Chapter 22
Chapter
Twenty-Two
A Question of Custody
The Assistant Commissioner kept me waiting eleven minutes, which was his way of establishing that in his building a duke waited like other men.
His office was twice the size of Graves’s and half as honest—good carpet, a portrait of the Queen, papers arranged for visitors rather than for work. We performed the openings. Then he folded his hands and waited.
“The Earl of Rosehaven,” I said, “will be held in this building until his trial. I want him to have a clean room with light and air, reasonable access to his solicitors and his family, and Inspector Graves within call.” I put it as a fact rather than a request, which is a thing rank permits and rarely refuses.
“Your Grace.” He had his voice arranged as carefully as his papers. “You are asking me for a thing I cannot give you.”
“You command the Metropolitan Police.”
“I do. The Metropolitan Police arrests men and charges them. It does not keep them.” He said it without any pleasure, which was worse than if he had enjoyed it.
“His lordship goes before the magistrate at one today, the same as any common thief, because a peer’s privilege does not begin until he is tried.
The magistrate will remand him, and the remand warrant will say where he is taken.
That warrant is not mine to write and not mine to alter.
And the prison it names is not mine either.
Prisons belong to the Prison Commission, which belongs to the Home Office.
I could no more give you a room in one than I could give you a berth on a man-of-war. ”
“Which prison.”
“Holloway. It is where the untried go.” A pause, correctly judged. “It is a better place than the name suggests, Your Grace, and a good deal better than Newgate. I say that because it is true and not because it will comfort you.”
One o’clock. I had arrived at eleven to arrange a thing already arranged by a warrant not yet written, in a building four streets away, by a man I had never met.
“And afterward?”
“Afterward is not mine either, and it is not the Old Bailey’s.” He let it sit exactly as long as it deserved. “The grand jury will find the bill in the ordinary way, and then the indictment goes up to the House of Lords. You will be trying him yourself, Your Grace.”
My hand had gone to my breast pocket at some point in the last minute, and I took it away again.
The letter from Her Majesty had lived there three weeks.
But it had been granted for one purpose.
To conduct an investigation touching the public good and desiring that those to whom I presented it extend me every facility consistent with their duty.
It would not have moved the superintendent.
His duty this morning was to deliver a prisoner to a magistrate and he meant to do so.
To lay it on this desk was to say, in front of a senior officer of the Metropolitan Police who would be obliged to remember it, that the Crown’s private business and the murder at Kew Gardens were matters a duke pursued out of the same pocket.
And those two tracks had to be kept apart.
So I kept it in my coat and did not present it.
“You have gone somewhere, Your Grace.”
“I have arrived somewhere. It is not the same thing.”
He squared the papers he had arranged for visitors.
“An untried prisoner may wear his own clothes. He may have his food sent in at his own charge, and his own bedding, and his own books. He may write letters and receive them. He may see his solicitor out of the hearing of any officer and his family within the sight of one. Everything you came here to purchase this morning, the law gives him for nothing.”
“Then give me the one thing you have got. Five minutes with him before the court.”
“The cells beneath the court are not mine either. But the sergeant who keeps them was mine for nine years, and he will read a note in my hand.” He drew paper toward him. “Five minutes, Your Grace. And I shall want it understood that I have given you nothing.”
He walked me to the door himself, which he need not have done.
“A word, if you please. You have been the better part of an hour with me. Chief Inspector Dodson is not clever, Your Grace. He is, however, extremely attentive to slights, and he will hear before long that you were in this room. Whatever it is you have not told me, he will spend the rest of his case trying to guess it.”
I found Cosmos in a cell, a stone room with a bench and no window at all.
He stood with his hands behind him as though the room were his own greenhouse and I had called at an awkward hour. “Steele.”
“I went to Scotland Yard this morning to have you kept there. I failed. You go to Holloway this afternoon.”
His mouth moved toward a smile without arriving. “I have been arrested, Steele. I did not look to be unarrested by luncheon.”
“That is a great deal more grace than I have earned.”
“It is not grace, it is economy. Tell me the things that did work.”
“Gathorne and Pryce, solicitors, have had your affairs since yesterday. They are my family’s people, they have been at it a hundred years.
” I gave it to him in order since it was the only comfort in my possession.
“Sir Hugo Rennell, Barrister, is instructed. He cleared the week on my word alone, and asked me one question before he did it.”
“Which was?”
“Whether you were innocent.”
Something crossed Cosmos’s face and was put away again. “Rennell.” He said the name the way a man says the name of a good surgeon. “Then it is to be a real trial.”
“It was always to be a real trial.”
“Yes. But a man may go on not quite believing a thing until somebody engages Sir Hugo Rennell on his behalf.” He turned toward the wall for a moment. Once he’d regained his composure, he turned back to me. “They tell me my peers are to try me.”
“They are.”
“I would rather be tried by strangers. Strangers have not dined at my table.” A short breath.
“You will have to stand up in your place, Steele, and say a word about me in front of every man who has ever taken my hand. I mention it because I would sooner it came from me than crept up on you in a corridor.”
“I am aware of it.”
“I know you are. I wanted it said aloud once, by somebody who is not sorry for you.”
Above us a door closed and the traffic of the Strand went on. Somewhere along the passage a man was being told to move along.
“Here is what I can promise,” I said. “Your sister will not be alone for one hour of this. Whatever she needs, and whatever she will not admit to needing, comes to me. She may quarrel with me about it afterward at her leisure. The children will be kept in ignorance while ignorance can be kept, and when it cannot, they will hear it from her and not from a newspaper. With your permission, Gathorne will manage the estate and the accounts, so that nothing of yours drifts while you are at Holloway.”
He listened to the whole of it without moving. And then he said, “Claire must be looked after as well.”
“Rosehaven—”
“No. Hear me out, because I have had a morning to arrange the words and I shall not have another.” His hands came out from behind him.
“She has nobody. Her husband’s people never took to her.
She has no brothers. Every friend she possesses in the world is under my roof and about to be a great deal too occupied.
If this goes as it may go, she will be a woman whose name was read aloud in the House of Lords, and she will have got there for no reason on earth except that I loved her and struck a man on her account.
” He stopped and made himself go on. “See to her. Not the case. Her. Whether she eats. Whether she is sitting alone. Whether some clever person is at her door with a card and a kind manner. Rosie will do it if I ask her, but she’ll have enough on her plate. ”
“You have my word.”
“Do not let either of them do anything brave.” The almost-smile came back and did not stay. “They will try. They will call it duty. But it will be love, and it will hang me.”
“I shall mount a guard against bravery from every quarter,” I said, and hoped the boast lay within my power to make good.
“Bravery is the family disease.” He straightened his cuffs, which were not dirty yet but would be.
“One last thing. It is small, but I want it done. The fern on the south bench wants misting and not watering. Rosie will drown it out of kindness when she thinks of it. The rest of the greenhouse needs to be looked after. There is a green notebook in my desk with the whole of the regimen written in it. Give that task and that notebook to Fox. He will see to it. And I’d like some seed catalogues. It will help pass the time.”
“It shall be done.”
“Thank you. It is nearly the only thing in England I can still arrange.”
The gaoler’s boots came along the passage.
“Go on,” Cosmos said. “You have a great deal to do, and I am to have a very great deal of nothing.”
Dodson found me on the steps, as I had known he would. Men like Dodson always know when their ground has been walked on.
“Your Grace. A long morning at the Yard, I hear.”
“An instructive one.”
He stepped aside with exactly the correct depth of bow, and let me get four stairs down before he observed, to nobody, that interest from Grosvenor Square was becoming quite the feature of his case.
I filed it where I file the things I cannot mend.
The van came up out of the yard behind the court a few minutes later and turned north into the traffic.
I stood on the steps and watched until it was out of the street.
Holloway was four miles from Grosvenor Square.
I had never in my life had occasion to learn that. I did not expect to forget it now.