Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
The Truth Comes out
The study door struck the bookcase behind it and rebounded.
Rosalynd stood in the doorway, cheeks flushed, eyes bright with indignation. That particular expression was not new to me. Usually it appeared just before something exploded.
How much had she heard? I made the calculation the way I make all unpleasant calculations, quickly and without flinching.
The corridor. The shut door. The footman would have admitted her—no one born could have stopped her—and the stairs took half a minute at her pace.
Long enough. She had heard the worst of it.
The set of her chin confirmed my conclusion.
For perhaps three seconds nobody moved. Then both Finch and Graves came to their feet.
"Right," said Graves briskly. "I'll be going."
"An excellent idea," said Finch.
"No," I said.
Both men stopped.
"Sit down. We are not done."
"Your Grace," Graves began. "I believe a strategic withdrawal would be best."
"Sit. Both of you."
Finch resumed his seat. Graves followed with considerably less enthusiasm. Both angled their chairs fractionally out of the line of fire. Neither looked at her.
At that precise moment Milford entered, remarkably close to discomposure. In his years of service Milford had been discomposed twice: once when lightning struck the stables at Thornburn Abbey, and once when a Cabinet minister had taken ill. This afternoon made a third.
"Your Grace, I do beg your pardon. I was below stairs and—" He glanced toward Rosalynd. "Milady, I apologize for not being there to greet you."
Rosalynd folded her arms. "Quite all right, Mr. Milford." The warmth she spent on my butler was pointedly unavailable to his employer. And then she turned to me. "His Grace was just about to explain the nature of his discussion with Mr. Finch and Inspector Graves."
Three faces turned to me with identical expressions of polite expectancy. I have chaired committees with less coordination.
"Not here, I won't." I turned to Milford. "See to Finch and Inspector Graves, and whatever you do, don't let them leave."
"Er, yes, Your Grace." He was probably wondering how he would keep an enquiry agent and a Scotland Yard inspector from leaving.
I left him to the problem. A man does not rise to Milford's eminence without resources.
"Since we're staying, Mr. Milford," Finch said, "I wouldn't object to another bottle of ale."
Milford's shoulders relaxed.
"And perhaps another helping of the beef," Finch said.
Graves stared. "You cannot still be hungry."
"I work better on a full stomach."
Milford did not so much as blink. "Very good, Mr. Finch."
The man could have taken tea through a bombardment.
I glanced at the termagant who was still breathing fire at the threshold.
There was no salvaging the session’s secrecy.
There remained only the question of venue, and I preferred my disasters private.
"Lady Rosalynd and I are going to enjoy a private discussion in the library. " I gently took her elbow.
"Steele—" She'd asked me not to touch her.
But I was not in the mood to comply. "Library. Now."
She took one look at my face and offered no further objection.
Her elbow was rigid under my hand for the first three steps. By the fourth, it was merely unforgiving.
As we reached the far end of the corridor, Finch's voice drifted after us: “And cheese as well, Mr. Milford, if it wasn’t too much trouble.”
"Good God, man," from Inspector Graves.
Rosalynd made a small sound that in anyone less angry might have been a laugh. It gave me hope. Not much. A duke learns to govern on thin majorities.
The library curtains stood half drawn against the westering sun. The fire was laid but not kindled. I did not ring for anyone to kindle it. What was coming would want no witnesses. And in any case, I expected the temperature of the room to be supplied by its occupants.
No sooner had I closed the door than she demanded, "What is going on?"
I could have lied. A month ago I would have offered half-truths, enough to satisfy her curiosity and not enough to place her in danger.
But Rosalynd was too intelligent for that.
Too curious. And she had heard enough to know there was more.
If I continued to lie to her, she would not retreat.
She would continue on her own. And that I could not have.
She had heard keep her alive. She had heard the river and Hammersmith. The only question remaining was whether she would have the whole architecture from me now, or excavate it herself with a teaspoon—and her work with a teaspoon was formidable.
Besides, I was tired. Not of her—never of her—but of keeping the secrets from her. "We're conducting a separate investigation."
"Into what, exactly?"
"Into the masked man from the Thames investigation."
"Why?"
"I decided the earth had harbored him too long."
"You're not planning to kill him?"
"He deserves it for what he has done. But no. Once we have identified him, he'll be turned over to the authorities. And let the Crown deal with him."
She studied me a moment longer than the answer warranted. Satisfied—or filing the point for later, one never knew which—she moved on.
"Finch and Graves are involved, I gather?"
"As well as Whitfield, the accountant I employed during the Opera House investigation."
"Finch and Whitfield I can understand. You pay them, of course. But Graves is Scotland Yard. How did you obtain his cooperation?"
There was the truth. But something held me back, first and foremost, her reaction.
"How long has this separate investigation been going on?"
I’d hesitated too long. "A month or so."
Her gaze narrowed. "Around the same time the Opera House investigation concluded, then."
"About then, yes."
She had begun to pace the room the way Graves paces a crime scene—unhurried, missing nothing. I recognized the method. It was my own, and it had never before been aimed at me.
She walked up to stare long and hard at me. Suspicion shone in her eyes. "How did you get Graves's cooperation, Steele?"
At close range her eyes were extraordinary, an inconvenient thing to notice while being cross-examined. "Her Majesty allowed it."
"Allowed? So you requested her help."
"Not her, precisely. Scotland Yard's."
It was the truth. It was also a hedge, and no one alive hedged successfully against Rosalynd Rosehaven.
"And she gave it to you just like that? Amazing. You must have brought a strong argument for her to grant such a request."
"I explained that the man was the mastermind behind drug trafficking, behind the young women who were taken to the Thames House to be used and abused.
She agreed such criminal activities could not be allowed to continue.
" I was on safer ground here. Maybe she would believe me. Maybe she would probe no further.
Rosalynd believing convenient things had never once occurred in my experience of her.
"And that was your only reason?"
"Isn't that enough? The man is a menace to the public good."
She wandered to the stacks and ran her fingers across the book spines. "The public good. A noble cause indeed." When she reached the end of the row, she turned toward me. "And what did you promise the Queen? Her Majesty does not grant favors without expecting something in return."
And there it was. The crux of the matter. "I gave you up."
The words had lived in me for a month, sealed and archived. Spoken aloud, they sounded exactly as bad as I had feared.
"Ah," she said. "In exchange for getting Scotland Yard's cooperation, you and I would no longer have anything to do with each other."
"That's correct." Maybe whatever this new understanding between us was could still be saved. I did not believe it, even as the thought formed. She was three questions from the center of the thing and closing.
She left the stacks and moved forward, stopping but a short distance from me. "I do have one question. Did she propose the separation, or did you?"
The question every interrogator saves for last. The one to which she already knew the answer.
There was no saving this truce. There was only one answer I could give. "I did."
I expected fireworks. But there were none. She stood very still, the way she does when something lands. I would have preferred the fireworks.
"You gave me up, Steele, so you could hunt down the masked man. Because he is a menace to the public good." She rested a hand on my chest.
"Yes."
"Any other reason?"
"What other reason could there be?"
"Me."
"I—"
"Don't bother lying. Your heart is doing the talking for you."
She was right. My heart was beating hard enough that she could very well feel it through my coat.
She stared at me for a long moment.
"You truly believed that was the only way."
"Yes."
“You knew this man was fascinated with me, maybe even obsessed. And you, in your own inimitable way, crafted this plan to keep me from coming to harm."
“Yes.”
She curled her arms around my neck. "Oh, you impossible man.”
I stood in the circle of her arms prepared for every outcome but acquittal. "It was the only way I knew to keep you safe. And he's now engineered a murder with enough evidence to point to your brother."
"So both investigations are now the same."
"Yes."
Saying it aloud joined the two halves, and the join was ugly. The same hand I had been hunting had spent that month measuring her brother for the gallows.
She turned away. "You should have told me."
"I couldn't."
"Why not?"
"Because if I had, you would have wanted to be part of it. And I couldn't have that. But now—"
"But now, he's made Cosmos his target to attract me. 'Walk into my parlor,' said the spider to the fly. Well, Steele, this fly is too savvy to fall for that trap."
She said it lightly. My blood ran cold, declining to take it that way.
"You really thought I was in danger," she said softly.
I almost laughed. "I think you're in danger every time you leave the house."
The corner of her mouth twitched. Then it went, and I regretted the going.
"You should have trusted me."
"I do trust you."
"Then why keep this from me?"
The answer came at once. Because I was afraid. Fear and I were old acquaintances. I had simply never before permitted it a vote.
She looked up sharply. "You were afraid."
"Yes."
The admission cost less than I had budgeted for it. That is the trouble with hoarding a thing for a month. One forgets to reprice it.
"Of what?"
I said the only truth I had left. "Of losing you." Ten years of not saying such things, undone in three words, and the strangest part was the relief.
"You cannot say things like that."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't know what to do with them."
I smiled a little.
"I have much the same difficulty where you are concerned."
It was the most honest exchange we had managed in a month, and we had conducted it in under a dozen words. There was likely a lesson in that. I declined to learn it just then.
She looked down. Then back up. "I've missed you."
The words were so quiet I almost thought I had imagined them. The simple honesty of them nearly undid me. I had missed her too. Far more than was wise. I knew a lost campaign when I fought one.
"I missed you as well."
A tiny smile appeared.
"I think we're both exceedingly bad at this."
"At investigations?"
"No." A little laugh. "At staying away from one another."
I smiled despite myself. "Abysmal."
She laughed softly.
Until that moment I had not understood how desperately I wanted to hear that sound.
"You cannot keep me out of this investigation," she said.
"I know. But you must be sensible, Rosalynd."
"I'll try."
I wanted to shake her. "For once in your life you have to be. Promise. Or I'll shut you out."
She stepped closer. So close that the gold flecks in her eyes were plain. "I don't want to be apart from you. I can't sleep from wanting you."
I brushed my fingers across the softness of her cheek.
She leaned into it. A small, trusting movement. Enough to ruin me entirely.
"Neither do I." It was the last truth I had left.
She smiled. A soft, radiant smile.
I bent my head. She met me halfway.
Her lips found mine with a certainty that unraveled the last of my resolve.
The kiss began gently, almost cautiously, as though we were both relearning something we had spent too many weeks denying ourselves.
Then her fingers tightened against my shoulders, and I drew her nearer, no longer able to pretend restraint came easily.
She tasted faintly of chocolate and ratafia, and of the warm summer afternoon she had carried in from Grosvenor Square. For one impossible, precious moment there was no masked man, no Queen's bargain standing between us. There was only Rosalynd.
When at last we parted, neither of us had gone very far.
My forehead rested lightly against hers.
I felt her breath catch before she smiled—a small, unguarded smile meant for no one but me.
A long moment later she rested her head against my chest. Beneath my hands, the last of the afternoon's fury had gone out of her shoulders.
"We're hopeless," she murmured.
"Completely."
"What are we going to tell the Queen?"
The question was so entirely, perfectly her—the kiss barely concluded and the logistics already marshaling—that the laugh arrived before I could dress it in dignity.
"I haven't the foggiest." And then I kissed her again.