Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
The Thread He Feared
For three weeks I had not been invited to Rosehaven House.
But this morning I had received a note from Rosalynd. She had news to share and suggested we meet at eleven. At Rosehaven House.
I mounted her front steps in full view of everyone in the square. At her entrance hall, Honeycutt's stiffened shoulders told me he did not approve. His taking of my hat and gloves told me he understood. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
"Her Ladyship and His Lordship are expecting Your Grace." He might as well have announced a flood. "In His Lordship's study."
As I did not know the way, he went up ahead of me.
"The Duke of Steele," he announced when we arrived and then withdrew.
Rosalynd stood by the window, her face pale in the morning light. I had never in my life wanted anything as much as I wanted to cross that room and hold her in my arms. I did not. She would not welcome any comfort from me.
"Steele," Rosalynd said.
My name in her mouth was a small undoing. "Lady Rosalynd."
Cosmos rose from behind his desk. "Thank you for coming." He appeared in no better shape than his sister.
"Would you like some tea?" Rosalynd asked. Even in trying circumstances, etiquette had to be observed.
"No, thank you."
"Take a seat, Steele," Cosmos said. "This is going to take a while."
I accommodated myself in the chair across from his desk. When no word from either of them was forthcoming, I said, "You said you had news."
"Yesterday, when I spoke with you," Rosalynd said, "we wondered about a motive that would tie Cosmos to the victim."
My gaze traveled between brother and sister. "I gather you found one."
She nodded.
Cosmos dropped into his chair and, in a very tired voice, said, "It has to do with Claire."
"Lady Edmunds?" I asked.
"Yes. We have been…seeing each other."
Seeing—a rather euphemistic word for what I had observed at ballrooms. They cared for one another. Deeply.
"In plain terms," Cosmos said, "Crane was blackmailing her."
"Ah."
Rosalynd rounded on me. "Is that all you have to say?"
"For now." I brushed a nonexistent speck from my trousers. "I'll have more when I'm offered a more extensive explanation."
"He's right, Rosie."
Between the two of them, they laid it before me.
Claire's husband had regularly taken a potion prescribed by his physician when his vigor had flagged.
On the night of his death, he had taken more than had been advised, and his heart had failed.
Both his physician and the chemist had testified at the inquest about the potion.
The verdict had been death by natural causes.
Crane had come to Claire in April and named a price for not asking a coroner whether her husband's heart had been helped to its rest. By her. She had paid him, the sum climbing as such sums climb, and had told no one.
But Cosmos had found out nonetheless.
"I tracked him down to his club," Cosmos said.
He did not look away while he spoke, which I respected and which did him no good at all.
"I sought out a private room and told Crane the payments would stop. He said something I will not repeat before Rosie. That’s when I struck him.
" A muscle moved in his jaw. "I didn't think we were overheard. "
"But clearly you were."
Cosmos bowed his head. "Yes."
I sat in that study and felt the trap close—not with violence, but with the soft completion of a thing built by a patient hand.
A pistol by the body was a riddle Dodson might worry for weeks. A pistol by the body of a man the Earl of Rosehaven had publicly quarreled with and struck a month before—that was not a riddle. That was a rope, strong enough to hang him.
The man in the mask had not needed to invent Cosmos's guilt. He had only needed to find a guilt already made and lay his corpse upon it.
"You see it," Rosalynd said, watching my face. She had always been able to read it, which was inconvenient at certain times.
"I see that Dodson is perhaps two days from a witness and three from a warrant." There was no kindness in softening it. They had not summoned me to be lied to gently. "And I see that you will do anything to stop your brother from hanging."
Something flickered in her eyes—not triumph. She was too tired for triumph, and too kind to take it in front of her brother. But she did not pretend to misunderstand me.
"Then we are agreed I am in it,” she said.
"We are agreed," I said, and felt the last of a thing I had guarded against go quietly over the wall.
There would be no keeping her from this. There never had been. Finch had told me I was a fool to believe otherwise. I had paid him for the truth and disliked him for delivering it. And here it was, proven this gray morning, with the woman in question standing five feet away.
"You asked me here for more than to reveal a motive."
"I did," Cosmos said.
"Go on."
"We need to learn the details about how the body was found.
A man shot at Kew Gardens would bleed into the ground.
He fouls the gravel, the leaf litter, the soil.
He leaves the precise signature of the place he died in—on his clothes, in his hair, under his nails.
" His hands tightened on the arms of the chair.
"I have not been made privy to those facts.
I need to know them. For if the body bears substances that do not belong at Kew, then he was not killed there.
He was murdered somewhere else and brought to Kew along with my pistol to tie me to his death. "
His eyes held mine.
"I need to examine his clothes, Steele. I need to view the body. If I am afforded that opportunity, I will tell you within the hour what part of England killed him. And that is a thread that runs away from me, not toward me, because I did not kill him."
"You cannot examine them yourself," I said. "You are the Yard's chief suspect this morning. They will not let you within a mile of the evidence."
"The Yard won't. But the surgeon who has the body is Merrick.
He and I have stood over a dozen poisoned stomachs together, and he owes me his good name on at least two of them.
" Cosmos almost smiled, but did not. "He will not defy Dodson openly.
And Inspector Graves does not have the authority to interfere in another man's case.
But a duke may ask to view the deceased.
You've done it before and, blast you, taken my sister with you. "
"Cosmos," Rosalynd said in a soft voice. "It was my decision to view the victim in the Thames investigation. Steele tried to talk me out of it. He did not succeed."
"He could have—never mind." Cosmos struggled to regain his composure.
"A duke may bring his man with him. If you are the one who asks, and I am the man you bring, Merrick will look the other way long enough for me to read what Crane was wearing.
I cannot remove a thread of it. But I need not.
I need only be in the room with my eyes and ten minutes' light. "
I turned it over. It was not without risk, his plan. If Dodson learned that the Earl of Rosehaven had stood over the body he was suspected of making, he would build a tower upon it. But it was a true thing, the first move in the whole affair that ran toward the truth instead of away from it.
I came to my feet. "Very well. I shall send word to Merrick this morning. Once he allows it, I will bring you with me."
"Then there is my part,” Rosalynd said.
I knew what she was going to say before she said it.
"Cosmos can read the ground a man died on.
You can open doors that rank opens. But neither of you can sit in drawing rooms and learn from women the truth of Crane—who he flattered, who he feared, and who he owed.
" Her voice grew steadier with every word.
"None of that opens to a hired man. It opens to me, and only to me. "
It was what Finch had told me, almost to the word. And I had answered Finch with a flat refusal. I had no refusal left in me. I had only the old fear, and that fear no longer had anywhere to stand.
"It opens to you," I said, laying my hands upon her brother's desk as I stood.
"With conditions. You go nowhere on Crane's account that you would not otherwise go, and you go to no house unless I know where you are.
Whatever you learn comes to me that same evening. We decide what to do next together."
I heard how it sounded. Even now I was trying to place safeguards around her instead of trusting her judgment.
She would hear it, certainly. Whether she would accept it was another matter.
Yet I could not bring myself to speak differently.
Loving her had never taught me how to stop wanting her safe.
For a long moment she held my gaze. The gray morning light and the months during which we had loved one another stood between us. A love that could no longer be.
"Two of the three," she said at last. "I will tell you the same evening, and I will go to no house you do not know about.
" She lifted her chin. "But I will not promise to go only where a lady might.
Because the thing we are hunting does not stop at the edge of polite society, and that means neither can I. "
It was more than I had any right to and less than I could bear. I understood at last what Finch had tried to tell me. Partnership was not keeping her behind me. It was trusting her to stand beside me.
I would guard her where I could. She would go where I could not. Together, perhaps, we might reach the truth.
"Then we begin," I said.
Out beyond the window the square was alive—a maid beating a step, a cart upon the cobbles, the ordinary city that did not know a faceless man had laid a careful corpse to catch a woman, and that the woman's family had just, very quietly, declined to let her be caught.
Crane's murder had given us a trail to follow. The other trail remained mine alone. I knew, with a certainty, that they would lead to the same man.
Rosalynd must never discover it.
I would see to that.