Chapter 5
Chapter
Five
Holding the House
Ihad crossed Grosvenor Square without bonnet or gloves, in front of half the square and a gentleman walking his dog, and I would do it again tomorrow if it came to that.
On the walk back I held to that thought, because it was the only part of the morning I had chosen for myself.
The rest had been chosen for me—by a pistol I should never have lifted from my brother's desk, by a man in a mask, by a queen who imagined that two people kept apart was the solution to something.
I had disobeyed her royal command, for it had been a command no matter how politely it had been couched, and gone to Steele to ask for his help. I would not be sorry for it, whatever came.
Rosehaven House met me with noise, the way it always did, and for once the ordinariness of it was an affront.
Above stairs, Holly and Ivy were conducting an argument that involved, by the sound of it, a hairbrush and a great deal of principle.
And somewhere Snowball was making her displeasure known.
The house went on as though its master had not been handed into a carriage two hours past and driven to Scotland Yard, because the house did not yet know. I had told Honeycutt to tell no one until I returned.
He met me in the hall as I stepped through the door. "Milady."
"Has there been word?"
"None, milady."
"The children?"
"Lady Laurel witnessed the event.” A pause, the Honeycutt equivalent of a throat cleared over something delicate. "I believe she has formed her own view. And Lady Chrysanthemum—"
"Yes, I imagine she knows." The pianoforte's keys were being pounded with more effort than the classical composition required. “Anyone else?”
“Not as far as I could tell, milady.”
Laurel found me in the morning room before I managed to take a seat. She stood in the doorway with one finger marking her place in a book she was not reading.
"There were policemen," she said.
"There were."
"Two constables and a man in a good coat who was not a constable. They took Cosmos away."
There was the lie that would let her sleep, and there was the truth she had already half-built.
Because she was Laurel and would catch me out in a heartbeat, I gave her the smallest honest version I owned.
"They have asked Cosmos to help them with questions about a man who has died. He has done nothing wrong."
"I'm twelve, old enough to know the truth."
"I've given it to you."
"Not the whole of it."
"I don't know the whole of it, and that is the truth. I don't want you to worry. The Duke of Steele is helping us see it put right."
"The Duke?” she said. "I thought the two of you were not speaking." Of course she had noticed. Since March Steele had practically been a fixture at our house. But in the last three weeks, he hadn't set foot inside it.
"We are speaking today."
She accepted that with a small nod and no fuss, and then she said, "Fox was in the greenhouse with Cosmos when the footman came to fetch him. He's taking the heads off some of the flowers. No idea if that's supposed to happen."
"I'll see to it."
The door flew open. Petunia in tears. She flung herself against me and buried her face in my skirt. "The police are going to hang Cosmos." Of course, she knew. She had a talent for learning things.
I cupped my hand around her chin and raised it. “No, they won’t, sweetheart.”
A sob escaped her. “You'll stop them?"
“The duke and I will."
A last hiccup. A wipe of her face. And then a tremulous smile. "It will be fine then. The duke can do anything." And with that she walked out of the room, followed by a somber Laurel.
After I ascertained Fox was trimming the heads of the flowers for their benefit, I proceeded to my bedchamber. I did not draw open the curtains. I did not light the lamp. The dark suited me.
I had taken the pistol from Cosmos's desk because I wanted a weapon and did not wish to account for the wanting.
And then it had been taken from me by the same masked man who came uninvited to my masquerade ball and told me he had it.
The single fact that would lift the suspicion from Cosmos—that the pistol was stolen from me—was the fact I could not give without laying my entire history with that man on Dodson's desk.
Two hours later, the knock came soft, two raps. I knew it for Tilly's before she entered.
"Milady. His Lordship is home. He's in his study. He asks that you come to him."
Cosmos rarely summoned anyone. He went to people, or he sent a fond, distracted note that one might answer at leisure. He did not sit in his study and call his sister down to it.
"Thank you, Tilly."
I did not change my gown or do anything to my hair. Whatever was about to happen, I would not meet it freshly powdered, as though I had something to set right in the glass first. I went down as I was.
His study door was shut. It was always shut. When he wasn’t in it, he kept it locked against Petunia's curiosity and Fox's experiments.
"Come,” he said when I knocked.
He stood at the window with his back to the door, still in the clothes he had been taken away in. He had not lit a lamp either. The two of us, it seemed, had arrived at the same end.
"Cosmos. Are you—"
"They let me go. No charge." He said it to the window. "Dodson was very sorry to do it. He made certain I understood that the sorrow was temporary." He turned, and the keen, patient gaze I had known my whole life had something in it I had seen only once before. "Sit down, Rosie."
I sat.
"I have spent the better part of today being asked about a pistol," he said.
"Our father's pistol. The one I keep—kept—in this room, in a drawer, where it has sat untouched for years.
I told them, in perfect honesty, that I had no notion how it came to be lying beside a dead man at Kew Gardens.
" He set his hands on the back of his desk chair.
His voice did not rise, which was worse than if it had.
I remained still, for I knew there was more to come.
“I can only surmise you took it. So you will tell me all of it. And you will not spare me the parts you think will frighten me, because I have spent the morning frightened past the reach of anything you could add to it."
So I told him.
I went back to the beginning, to an afternoon while he was at a lecture, when I had come into this very room, opened the second drawer of his desk, and lifted our father's pistol from its case.
"I wanted a weapon," I said. "I did not wish to explain to you why I wanted one.
So I took it, and shut the drawer, and let you go on believing it sat where it had always sat. "
"Why did you want a weapon, Rosie?"
"Because of what I meant to do with it."
And then I gave him the Floralia—not the laundered thing the newspapers had run, the one he had read over his breakfast and folded down in disgust. The whole of it.
Beneath the masks and the costumes the Floralia had been a market.
The goods were girls, taken off the streets and out of service positions and frightened into silence, sold for an evening to men who would never answer for it because no one with the power to make them look had ever bothered.
Steele, his brother Nicky, and Finch, the enquiry agent, had set themselves to dragging the thing into daylight.
That daylight, in the end, had meant a newspaperman, an illustrator, and a scandal too large for society to unsee.
"And your part in it?” Cosmos asked.
"They needed someone inside. Among the women.
Someone to find the moment and signal Steele and the other men on the river.
" I held his gaze, because to look away would have been its own kind of lie.
"I dressed as one of them, Cosmos. A red gown.
A mask. I rode on a barge full of women who had chosen to be there, and let every soul aboard believe I was one of them. It was the only way in."
He took off his spectacles. He did not clean them or set them down. He only held them, as though he had forgotten what they were for.
“And Steele permitted this?”
"Steele forbade it." The words came out harder than I meant them to.
"He argued with me the better part of an evening.
He had a dozen reasons and not one of them was foolish.
I went anyway. So whatever you are preparing to lay at his door, it belongs at mine.
I chose it. Knowing all of it, I would choose it again. "
A muscle moved in his jaw. He said nothing, which was Cosmos's way of saying a great deal.
"The pistol was in my pocket,” I went on.
"For myself. Against the chance the night went wrong.
And it did. I gave the signal from a bathroom window, and when I opened the door to go down and away, there was a man standing on the other side of it.
Half masked. He knew my name. He knew a great deal he had no business knowing.
" I made my voice flat, a recitation, because flatness was the only thing holding it level.
"I reached for the pistol. He was faster.
He caught my wrist and turned it until I cried out.
He took the weapon out of my hand as easily as lifting a glass from a tray.
Then he had me carried off. Steele reached me before I was harmed.
" I drew a breath. "That is what the papers did not have. That is what I did not give you. The pistol never came back to me. It stayed with the masked man, from that night to now.”
There was more, and I did not say it. I had never said it—not to Steele, not to anyone.
I did not say it now: that the man had wound a loose curl about his gloved finger and called himself fascinated, that he had spoken of taming me the way another man might speak of breaking a horse, that he had looked at me with the patient appetite of a collector who has decided upon a piece and is content to wait for it.
Cosmos had weight enough to bear at the moment.
He did not need to hear that I was the thing all of this was for.
For a long moment my brother remained silent. When he spoke, it was slowly, the way he worked at everything, from the root upward.
"He has had it since the river," he said. "He kept our father's pistol in some drawer of his own, for months." His gaze came up to mine. "And this morning it was found beside a dead man at Kew, where it could not fail to be traced to me."
"Yes."
"Which means he did not choose me." He set the spectacles down at last, with great care, as though they might shatter from a rough thought alone.
"He chose you. I am only the lever he means to use.
Put me in a cell, and there is no length you would not go to, no bargain you would refuse, to have me out of it. "
I had braced for his anger. I had not braced for this—for him to arrive, unaided, at the precise shape of the trap, and to look at me across it with no blame in his face at all.
"Yes," I said again, and the word came out unsteady.
"Then I will not give him the satisfaction of watching me be frightened," Cosmos said.
"And neither will you." He came around the desk and, for the first time since I had entered the room, he was simply my brother again, eight-and-twenty and tired and reaching for my hands the way he had reached for them when we were children and the house had emptied of everyone who was meant to keep us.
"You should have told me when it happened, Rosie.
Not for the pistol. For you." His grip tightened.
"But you will not carry the next part alone.
Whatever he wants of you, he will have to come through this family to take it.
And we are a great deal more trouble than he has reckoned on. "
For the second time that day I did not weep, though it cost me. I had crossed Grosvenor Square that morning to ask one man for help. I had not expected to end the day being offered it, unasked, in a darkened study, by the brother I had spent months lying to in order to keep him safe.
"There is a duke across the square," I said, when I trusted my voice, "who believes he can manage this entirely on his own."
Cosmos made a sound that, in a better hour, might have been a laugh. "Then he has not been paying attention to either of us."