the doorway of the haberdashery looked up.
The woman with the pram, perhaps eight yards behind them, turned her head.
Lord Graystone’s grip tightened for one terrible second. Sophia understood, in the held second of his grip, that he had calculated the distance to his carriage, the time it would take to walk it, and the small attentive audience on the street, and was deciding.
“Lord Graystone.”
The name cracked across the air.
It came from twenty feet behind them. It was Edmund’s voice. It was not the considered register-controlled voice she had been hearing from him for weeks. He had just rounded the corner at a run. He had just seen the hand at his wife’s wrist. She had never, in her life, heard that tone from him.
It was cold. It was unguarded. It was shaking with a rage so absolute that the syllables of Lord Graystone’s name did not, on their delivery, belong to any particular accent.
Percival released her wrist and stepped back. He did it as though he had been burned. He reached, out of long habit, for the face he wore in every drawing room in London. It came up. It would not hold. It was the first time Sophia had ever seen Percival’s composure fail.
Edmund crossed the twenty feet in perhaps, four seconds.
He did not look at Lord Graystone. Edmund looked at Sophia. He looked at the wrist that had been held. He looked at the red mark already visible above the line of her glove. He looked at her face.
What was in his expression she would remember for the rest of her life. It was fury. It was terror. It was a tenderness so completely intertwined with both that she could not have said which was the underlying emotion and which was the response.
Edmund took her arm gently. He positioned himself between her and Lord Graystone, and he turned his face to the baron for the first time; his voice was very quiet.
“Walk away.”
Lord Graystone did not move.
For the length of two seconds, his pleasant social mask dropped entirely.
What was beneath was ugly. It was also desperate.
He was looking at Edmund and understanding that the conversation he had hoped to have with Sophia in his carriage was not going to happen, and that the absence of it was going to cost him.
The mask reassembled.
He tilted his head. “Of course.”
Percival turned. He walked. His step was a fraction faster than it had been when he had crossed the street to approach Sophia, and his shoulders were tight. He did not look back.
For the first time in two months of public rooms and pleasant social bows, Sophia saw him for what he was beneath the charm. He was a frightened man whose web was unravelling, and he knew it, and he was walking very quickly toward what was left of it.
***
Edmund did not speak in the carriage.
He had handed her in. He had taken his seat across from her, given the driver the address, and the carriage had begun to move. His hands were on his knees. They were shaking.
Sophia reached across the gap between the benches.
She took both of his hands in both of hers. She did not say anything. She watched the shaking subside by degrees, and she did not let go.
When the shaking had stopped, she said, quietly, “Mrs. Holt gave me a letter.”
He looked up.
“From Margaret. Sealed. Four years ago. Margaret named him. Margaret named him in writing, and she described the evening she heard him tell Robert that withdrawing was no longer an option, and she set down her own conviction that what was happening to her was the same thing that had happened to Robert. I have it. It is in my reticule.”
He nodded.
He did not speak. He did not let go of her hands.
He lifted them to his mouth instead.
He pressed his lips to her knuckles. It was not gallantry. He had just been told, by his own arrival four seconds late, that he had nearly lost her, and he was less in command of himself than he had been at any point in the past several weeks.
Then he lowered her hands, but he did not release them. He held them, joined with his, against his own knees.
“Sophia.”
His voice was rough.
“Yes.”
“I had not understood, until I saw his hand on you, that I would not survive it.”
She did not answer.
"I came around that corner and saw his hand on you, and I understood, very precisely, that if any harm had come to you I would not have walked away from him."
He stopped himself there. Whatever else was in him he did not let out. She looked at him. She did not let go of his hands.
“I have heard you.”
She did not say anything else. The carriage rolled on through the late afternoon light toward Grosvenor Square.
When they reached the house, he handed her down himself. He did not let the footman do it.