Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
An Uninvited Call
By the time my hansom cab turned into Grosvenor Square after my visit to Claire, the afternoon light lay flat and bright across the paving, and the square had settled into its quietest hour.
The square possessed that placid afternoon aspect that always suggested respectable people had nothing more pressing before them than the arrangement of the tea things.
I, however, was not among their number.
The ride back from Belgravia had given me a half hour alone with my own thoughts, and my thoughts had spent the whole of it walking in a circle.
Benson. Harcourt. Crane. A valet who knew everything, gone into the service of a man about whom nobody knew anything.
I had resolved to send a note across the square first thing in the morning.
Three lines. Businesslike. The word Benson, the word Harcourt, and an hour at which I might be called upon.
Nothing that required an answer beyond a yes.
The cab had scarcely drawn to a halt when a familiar figure descended from a hansom across the square.
Mr. Finch.
He mounted the steps to Steele House, his hat set slightly askew, with an unhurried stride.
A hurrying man, he had once informed me, is a man announcing to the street that something has happened.
His stroll announced nothing at all, which, in the middle of a Mayfair afternoon with forty windows to witness it, announced a very great deal.
I paused with one foot upon the pavement.
The Steele House door opened and Finch disappeared inside. Was he delivering his report to Steele? Or was something else afoot?
I entered Rosehaven House and handed my gloves to the footman. "Is my brother in his study?"
"Yes, my lady."
I went directly there.
Cosmos sat in his accustomed chair, a book open before him and a cup of tea gone cold at his elbow. My brother was not reading. He was waiting—for news, for a knock, for something—and filling the shape of an ordinary afternoon while he did it.
"Back already." He closed the book without marking his place. "Was Claire well?"
"As well as can be expected. Resting. Her household is minding her."
He gestured at the chair opposite. I crossed to the window instead.
Old habit. I thought better standing, and I had a great deal to think about and no notion yet of how much of it to hand him.
Benson's name would lead to Harcourt, and Harcourt to questions, and questions to my brother sitting up until dawn building catastrophes out of nothing.
So I gave him the parts that would comfort him—that she was eating, that she had asked after him—and kept Benson in my pocket for the man across the square.
From here one had a perfect view of Steele House. The afternoon sun lay flat upon the study windows and returned me nothing but a pale suggestion of myself. Finch and Steele in one closed room. And a square between me and whatever they knew. I have rarely resented the distance so much.
Another carriage drew up before Steele House. A gentleman soon descended from it.
Inspector Graves.
I straightened. Behind me the chair creaked.
"What is it?" Cosmos asked.
"Mr. Finch arrived at Steele House ten minutes ago. Inspector Graves has just followed him in."
"Perhaps the inspector came of his own accord."
"Inspectors of Scotland Yard do not call upon dukes in the late afternoon of their own accord. They are sent for, or they come because something will not keep."
"Then perhaps Steele learned of something after he left you."
That was annoyingly reasonable. I turned it over for as long as it deserved, which was not long. Steele did not wait for information to find him; he went out and arrested it. He had sent for them both. I was sure of it. And he had done it knowing precisely where I would be all afternoon.
Behind me, Cosmos sighed. I had heard that sigh the whole of my life. It generally meant I was being difficult, and it was generally correct.
"You have your investigation expression."
I turned and widened my eyes at him.
"And there it is." He smiled despite himself—the first true smile I had seen from him in days. For a moment he looked like my brother again rather than a man rehearsing his composure for a courtroom.
I crossed to his chair and bent to kiss his cheek. He smelled of cold bergamot and the same soap he had used since he was nineteen. "I shan't be long."
"Where are you—" He stopped. "Across the square."
"Possibly."
"It is never merely possible with you."
I was halfway to the door when I looked back. "She's been missing you."
The smile went out of him. He looked, suddenly, very tired.
Poor Claire. Poor Cosmos.
"I hate this," he said.
"I know."
There was nothing to add, so I added nothing, and let the silence sit between us until it had done its work.
“Try not to get into trouble."
"I never try.”
He gave me a look. “No. You just do.”
A few moments later I was crossing Grosvenor Square toward Steele House, curiosity carrying me along at a pace I did not trouble to disguise.
The square was not empty. Two nursemaids held the gardens between them, a footman was polishing the brass at number eleven, and the whole of the north side possessed windows with eyes behind them.
Had I come at midnight I might have gone unremarked.
As it was, I went in full daylight, unchaperoned, to the door of an unmarried gentleman—a set of facts I elected to leave on my own side of the square, together with my better judgment.
Somewhere ahead, three men were discussing something in a room I had not been invited into. Between me and that room lay a stretch of gravel and the entire question of what Steele and I now were to each other, which I had no intention of solving before I reached the far pavement.
If Mr. Finch and Inspector Graves had both been summoned, something had happened. I have never possessed the good sense to leave interesting things alone.
The footman who answered the door was young enough to look alarmed at finding me upon the step. "Lady Rosalynd."
"Good afternoon."
Of Milford there was no sign, which told me something in itself. Butlers do not surrender their front doors to footmen unless they are wanted more urgently elsewhere.
The hall was cool and dim after the glare of the square, and smelled faintly of leather and beeswax—a house kept by staff, and kept well.
"Is His Grace at home?" I asked, knowing perfectly well that he was.
"Yes, my lady. In his study."
"Excellent."
He drew himself up. "I shall show you—"
"Don't trouble yourself. I know the way."
Before he could protest, I was crossing the hall. "Lady Rosalynd—"
But I had already reached the stairs.
He did not pursue me. Sensible boy. There was no future in it.
I went up quietly. Not stealthily—quietly. There is a distinction.
The upper corridor lay shuttered against the afternoon sun. It held that particular hush of a house conducting a meeting—doors shut, servants elsewhere, every sound in the place gathered into a single room.
I was halfway toward that room when my name came through the door.
"…Rosalynd." Steele's voice.
I stopped.
Eavesdropping is a low practice. My grandmother has said so many times, generally while doing it. I gathered my skirts in one hand so they would not rustle, and stood very still.
Another voice, deeper, with the Yard's patience in it. Graves’s. "You haven't told her?"
"No."
Told me what? I took another step.
"…she is involved," Graves was saying.
"Not in this."
Not in what? The pronoun was doing a great deal of work, and none of it for my benefit.
"I think that is a distinction Lady Rosalynd herself would dispute."
A pause. Then Finch. "He's right, Your Grace. The lady has a way of involving herself."
I drew myself up. That sounded suspiciously like criticism.
"I know perfectly well what she has a way of doing," Steele said.
"Then why keep it from her?" Graves asked.
Silence. Long enough that I thought he would not answer at all.
Then: "Because I'd prefer to keep her alive."
I went perfectly still.
Keep me alive.
The words themselves were nothing. Men say such things in novels weekly. It was the way he said them—flat, final, no rhetoric in it anywhere—that put the cold back in my spine. Steele angry was a thing I had encountered before. This was not anger.
"The money, the river, this property beyond Hammersmith," Graves said. "They are all beginning to point in the same direction."
Property. River. Hammersmith.
I pressed the words into my memory in Graves's own order, exactly as spoken. Whatever they meant, I would want them later, unimproved by imagination.
"All the more reason to tell her," Finch said.
"No." The word came sharply from Steele. Even through the oak, the quality of the room's silence changed. "I won't have her blundering into this."
I beg your pardon.
"Until we know what we are dealing with, she stays out of it."
That was quite enough.
I could have retreated. I could have gone home, sent my businesslike note in the morning, and left the three of them to their maps and their secrets and their touching concern for my continued existence. I could also have taken up needlepoint.
I threw open the door.
Maps covered the desk, their corners weighted flat with an inkwell and three books, the river running through the largest of them in a long blue curve. Papers lay everywhere. Finch sat by the fire with a bottle of ale in one hand. Graves occupied the chair nearest the desk.
Steele stood beside the mantel. He did not look surprised to see me.
I did not disappoint. “What the blazes is going on?"