Chapter 23
Chapter
Twenty-Three
A Thing Worth Crying About
Honeycutt announced Steele at two. I had his news before he was through the door. Everything in Steele’s expression was carefully arranged. But he carried bad news in his shoulders, and the weight of the world was upon them.
“I’m sorry, Rosalynd. I couldn’t manage a Scotland Yard cell. Cosmos will be held at Holloway.”
“Why?” I cried out.
“I was wrong about what the Yard has the power to do. The police charge men. They do not keep them. A magistrate remands those charged. The warrant names the prison, and the prison belongs to a department I cannot reach. I went into that building believing rank would answer. I came out having learned that it does not.”
“Tell me the rest. All of it. Do not sort it for me.”
“I had five minutes with Cosmos in the cells beneath the court. He is well.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked after you. He asked me to see to Claire. He warned me that I shall be one of his judges, and apologized for it, as though the arrangement were his doing.” Steele’s voice did something I had not heard it do.
“And he asked me to tell you that the fern on the south bench wants misting and not watering. He says you will drown it out of kindness. He says you drown everything out of kindness, and that there is a green notebook in his desk with the regimen written in it. And to give it to Fox who will see it through.”
I have been told my brother was arrested. I have been told he was charged. I took both of those standing up. The fern took my legs.
I collapsed on the nearest chair without meaning to, putting my hand over my mouth like an actress in a melodrama while tears rolled down my cheeks. The worst of it was that I could not stop. Cosmos had been confined to a cell in Holloway, and he was thinking about a fern.
Steele crossed the room and crouched down in front of me, put a handkerchief into my hand, and did not say a single word. When my overwhelming grief had passed, he used the handkerchief to brush away my tears.
It was then, with perfect timing, that the door flew open.
Petunia, of course. She looked from my face to the duke’s hand to my face again.
Behind her, Chrissie appeared with Laurel at her shoulder.
Then Fox, who had more than likely come up from the greenhouse as he had not troubled to wash the dirt from his hands.
Then Holly and Ivy, arriving together at a dead run and stopping in exactly the same place at exactly the same moment, as they have done since they could walk.
“Why is Rosie crying?” Petunia asked Steele, her lower lip trembling.
I have watched that man command a room, face down a chief inspector, and confront a murderer. I had never once seen him at a loss for words until he was looked at by a small girl in a pinafore.
But then he gathered his will, walked toward her, and put himself at her height. “Your sister is crying because your brother has been sent to a prison called Holloway, and it is a thing worth crying about. I should have found a gentler way to tell her. I am sorry to say I did not manage it.”
“Is he coming back?”
“I am working at it, and so are a great many other people. I will not tell you it is certain, because I do not think you would believe me.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Petunia, brushing her own tears away.
“No. You are difficult to deceive.”
“Is it a bad prison?” one of the twins asked.
There was the lie that would let her sleep, that would let them all sleep. But it was best to give them the truth. “It is not a good one,” I said. “No prison is. But I will see to it that he has his own clothes, his own food, and his own books. And his solicitor will see him every day.”
“Can we go visit him?” Laurel asked.
“No.” I came to my feet. “But you may write or draw something. I’ll take your letters and drawings with me tomorrow when I go see him.”
Fox had said nothing at all. He was standing with his hands behind him in an attitude he had copied off Cosmos since he was four, and he was looking at the carpet.
“Fox,” I said.
“The greenhouse wants doing,” he said.
“His Grace brought a message from Cosmos for you. The fern on the south bench is to be misted, not watered. A green notebook in Cosmos’s desk has the whole of the regimen in it.
” I made myself say the next part evenly.
“I am not to be trusted with it. He said so. He would like you to have the keeping of the fern, indeed the entire greenhouse, until he comes home.”
Fox looked up. Something in his face had resettled. “Right.” And he went out of the room at a pace that was nearly running.
“It is very nearly tea,” Chrissie said, into the silence, in the voice our mother used. “You will all want to change. And you will want to write a note or draw something for Cosmos.”
I gazed at her with all the gratitude I could muster. “Thank you, Chrissie.”
They filed out of the room, Chrissie last, meeting my eyes on the way and saying nothing, which was her whole character.
“That was well done,” Steele said, when the door had closed. “You gave them the peace and comfort they needed.”
“Thank you, but I did not do it alone. You did as well. And Chrissie. She sounded just like our mother. She always managed to make us mind.” I folded his handkerchief into a smaller and smaller square and put it in my pocket. “Now, please sit down. I have news of my own.”
He sat.
“Grandmother came this morning after you left.” I gave it to him as she had given it to me.
The dull knighthood nobody can recall the occasion of.
City money, no land, no county, no wife, no heir, nobody standing behind him.
And then the illness, and the sea, and the coming back—the physician of thirty years let go, the shooting given up, the whole household turned out and replaced, and every one of those things thought sad and common by everybody who noticed and remembered by nobody at all.
“And here is what she could not do,” I said.
“She could not name one living soul who knew that man well before the chest and knows him now. Not one. Every person who was nearer to him than the width of a drawing room is gone— his staff, his physician of thirty years, his closest friends. He has kept everyone at arm’s length since he returned from the sea.
He shed them himself. Now all that people do is say poor Sir Reginald while they stay away from him. ”
Steele had gone very still.
“There is more, and it is mine and not hers.” My mouth was dry.
“The man who put his hand at my waist in my own ballroom and told me he had my brother’s pistol waltzed me the whole length of that room.
He moved like a man of forty in good health.
He did not cough once. And the gentleman at Lady Pembury’s who could not draw breath for coughing kept half a room clear around him out of delicacy.
Everybody looked away, which is exactly what he wanted us to do. ”
“And you believe Harcourt and the masked man are the same person.”
“I have been in a room with both of them, and I would swear to it. You will say we need more proof. Yesterday, I allowed for that. But matters have changed, Steele. Cosmos is in jail, remanded to prison for a murder he did not commit. We no longer have the luxury of time to find proof.”
He did not disagree. Instead, he went to the window and stood with his back to me for the better part of a minute.
“I have spent a month on the enquiry into the masked man,” he said at last. “And then a body was discovered at Kew Gardens next to a pistol that pointed straight to Cosmos. You came to me and asked for my help, which I was glad to give. I thought I could keep the two enquiries separate to keep you safe.” He turned back to me.
“A fool’s belief as it turned out. They can’t be separate enquiries because both enquiries lead to the same man. ”
“Yes.”
It had to cost him that admission.
“I will arrange a meeting tonight. In my library this time. Finch, Graves, Whitfield. And you. Everything will be on the table. No holds barred. No secrets kept.” He was already elsewhere, already arranging matters.
“Eight o’clock,” I said, grinning. “Finch will want feeding. Best inform your cook.” Circumstances might be grim, but there was still time for humor.
He responded with a grin of his own. “Eight o’clock. I shall inform Cook.”
“Steele,” I said when he was nearly at the door. “Cosmos asked you to see to Claire.”
“He did.”
“Do it. Properly.” I chose my words with some care, because there was a great deal I had been given and was not at liberty to hand on.
“She has nobody. Her husband’s people never took to her, and she has no family of her own worth the name.
” I paused. “She needs a good deal of being looked after. If she says she is perfectly well, I want your word that you will not believe her.”
He waited. He was very good at waiting. It was how he got most of what he got. “There is something you are not telling me.”
“Yes.”
“Is it yours to tell?”
“No.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and then he did a thing he has never done in my presence. He laughed, one breath of it, entirely against his will. “God help us. It only wanted that.” And then he grew serious. “You have my word on Claire.”
He’d guessed. Of course he had.
I stood at the window while he walked across the square to his home. Only when he mounted the steps and entered Steele House did I cease my vigil.
It was very nearly tea. I went upstairs to change.