Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
A Sacrifice Declined
For a moment none of us moved.
And then Grandmother looked at Claire the way she looked at a hand of whist that has just improved considerably.
“Well, that settles the question of what this family does next. Cosmos will be cleared. There is no version of events in which my grandson hangs while his child is born to a ruined widow. I decline to permit it.”
Claire’s composure, which had survived the confession itself, very nearly did not survive the kindness. Her chin came up by force of will alone.
“Then you will understand, Lady Rosehaven, why I must do the one thing I can do.” Her hands were folded in her lap with a stillness that frightened me.
“I was with him the night Crane died. Cosmos came to me at eight and did not leave until past two. I shall go to Scotland Yard this afternoon and swear to it.”
“No,” I said. “You shall not.”
“Rosalynd—”
“Sit down, child,” Grandmother said, though Claire had not risen. It was that sort of voice. “And listen to my granddaughter, who is about to be sensible.”
I did feel irritated, as it happened, though not for the reason Grandmother supposed.
I was about to make Steele’s argument, in Steele’s order, very nearly in Steele’s words.
The same argument he had made to me days ago, when I had wanted to fling myself and the truth of the pistol at Scotland Yard.
I had raged at him for it, even though he’d been right.
“Claire. Think of what Dodson has. A quarrel over blackmail, sworn to by a respectable witness. Cosmos striking Crane. And an attachment between you and Cosmos that his men assembled in two days from carriage wheels and balls. All of that is inference. Damning, but inference.” I leaned forward and took her hands.
They were cold, the way mine had been in Steele’s entrance hall.
“Now imagine you walk into Scotland Yard and swear that the Earl of Rosehaven spent six hours of that night in your house. Just the two of you. Until two in the morning. You will not have given Cosmos an alibi, dearest. You will have converted Dodson’s inference into sworn fact.
You will have taken the motive he has built and gilded it. ”
“But it is the truth.”
“It is a lover’s truth, and Dodson will call it a lover’s lie before you have finished taking the oath. That is the injustice of it. The testimony is worthless to Cosmos precisely because you love him. A stranger’s word could free him. Yours cannot.”
“It would be worse than worthless,” Grandmother said.
“You would hand them your own head along with his. At present, Mr. Crane’s slander about your husband died with Crane.
Walk into that building, place yourself under oath at the center of this affair, and some clever young man will dig the slander up again inside a week and give it the inquest it never deserved.
They might name you accessory before the assizes met.
And then, child, what becomes of what you carry? ”
Claire’s hand moved to her middle, the small unconscious gesture I had seen several times without understanding it, and now could not see without an ache.
“And I will tell you the other thing,” I said, “because you have not thought of it, and you must. Cosmos would deny it.”
She stared at me. “He would perjure himself?”
“Without hesitation. You know he would. And Dodson will sit between the two of you watching each of you commit a crime to spare the other. And he will use it, Claire. A man who lies to protect a woman is a man who would kill to protect her.”
The fight went out of Claire by degrees. What remained was worse to look at than the resolve had been.
“Then there is nothing,” she said. “He is in a cell for striking a man on my account, and there is nothing on this earth I can do for him.”
“There is something you have already done,” I said. “You gave me Benson.”
It took some time to lay it out, and I chose with care what was mine to lay.
Not the whole of it—not the masked man, not the Floralia, not the parts of this history that belonged to me and to an enquiry I was not at liberty to expose even here.
But the shape of it. That could be given, and they had earned it.
“Crane did not find your secret, Claire. He was sent to it. Steele and his men looked into his affairs and found money—two years and more of steady wages from a source no clerk can trace. Crane was not a blackmailer who happened upon softness. He was a collector, salaried, gathering other people’s secrets for a man who pays to know them.
For two years he kept an acquaintance that nobody in London could explain—an elderly gentleman with gout and a dreadful chest. Sir Reginald Harcourt. ”
Claire had gone very still. She arrived at it one step ahead of my telling, her face changing as the steps assembled themselves. She was not slow, my brother’s Claire.
“Benson,” she said. “Benson went to Harcourt.”
"Straight from your household into his. Carrying everything Edmunds ever trusted him with—the physician, the chemist, the potion fetched discreetly for a vain and private man.
Your secret did not fly through the air, Claire.
It walked from your house to Sir Reginald Harcourt's dressing room, and from Harcourt it was handed to Crane with a price upon it and your name attached. "
Claire's hands had gone still in her lap. "Can you prove it?"
"No." The word cost me something to say plainly.
"I have a valet and a coughing fit at a musicale. Steele has taken it apart in front of me line by line, and he was right to. What I have is a house. Not a man. He asked me to do nothing until his men report to him. I’m to be sensible in the meantime. I told him I would."
"But you don't believe that it’s only a house."
“No. The man who set Crane on you, the man whose wages kept him in Belgravia, the man behind the whole of this is Sir Reginald Harcourt. I cannot prove one word of it." I met her eyes. “But I would swear to it before the Queen herself.”
“Still, I wrote the reference.” Claire’s voice dropped to almost nothing. “Benson asked for a character, and I sat at Edmunds’s desk and wrote that Benson was honest and discreet and faithful, and I sent him—I sent him myself—”
“You sent a servant to a situation. That is all you did.” I gripped her hands hard enough to hurt, because gentleness would not reach where she had gone.
“The man who turned that servant into a weapon is the one who owes this debt. I mean to see it collected. You did not do this, Claire. It was done to you. You are going to stand on it, because your child will need a mother who can.”
Grandmother, throughout the whole of this, had said nothing at all. Her gloves lay forgotten on her lap.
I have known my grandmother's silences my entire life and can tell them apart the way other people tell birds apart.
This was not the silence in which she gathered her forces.
It was the other one, which I had encountered perhaps four times, where she went somewhere private and came back holding something she did not like.
“Sir Reginald Harcourt," she said at last.
"You know him?"
"Rosalynd, I have been out in society since before your father was breeched.
I can seat every family of consequence in England three generations deep.
I can tell you which duchess's mother was an actress and which bishop's fortune began in a gaming club, and I have never in my life required more than a name and a county to do it.
" She turned her head toward me. "And yes.
I can seat Sir Reginald perfectly well. And I find I do not care for it. "
"Tell us.”
"Knighted in seventy-one or seventy-two.
A subscription to a hospital, or a loan to a colony, or some other worthy thing nobody has ever troubled to repeat because there was nothing in it worth repeating.
Money out of the City. No land, and therefore no county and no neighbors.
No wife. No children. No brother, no nephew, nobody standing behind him at all.
" She smoothed a glove across her knee without looking at it.
"I have sat at table with him three times. He carved badly and had opinions no one cared to learn.”
“In other words, someone hardly worth mentioning.”
“Yes. Before the chest, he was a great deal of nothing in a good coat, which describes half the men I have outlived."
"Then what troubles you?" I asked.
“Harcourt shot every October in Norfolk with the Cheswicks, but then he stopped. There were two or three houses he went to in the autumn, and he stopped going to them as well. Went to the sea instead—Torquay. He came back with a new household entire—every servant, top to bottom, the whole establishment turned out and replaced. And he let his physician, Sir Arthur Kelling, go as well.” She stopped.
"Do you know, I have not thought of any of that in two years, and I am not certain I ever thought of it at all.
One simply says poor Sir Reginald and passes the sugar. "
The clock counted through it.
"He became ill," she said slowly, "and then he went away, and then he came back a great deal worse.
That is not remarkable. Men go to the sea and come back worse every year of the world.
What is remarkable is what lies in between.
Attend to me, Rosalynd, because I am going to say it badly.
" She lifted her chin. "There is a space.
On the near side of it there was a man with a physician and a shooting party and a household.
On the far side there is a man with none of those things, and nobody who could tell you the difference.
Not one soul in London has ever thought that worth a second sentence, because that is precisely what a long illness does to a man's life. "
I did not say anything. I could not have improved it.
She set both hands flat on her knees. "I have spent five minutes trying to name one person who knew him.
Who physicked him. Who shot with him. Who sat down to dinner in his own house, or dressed him, or kept his accounts.
Anybody at all who was ever nearer to Sir Reginald than the width of a drawing room.
" She looked at me. "There is not one left.
Every soul who could tell you whether the man in that invalid chair is the man he was has been let go, and the rest of us are precisely where he left us. Across a room."
"Grandmother—"
"I shall not ask you what he has done." She began drawing on her gloves, finger by finger.
"You would tell me, and then I should be obliged to conduct myself like a woman who knows something, and I have never once managed that convincingly.
So I will give you what I have, and what I have is a space, and you may put it in your pocket and make of it what you like. "
"You are going to do something."
"I am going to take tea." She settled the second glove over her wrist. "He has made himself invisible to men, and I daresay he has been thorough about it. His business people. Bankers. Clever young persons with notebooks. But no man alive has ever troubled to make himself invisible to old women, because no man alive believes he needs to. I intend to spend the coming week with every dreadful creature of my acquaintance in London. Half of them owe me confidences and the other half owe me money at whist. I do not want his history, child. I want the people he shed, and the month he shed them in. I shall have them in a week’s time.” She rose.
"There is something you must hear first, Grandmother,” I said. “Whatever you learn, however you learn it, he must not feel it being learned. He keeps accounts, and he has people killed.”
At her full height, in her second-best carriage dress, my grandmother resembled nothing so much as a ship of the line coming about.
“Noted.” She kissed Claire's forehead on the way to the door, pronounced her a sensible girl who would eat her supper and sleep the night through or answer for it, informed me that she would call on us in two days for tea, and was gone. The drawing room required a moment to recover its proportions.
Claire let out a breath. "Is she always—"
"Always."
"Cosmos never said."
"Cosmos apologizes to wasps. He has never once needed rescuing, and so he has never seen her come about." I rang for a fresh tray of sandwiches, something that wouldn’t offend. “I want you to eat something. Then I am sending you home in our carriage to rest. Remember, my dearest friend, you gave us the thread in Benson. There’s nothing else you need do except care for yourself and that which you carry.”
Once the tray was delivered, we talked about nonsensical things giving her time to regain her equilibrium. She left in a much better frame of mind than the one in which she’d arrived.
When she had gone I stood a long while at the window and let the day assemble itself.
A valet carried out of one house and into another. A hanger-on drawing wages for two years from a source no clerk could trace. And now a man who’d dismissed an entire household, along with his physician, and distanced himself from his previous acquaintances.
Steele had called it a house, not a man. But he was wrong. The gentleman who had waltzed me across my own ballroom, with his hand at my waist and his voice low beneath the music and the invalid at Lady Pembury’s musicale was the same man.