Chapter 25
Chapter
Twenty-Five
A Note Without a Name
The following morning it took the better part of an hour to reach Holloway.
The Camden Road went from stucco to brick to soot, and then the prison came up out of the ordinary street like a castle out of a picture book—gate tower, battlements, arrow slits that had never seen an arrow, built to look ancient by men who finished it the year my father came of age.
Someone had gone to the trouble of making it beautiful. That was the part I could not manage.
At the lodge I gave my name and my brother's and signed a book.
A warder went through the basket with his hands—the cold chicken, the plums, the pot of damson jam Mrs. Bateman had pressed on me with an expression that forbade comment.
He shook out each garment, read the children's letters, and rifled the seed catalogues.
He was not unkind about it. He simply did it, as he did forty times a day, while I stood and let him.
Then a second warder walked me across a yard and up a stair to a door with two men on it.
The room beyond was narrow and clean—a table, two chairs, a barred window high in the wall.
My brother stood beneath it in his prison clothes with his hands clasped behind his back, as though waiting for a lecture to begin.
"Rosie."
I had promised myself in the corridor that I would be sensible. Keeping the promise by the width of a hair, I crossed the room and took both his hands. In the doorway a warder shifted and then, at a look from the other, subsided.
"You are thinner," I said, because it was true and because it was easier than everything else.
"The food here is a rumor about food." He seated me in one of the chairs and took the other.
"Then you shall be glad to hear I brought some from home. Gathorne has arranged for it to come daily."
His collar was clean, and there was a nick high on the cheek that he had not put there. "You have been shaved."
“By a man serving four years for receiving. He’ll be doing it every three or four days. An earl with a week's beard is an earl who has given up, and Sir Hugo tells me half of this business is what men decide when they look at me." The almost-smile. "So I sit very still and think about ferns."
I did not say any of the four things that came to me.
"Now," he said. "Report. All of them, in order."
I gave him the household, name by name, the way he wanted it.
Fox in charge of the greenhouse with a solemnity that would have been comic if it were not so plainly love, feeding the sundews so often they had begun to look prosperous and lazy.
Laurel informing Honeycutt that the fall of empires was instructive under present circumstances.
Holly and Ivy concluding the armistice of the hair ribbon and opening negotiations over a pair of gloves.
Chrissie running the house, while I was otherwise occupied, with an efficiency that had startled the servants and, I admitted, me.
Then I gave him the letters. "And Petunia sent this." I unfolded it on the table between us. "I was made to swear an oath of faithful delivery."
The drawing was executed in her fiercest crayon: a small figure with copper scribbles for hair standing atop a mountainous gray beast, and beneath the beast's feet, unmistakable in a good coat and a flattened hat, a gentleman.
"The elephant is named Justice. She wishes you to know that it is sitting on Inspector Dodson, and will remain sitting on him until you come home."
My brother laughed. It came out of him all at once, unguarded, the laugh from before all of this, and the younger warder started in the doorway as though a chair had spoken.
Cosmos folded the drawing with the care he gives his pressed specimens and put it in his breast pocket, and for a moment neither of us managed anything at all.
"And Claire," he said at last. His voice did what it always does at her name now—dropped its cleverness at the door.
"Bearing up. I saw her yesterday and shall see her tomorrow. Grandmother has taken her under her wing."
"God help her. Grandmother's wing has weather in it." But the relief moved through him in plain sight. "She eats? She sleeps?"
"She is being looked after, Cosmos. By all of us, including Steele."
The words rose in me then, and I held them behind my teeth.
She is carrying your child. A man in a cell has nothing to do but imagine.
Give him a child to imagine and by tomorrow he would have calculated what his life was worth against the two of theirs.
And beneath that lay the plainer truth—it was hers to tell, in a better room than this one, with no warder at the door.
I said nothing. It cost more than I would ever tell either of them.
"Rosie." He was watching me the way he watches a specimen that has moved. "Do not let her do anything brave."
"Bravery is under guard from every quarter. I have seen to it personally."
"Time, milady," said the older warder, not unkindly.
Cosmos rose and kept my hands a moment longer. "Give them my love. Claire too. And tell Petunia I shall hold the elephant close to my heart."
Somehow, I kept my composure the length of the corridor, the stair, the yard, and the lodge. And then I spent four miles of the Camden Road getting it back.
Rosehaven House received me with its usual noise, and for once I went gratefully into it. Petunia required a full accounting. Had he liked the elephant? Had he understood about Justice? Had he laughed? When I confirmed the laugh she nodded once. Her drawing had done its work.
It was Fox who sent me into the study, though he did not mean to. He found me at the foot of the stairs before dinner with dirt under his nails and asked, in a voice arranged to be casual, about the green notebook. The study was locked. So he’d been managing the greenhouse on memory and guesswork.
"I shall bring it to you before dinner," I said.
The study was dark. I did not light the lamp because I did not wish to see its solitude. The way to that desk in the dark was in my feet, the way the stairs of one's childhood are.
The green notebook lay exactly where Cosmos had said, in the second drawer, squared to the drawer's edge, because everything of my brother's is squared to something.
Beneath it sat the pistol case, flat and black, brass corners dull in the last of the light.
Every misery of the past ten days had climbed out of that case.
It had waited here through all of it, closed, patient as furniture.
I owed the thing a look. That is the only account I can give of why I did it. I set the notebook down and opened the case. On the velvet, in the pistol-shaped hollow where my father's gift had lain for many years, sat a folded square of paper.
The room went a long way off and came back changed. I made myself breathe twice before I touched it. And then I unfolded it and read it in the gray of the window, because striking a match had become more than my fingers could manage.
Five words, in an even, elegant, unhurried hand.
We will meet again soon
No signature. No initial. The paper was heavy and expensive, unfoxed, unyellowed, its creases sharp. It had not lain in this case for months.
Two things came to me, in the wrong order.
The second arrived first, and it emptied me.
Someone had walked into my house. Past Honeycutt, past the footmen, past six children—or been walked in by hands we had paid or trusted or never once looked at—and had opened this drawer and set his note in the one place in London where only I would find it and only I would know what it meant.
Here is where you began, the velvet said.
I have been inside your beginning all along.
The first took another minute. When it came, it changed the weight of the paper in my hand.
Whitfield had asked for fifteen years of Sir Reginald Harcourt's signatures laid out in order. Nobody could give him a single line of the masked man's writing. There was none. There had never been any. He did not write. He arranged for other men to write.
And here were five words of it. Five words in the masked man's own hand.
I went downstairs with it burning in my sleeve. I found Honeycutt in his pantry over the silver ledger and asked, in the tone one uses for asking nothing at all, whether anyone had called in the last day while I was out. The fishmonger's new boy. Nothing else, milady, excepting the police.
I kept my hand still on the doorframe. The police.
Two of Inspector Dodson's men, yesterday, the morning of the arrest. They had spent an hour in the study with the door shut and the desk turned out drawer by drawer, with Honeycutt in the corner throughout, not being willing to leave them alone in his master's room.
He begged my pardon for not mentioning it, but I had been in no condition to be told.
They had opened that case. A pistol case is the first thing such men open. Had there been a note in it yesterday, it would be in a file at Scotland Yard today.
So it had come since. In the last day.
And there was nothing out of order. That was the worst answer available. Nothing out of order meant the man had reached into the middle of my family without disturbing the dust, and could do it again on any afternoon he chose.
Tell Steele. The thought arrived already formed, wearing the shape of my own promise. Whatever I learn comes to you the same night.
I stood at my window. Across the darkening square his study was lit.
I built the scene as it would go. Men in the garden by midnight, men in the corridors by morning, and myself wrapped in cotton wool and set upon a shelf.
And Steele handed one more stone, shaped exactly to break him.
Proof that every arrangement he had made had not kept the masked man out of my house.
Beneath the sensible reasons, the old voice came. Carry it alone. Spare him. You took the pistol alone, you met the river alone, you kept the masquerade alone. I recognized it while I was listening to it, which was progress.
I argued with it and made a respectable case.
A threat is not a discovery. Those five words tell us nothing we did not know—that he watches, that he intends, that he wants me lying awake listening for doors.
That the note is a goad built to spend Steele's strength on theater, and I should not dance because the man had paid the orchestra.
But the hand, said the part of me still standing in that dark study after the rest of me had left it. Mr. Whitfield had asked for a hand.
Tomorrow, I bargained. In daylight, in Steele’s study, with Whitfield sent for and the thing laid on the table where it belonged. One night. That’s all.
I locked the note in the drawer of my writing desk and got into bed. But I did not sleep.
We will meet again soon.
He wished me lying awake, listening for doors.
He had that first part right. I lay awake.
But I was not listening for doors. I was composing, sentence by sentence in the dark, the things I would say to him when the meeting came.
By the small hours I had the whole speech by heart, and it was a good one.
I never once supposed I would be given the chance to deliver it so soon.