Chapter 27
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
A Vow Made
The report reached me nine minutes before she did.
Finch's second man was in my study before Milford could finish his name—Hicks, hatless, still heaving.
An obstruction in the streets north of Belgravia.
Arranged, by the look of it: too neat, too complete, the way clear behind and blocked before.
A man had entered her ladyship's carriage.
Bowen had reached the door inside two minutes.
Her ladyship was unhurt. The man was lost in the crowd.
Unhurt. The word did its work badly. It told me her body was whole and told me nothing else.
Two minutes of that man in a closed carriage with her.
Every arrangement I had made, the watchers and the warnings and the three weeks I had paid for with everything I owned, worth exactly the width of a carriage door.
I was rushing toward the study door when she appeared in the doorway, exactly as she’d arrived eleven days ago—no gloves, her hair down on one side, upright by sheer act of will.
I crossed the room and took her in my arms in front of Milford and Finch's man, who quietly quit the room.
She allowed it, gripping my lapel with one hand, hard.
Then she straightened. Of course she straightened. "I am not going to faint, Steele. I did not faint in the carriage, and I decline to do it in your study."
Milford brought brandy without being asked and left without being told. She drank half of it standing, then set it down, and took the chair by the hearth, lacing her fingers in her lap.
She gave me the whole of it, in order. Her gift under fire.
Terror makes her sequential. The streets narrowing past the mews.
The world coming apart in barrels and screaming horses.
The door opening, and the man in a light summer coat seating himself opposite her as though the seat had been kept for him.
And then the offer, term by term, in a flat carrying voice. Crane's murderer delivered to the Yard with proof no jury could look away from. Cosmos free within the week, his name restored, Dodson ruined as a gratuity. Claire's secrets kept—all of them.
“The price is me," she said at the end. "Not as his wife. He would not insult me by pretending. He has loved me since the river.” She scoffed at that.
I had thought, across all these weeks, that I had taken this man's measure. That I knew the limits of my anger toward him. I had known nothing.
What came was not heat. It was something I could not name. It went down through me, floor by floor.
The man who could open Cosmos's cell with a word had weighed that word and set its price, and the price was her—priced like his wharf and his straw man, one more acquisition for a collector who never appeared in his own ledgers.
I stood very still because she was watching. And because if I moved, I was going to break something.
"Go on,” I said in the best even-tempered tone I could manage.
“I told him I did not even know what he looked like." Her chin came up, and there in the middle of it was the ghost of her own dry wit, reporting for duty. "I may have mentioned fishmongers. He found the observation persuasive." One breath. "He took off the mask."
"Tell me."
"Handsome." She said it like a diagnosis.
"Early fifties. A face you would trust with your orphans and your funds.
I sat three feet from him and watched him wait to be admired.
I peeled it off him piece by piece. The stoop.
The cough. The cane. Twenty years he never lived.
" She held my eyes. "It is Harcourt. Not a servant of his, not a creature.
The man himself, wearing seventy the way other men wear evening dress.
I have seen him in both costumes now, and I will swear to it anywhere you like. "
We had known. We had followed the money and the men and the lies until every road ended at Harcourt. But knowing was not proof.
Now Rosalynd had looked beneath the mask.
The ghost had a face, and we had Rosalynd, a witness who would swear to it.
"And then he presumed. He put his hand toward my face and told me there was nothing monstrous in him.
" Her fingers came apart at last, and she looked down at her right hand as though it belonged to a colleague she was rather proud of.
"So I marked him. Three lines, cheekbone to jaw. Bowen opened the door on the blood."
Something rose in me then that was fierce and glad and wholly unsuited to a gentleman. I made no attempt to be ashamed of it.
"Three lines will not close inside a week. He must dine, he must be shaved, he must show his club and his servants a torn face and account for it."
I put the hunting away, because her hands had begun to shake now that the report was delivered. But her face told me the report was not complete.
"What else?"
She came to her feet and faced me.
"Last night I opened the pistol case in Cosmos's study. There was a note in it. On the velvet, where the pistol used to lie. Five words. We will meet again soon. Someone had carried it into my house. Past everyone."
She had not spared herself in the telling.
"I decided not to tell you last night. I had my reasons.
He wanted us wasteful. He wanted you spending strength on theater.
And you are carrying enough. So I decided to carry it alone.
For last night only." Her voice dropped.
"I meant to bring it to you this afternoon.
I had the speech composed. He arrived before my resolve did. "
I clutched the mantel over the hearth because I could not trust my anger to be contained.
Three weeks ago I had stood here and reasoned it out like a man drawing up a schedule of works.
The masked man watched her. Therefore he must not see me near her.
Therefore I would not go near her. I had given up the only thing I wanted in the world and called it strategy.
I had even been proud of what it cost me, as though the price were proof of the wisdom.
And today he had opened her carriage door in a public street and named his terms.
"Steele—"
I whirled back toward her. "A man in your house.
A man in your carriage. The streets between here and Belgravia walked twice daily by Finch's men.
" My voice came out level. It did that when there was nothing holding it but habit.
"He did not go round one of those men. He did not need to.
He chose a time when he knew you were visiting Claire.
And on your way back, he stopped the traffic. "
"You could not have—"
"Bowen was two minutes away, Rosalynd. Two minutes. That was all he ever wanted."
I still had the brandy in my hand from before Finch's man arrived. I launched the glass into the hearth. It splintered with a crack. The fire spat, but she did not flinch, which was somehow worse than if she had.
"I have been at that man a month. I have been careful and clever. And today he sat three feet from you with his hand coming toward your face. And the only thing standing between you and him was your fingernails."
"And they were enough."
I turned away from the hearth and crossed to the bookcase. My hand closed around the edge of a shelf. "I planned for your protection. Finch's men watching, guarding you around the clock. And it bought precisely nothing."
She said my name. Only that.
"Do not," I said, "be kind to me now."
"I have no intention of being kind to you." She came to stand directly in front of me. "I am going to be accurate. You did not fail today."
Some sound came out of me that was very nearly a laugh.
"He has been in my house. In my brother's study. In Claire's home. How, I do not know. He has been inside every arrangement anyone has made about me since the river. You did not build that, and you cannot unbuild it by hating yourself."
She was close enough now that I had to look down at her.
"But I will tell you what did stand between him and me this afternoon. I did not go up my own steps. I did not take it to my room and put the bolt on and sit with it in the dark, which is what I have done with every frightening thing that has ever happened to me. I came here. To you."
Her chin came up.
"Be angry at the correct man. Today, tomorrow, the next day. But not you. Never you."
I do not know which of us moved first.
Her hands came up. Mine were already at her face. And then I was kissing her, and it was not the kiss I had rehearsed through three weeks of well-governed nights. It was a man letting go of a rope he had been holding since June.
Her fingers went into my hair and closed, and she made a sound against my mouth that took the last of my reason out at the knees.
I had her back against the bookcase, a shelf of the Annual Register going over behind her, and neither of us cared what it cost. Her hands were at my collar.
My mouth was at the corner of her jaw, the hollow beneath her ear, and then her throat—bare, for once, the wretched high necks abandoned for July—and she tipped her head back and gave it to me, her pulse going hard beneath my lips.
I got her name out once, somewhere against her collarbone, and after that language was of no further use to either of us.
My hand found the small of her back and the length of her spine and the place where her gown gave way to skin, and she pressed herself into me with an unschooled, unhesitating want that I will carry to my grave.
She was not being carried anywhere. She was coming with me. Trembling.
And it was that—her wanting it, plainly and out loud—that put the knife in.
I was kissing a frightened woman and calling it love. And that was what finally made me stop.
I took my hands off her and stepped back, and the cold arrived because she was no longer in my arms. I walked away to stand by my desk with my back to her.
"Go home, Rosalynd."
Behind me came the small, precise sounds of a woman putting herself to rights. A hook. A breath drawn and held and let go. I looked at my own blotter and waited for the door.
But the door did not go.
She came round in front of me instead. I braced for the slap and would have been glad of it. But she lifted her hand and laid it along my cheek, then ran her thumb once across my mouth.
“Escort me home."
Of course she would ask that of me.
Milford was at the foot of the stairs with my hat and the flawless blank face of a man who intended to remember none of it. We crossed the square arm in arm. Neither of us said a word. It was the least awkward silence of my life.
Honeycutt was at the top of the Rosehaven steps before we reached the bottom of them. He took in her disordered hair and my ungloved hand at her elbow and made of it whatever he made of it. I turned her toward me at her own door.
"You will not be guarded from across the square again. Never again from a distance. They will be right here by your railings." I caressed her cheek. "Wherever you go, I go, or a man I would trust with my own life goes. You have my word on it."
She did not answer at once. Then she took my hand and held it for a moment against her ribs, where I could feel her heart going.
I knew exactly what she was giving me.
"Goodnight, Steele." And then the door closed softly behind her.
My coat carried the maddening scent of her the whole way home. I did not sleep that night. But for the first time since June, I did not want to.