Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
A Shocking Revelation
Breakfast at Rosehaven House began with an easing of the rules.
Normally, there was to be no reading at the table, no arguments, and no attention to other tasks. We were to enjoy convivial conversation—well, as convivial as my siblings were capable of. But given our current level of anxiety over Cosmos’s travails, I thought it best to relax the rules.
Holly and Ivy were disputing the ownership of a hair ribbon that belonged, as far as anyone could establish, to neither of them.
Fox was reading at the table, but still concealing the book in his lap.
Laurel had a novel propped against the toast rack with the page held down by the marmalade spoon.
Chrissie was sorting the morning's invitations into three piles whose criteria she did not bother to explain.
And Petunia sat at my left hand, feeding the corner of a sausage to Snowball.
At the head of the table, Cosmos read a botanical journal and stirred his tea without looking at it, missing the cup entirely on every third pass.
He had gone gray about the eyes this past week, and thinner.
But he was here, and the table was loud, and the morning sun lay across the cloth in a warm stripe.
I poured my tea and allowed myself, for the length of one cup, to believe in the morning. Unfortunately, that belief did not last beyond my next breath.
Honeycutt entered the room with an expression that left no doubt my enjoyment was about to end. "My lady. Inspector Dodson is in the hall. With six constables."
The table went silent at once.
Cosmos closed the journal, squared it against the table's edge, and rose. That small tidiness, that setting of his place in order told me he had been waiting for this.
"Finish your breakfasts," he said to the table, in the mild voice he used for identifying seedlings. "All of you. I shall be back before you've missed me."
Of course they did not finish their breakfasts. By the time Cosmos reached the hall, we were all of us behind him in a ragged, forbidden procession.
Dodson stood in the middle of our hall. Six constables by his side.
Through the open door, at the foot of our steps, in the full morning light of Grosvenor Square, waited the police wagon.
A crowd of nursemaids, footmen and, seemingly, one viscountess's entire household had already gathered along the railings.
"Cosmos Rosehaven, Earl of Rosehaven." Dodson's voice carried. He meant it to. "I hold a warrant for your arrest, for the willful murder of Sir Basil Crane."
"I understand," Cosmos said. "I am ready to accompany you."
"Hands, my lord."
The word did not make sense to me until one constable stepped forward with the irons.
"That is not necessary." My voice came out of me in a shout. "He has said he will accompany you."
"Regulations, my lady," Dodson explained. There was nothing in his face at all, which told me how much he was enjoying it.
Cosmos held out his wrists. He looked at no one but me while the irons went on. His look silently said what it had said before. Steady. Say nothing. Hold the house.
But out loud, he said, “Send to the solicitor. And tell those who should be told. Gently."
"It is in hand," I assured him, having no idea whether anything on earth was in hand.
He walked out of Rosehaven House between two constables the way he walked everywhere—unhurried, methodical, with singular purpose.
Outside, the whole square watched the Earl of Rosehaven go down his steps in irons and into the black wagon.
Its doors shut on him with a sound I expected to hear for the rest of my life.
Behind me Petunia burst into tears.
Somehow, we got the children into the drawing room, Chrissie and I.
Ivy was crying because Petunia was crying. Holly was not crying, which was worse. Fox walked to the window with his fists in his pockets and offered, in a low voice, to prepare something for Inspector Dodson's tea. I pretended not to have heard him.
"Six constables," Laurel said. She was pale and precise. For once, she did not have a book in her hands. "Last time it was two."
"Last time they asked," I said. "This time they came to take. It is a difference of manners, not of truth. Cosmos has done nothing wrong, and we are going to bring him home."
"When he comes home," Petunia announced, arriving out of her tears into a cold and shining fury that Grandmother would have recognized in a mirror, "Inspector Dodson is going to be extremely sorry."
Seemingly, my siblings were intent on revenge. I didn’t blame them. I felt exactly the same.
Honeycutt appeared at the drawing room door. For the second time that morning his face had news in it, though of a different weather. "The Duke of Steele, my lady."
Of course. He would have seen the wagon from his windows. He had likely been standing at them.
"Chrissie." I stood. "Take them up to the schoolroom. All of them. Fox as well."
While she shepherded our brothers and sisters, I went down to the morning room. Steele stood in the middle of the carpet. He did not come toward me as I entered. We both knew if he did, I would lose the composure I had spent the last hour building.
“I saw,” he simply said.
“The entire square did.” Somehow, I kept my voice from wavering.
Still he knew I was barely hanging on. “Let us sit, Rosalynd. I have something to tell you. Something that will help.”
I obliged. It was either that or a full collapse.
Taking the seat across from me, he told me about his family solicitors—Gathorne and Pryce, of Lincoln's Inn Fields. He’d engaged them. They were expecting his summons. A note he’d sent the moment the wagon turned out of the square. Sir Hugo Rennell, a barrister, was also retained.
“From here, I’ll go to Scotland Yard. Cosmos will be held there through the committal. Not Newgate. He will have a room, and a window, and Graves within call."
"You cannot promise a window in Scotland Yard."
"I can promise it. I have the means to make it true and I intend to spend them this morning."
I heard his words and let them stand. I wanted them to be true more than I’d wanted anything else in my life. But then, the way cold follows rain, I arrived at a different conclusion.
"Retained," I said. "Engaged. Expecting your summons.” I gazed at him. "When did you retain a barrister?"
"Yesterday afternoon."
"How did you know?"
"Graves came to me yesterday." He gave me Graves’s visit straight without softening a single syllable. "A witness came to the Yard the day before. A member of the Argosy. Respectable, no debts, no malice. He heard Cosmos’s quarrel with Crane through the library door. All of it. The word blackmail. Claire's name. The blow your brother struck.” Steele did not look away as he said it. "Armed with that, Dodson spent the whole of that day on the rest. Cosmos’s carriage in Claire’s street.
The balls. An afternoon at Kew this spring in front of half the world.
The warrant was being drawn while Graves stood in my study. "
I rushed to my feet. “You knew. You knew yesterday. You stood at your window and watched this house go dark and you let us all go to bed—" My voice broke and I despised it. “Why did you not tell me?”
He did not retreat and he did not come toward me. He stood and took it, which made it very much harder to deliver. "Because it was coming whether you slept or not. A lawful warrant, sworn on honest testimony. Nothing I hold and nothing the Queen has lent me reaches a warrant."
"That was not your choice to make."
"No. I made it anyway, and I will answer for it." His voice stayed level. There was nothing cold in it. "But answer me this first. If I had crossed the square last night and told you, what would you have done?"
I opened my mouth to say that I would have prepared.
That I would have readied the children. That I would have—I closed my mouth.
Because the truth stood in the room with us and would not be stared down.
I would have been at Scotland Yard by eight, laying the whole history of that pistol in front of Inspector Dodson to draw the fire onto myself.
He would have disbelieved every word of it, and used all of it, and I would have handed him my ruin and my brother's in the same morning.
"You see it," Steele said quietly.
I waved a dismissal at him. “Do not compound your offense by being right about it."
His lips maddeningly twitched. “I have found the two frequently arrive together."
I turned away from him and looked out at the square, at the railings. The crowd had thinned, now that the show was done. The fine, bright, ordinary morning went on, indifferent, while a black wagon carried my brother across London to a gaol.
He should have told me, no matter how he’d explained his reasoning. Even when I knew he was right. Still, I did not wish to be fair about it.
"I am not thanking you," I said at last.
"I have not asked."
"Then go." I faced him. Whatever was in my face, he received without flinching, which is one of the several unreasonable things I lo—that I tolerated about him. "Go and spend your morning, Your Grace. Get my brother his window."
He bowed—to me, in my own morning room, as formally as at a presentation before the Queen—and went.
Grandmother arrived at half past eleven in a state of magnificent wrath.
Honeycutt had scarcely pronounced the first syllable of her title before she was past him and into the morning room, stripping off her gloves.
"I have had this morning's events," she said, "from my maid, who had them from the coal merchant, who had them from that dreadful Pettigrew woman's second footman, who stood at the railings and watched my grandson—the Earl of Rosehaven—taken from his own doorstep in irons like a common thief.” She sat, spine nowhere near the back of the settee next to me, and leveled the look that has been correcting this family's posture for fifty years.
"You will now tell me everything, Rosalynd. Omit nothing. I shall know if you do."
I told her what could be told. The body in Kew.
Father's pistol beside it, taken from Cosmos's study by hands unknown.
The quarrel at the Argosy a month ago, overheard, and sworn to now by a witness.
Steele's solicitors, Steele's barrister, Steele at the Yard this very hour arranging that Cosmos be held there and not at Newgate.
Grandmother heard it through without once interrupting, which frightened me more than questions would have.
"A quarrel," she said when I had done. "My grandson—who once apologized to a wasp—struck a man at his club. Men do not strike men at their clubs over nothing, Rosalynd. What was the quarrel about?"
"That is not mine to tell."
"Not yours—" She set down her gloves. "Child, they will hang him for the want of it."
"They will not hang him, Grandmother. The matter touches a confidence I have no right to break, not even for you. Ask me anything else."
She looked at me for a long moment, and something moved behind the wrath—approval, perhaps, arriving against her will.
"Your mother," she said, "was exactly this maddening."
Honeycutt suddenly appeared at the door. "Lady Edmunds, my lady."
Claire came in white to the lips and stopped short at the sight of Grandmother. But then something in her face set, and she came forward past Honeycutt who promptly quit the room.
"Lady Rosehaven." She curtsied. "I am glad you are here. It spares the telling twice."
"Claire—" I began.
"No, Rosalynd." She said it gently, and took the settee facing my grandmother and me—committed, chin up, hands still.
"You have been keeping my confidence. I could hear you keeping it from the hall.
I will not remain quiet one more minute while this family protects me at Cosmos's expense.
" She drew a breath. "The quarrel was about me, Lady Rosehaven.
Sir Basil Crane was blackmailing me. He claimed that I had a hand in my husband's death—that the draught which stopped his heart was helped to its work by me.
It is a lie. But it is a lie an inquest could be made to love, and I paid him to keep it from one.
I paid him for months. When Cosmos discovered it, he went to that club, and told Crane the payments were ended, and struck him. For me. All of it for me."
She sat back, her hands shaking.
The drawing room was silent. Out in the hall the tall clock counted through it.
"Well," Grandmother said at last, in a commonsensical manner. "At least it was about something."
At this point Honeycutt, with the worst timing of his distinguished career, brought in the refreshment tray—tea, seed cake, and a dish of potted-meat sandwiches whose aroma arrived in the room a full stride ahead of him.
Claire stood up so fast the settee shifted.
"Forgive me," she managed. "I—forgive me—" and was gone into the hall with a hand pressed to her mouth.
"Poor creature," I said, half rising. "It is small wonder, with all she carries—the worry alone would turn anyone's—"
"Sit down, Rosalynd,” Grandmother ordered.
She had not moved but was looking at the door Claire had gone through.
Her expression had changed entirely. The wrath was gone.
Something else had taken its place—a shrewdness so old and so absolute that it silenced me mid-sentence.
“Take the food away, Honeycutt. Leave the tea.”
“Of course, my lady.” He left with the offending items.
And then we waited as the clock in the hall went on counting.
Claire returned some minutes later, gray about the mouth, steady by an act of will, murmuring something about the heat of the morning.
Grandmother let her sit. She let her settle her skirts and fold her hands and lift her chin.
Then she said, with the terrible gentleness of a woman who has buried a husband, raised a son, and misjudged nothing in half a century: "Are you increasing, child?"
What?
Claire's hands went still in her lap. She looked at Grandmother, and then at me, and then the last thing she had been carrying alone went out of her, visibly, all at once.
"Yes, ma’am. I am."