Chapter 28
Jonathan had gone to the magistrate at nine.
He had carried the deposition packet in a leather case under his arm. He had returned to the inn at the corner of Chancery Lane twenty minutes later with the magistrate’s signature on the warrant and the two constable’s men assigned. The trap was set.
The clerk who had delivered Sophia’s note to Bryant Wallace’s chambers at half past ten had returned with the message that Lord Graystone would be at the reserved private room at the inn at eleven o’clock precisely.
The magistrate would be behind the screen at the back of the room at a quarter to eleven. Edmund would be against the wall to the left of the door. Jonathan would be in the hall outside. Sophia would be alone in the chair facing the door when Lord Graystone entered.
It was twenty to eleven.
There was a strange quality to the air. Time was not moving at its customary pace.
The minute hand of the clock on the mantel had taken more than a minute to move once between the marks, and the ordinary sounds of the inn outside the door were arriving in the room as if filtered through several walls of muslin.
Edmund had planned the morning, on the surface, methodically.
He had checked the positions of the magistrate’s men. He had verified, twice, that the screen at the back of the small, reserved room was thick enough to conceal four people without showing the shape of them through the painted canvas.
He had walked the small room itself, measuring the distance between the door and the chair Sophia would occupy and the wall against which he would stand. Six paces. He could cross it in two strides if he had to. He had timed it three times.
Beneath the surface, he was not well.
Edmund had not felt that way since the autumn of Margaret’s illness.
He had not felt the precise weight of it since he had stood at her bedside one morning, ten days before her death, and understood, by some quality in the way the light was falling across her hand on the counterpane, that the recovery he had been waiting for was not going to occur.
He had felt it then. He was feeling it in that moment.
He was sending his wife into a room with a man who had killed twice.
It did not assist him that she had insisted.
It did not assist him that she was right to have insisted.
It did not assist him that Lord Graystone, who had a quality of disdain for women so absolute it amounted to a tactical weakness, would only drop his guard before a person he considered beneath him, and that the person he most considered beneath him in the present circumstances was Sophia.
Every single one of those facts was true. None of them were useful. They were making the terror sharper rather than smaller.
He found Jonathan in the corridor outside the parlor.
Jonathan had stepped out to consult with the magistrate’s clerk. He was leaning against the wall by the window at the end of the passage, with his arms folded, in the steady waiting attitude he used when he was managing his own nerves by refusing to do anything that looked like managing them.
“Jonathan.”
“Edmund.”
“If anything goes wrong in that room. Anything at all. You are to get her out first. Before you address what is happening with Percival. Before you address what is happening with me. Before anything. Do you understand?”
He said it flatly. He had been over every possibility in the small hours of the night and had reached a single instruction. Jonathan registered it immediately. He pushed himself away from the wall.
“Edmund.”
“You will.”
“I do not need to be told.”
“I am telling you anyway.”
“Yes,” Jonathan said quietly. “I shall. Of course I shall. There is nothing else I would do.”
Edmund nodded.
Jonathan held his gaze for a moment longer. The matter was settled, and that was its own kind of promise. The kind that did not require words.
Jonathan returned the nod.
Edmund turned, and he went back into the private parlor to find his wife.
***
They emerged from the carriage at five to eleven.
The yard of the inn was quiet. There was only Jonathan at the side door, with his hat in his hand, and the magistrate’s clerk behind him with the leather case.
The carriage that had brought Lord Graystone to Bryant Wallace’s chambers an hour before was visible at the front of the inn. The driver was on the box, alone. He had not, by his expression, been told what was to occur in the room above.
Percival Cummings was inside.
He had arrived at four minutes to eleven. Jonathan’s clerk had seen him enter the side door of the inn and ascend the staircase to the private parlor on the first floor.
He had been carrying a small leather case. He was sitting at the table in the small, reserved room one floor above their heads, waiting for the woman who had sent him the unsigned note.
Edmund stood at the side door of the inn with Sophia at his elbow.
Jonathan looked at him.
Edmund looked at Sophia.
He did not, for two breaths, look at anyone or anything else.
“Sophia.”
“Yes.”
“I am going to be six paces from you. I am going to be two strides from you. If you require me at any point, you need only say my name. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Sophia.”
“Yes, Edmund.”
He squeezed her hand. He did it firmly. He held it for perhaps a breath, and then he released it. He stepped back, and she straightened her bonnet and adjusted the fold of her shawl at her shoulders.
“I am ready.”
“Lady Ashfield.”
“Yes.”
“After you.”
She went up the staircase.
She did not look back. Edmund had registered at the door of the house that morning that she was finished looking, and she did not look back then.
She went up the staircase ahead of Jonathan and the magistrate’s clerk, in the steady measured tread she had used at every supper and every gallery and every drawing room of the past four months, and she did not, at any point, hesitate.
Sophia paused when she reached the landing.
She did not turn. She put her hand on the door of the private parlor. She opened it and stepped through. The door closed behind her.
Edmund stood at the bottom of the staircase.
He had been intending to follow her up at a count of fifteen. He had counted to seven before he started moving. Jonathan, beside him, did not remark on the count. Jonathan was already on the third step.
They went up the stairs together.