Chapter 33
Chapter
Thirty-Three
A Price Paid
When the last pistol went down onto the boards there was nothing left to hear but the river, going along the side of a broken launch in Bugsby’s Reach the way it had gone along it all afternoon and would go along it all night.
For some while I did not move at all.
Steele had both arms round me, holding me as if he would never let me go. I did not ask him to let me go. I simply put my forehead against his shoulder and shut my eyes.
“I told myself the whole way down the river that you would come,” I said. “I did not believe a word of it. And you came anyway.”
His arms tightened. “I was very nearly too late.”
“You were not.”
“Two minutes, Rosalynd.”
“You were not too late. You were exactly on time,” I said into his coat, and that was the end of that argument.
The world went on around us in the way the world does.
Somebody was calling for a surgeon. Somebody else was taking names from men sitting on the deck with their hands on their heads.
Lines went across. Another Thames Division launch came alongside.
Constables went back and forth over the wreckage, and somewhere behind me a sergeant was demanding to know who had put a boat through the rail.
None of it reached me.
My hands had begun to shake and would not stop. There did not seem to be anything to be done about it except to keep them flat against Steele’s chest and wait.
That’s how Chief Inspector Graves found us.
He had put away the revolver. His face had not yet recovered its color. “My lady.”
“I owe you my life, Inspector.”
“No.” He said it flatly. It was Steele’s life he’d saved. His eyes went over the deck, taking in the prisoners being put under guard. “Which one is Mercer?”
Steele looked around. Then looked again. “None of them.”
Graves’s attention sharpened. “Where is he?”
Steele turned toward the gray Customs launch grinding against our side. His eyes moved over it, then across the black launch and the men being put under guard. “He’s gone.”
There were police boats on every side of us now, constables everywhere, sailors shouting, prisoners being moved from one vessel to another.
Graves swore. “He was there when I fired?”
“Yes,” Steele said.
Graves called to one of his sergeants and gave an order. Men began searching both launches and shouting to the police boats alongside.
Steele did not move. Something in his face had changed.
“What?” I asked.
“I asked him why he came aboard with us at Wapping.”
“And?”
“He said he needed to know Harcourt was dead.”
I looked toward the place where a canvas had been drawn over the body beside the rail. “And now he knows.”
“Yes.”
Graves heard him.
His expression suggested that Mercer’s chances of enjoying his freedom, should Scotland Yard have anything to say about it, were shortly to become very poor indeed.
I did not think Scotland Yard would find him.
Finch appeared a quarter of an hour later with his arm in a proper sling and somebody else’s coat over his shoulders.
He stood there being pleased with himself in a manner that took no account whatever of his color, which was that of a dish of milk.
“If the two of you have finished pretending the rest of us aren’t here. ”
“You have been shot,” I said.
“So I am told, at intervals, by everyone.”
“You ought to be in a bed, resting.”
“So I am told, at intervals, by everyone.”
Steele looked at him for a long moment. “You disobeyed a direct order to remain behind.”
“I did.”
“I shall have it put in your obituary.”
“I should like something flattering in there as well, Your Grace, if there’s room.”
I laughed.
It came out badly and hurt somewhere under my ribs. I could not stop it once it had started. I put my hand over my mouth and laughed on a wrecked deck with a dead man under canvas twelve feet away, and neither of them said one word about it.
Finch waited until I had finished. “There she is,” he said.
“What?”
“The one that laughs.” He looked at Steele. “I’d begun to think she’d mislaid it.”
“So had I,” Steele said, and he brushed back one of the many curls that had fallen across my face.
Graves would not promise me Cosmos that night.
The papers Mercer had given him were enough to begin pulling Harcourt’s organization apart. Men were already being sent to the wharf at Wapping and to the addresses in the files. By morning there would be officers going in half a dozen directions.
But Cosmos was still at Holloway charged with murder.
“Give me a little time, my lady,” Graves said.
“How much time?”
“Days. Not weeks.”
I did not like it. But I accepted it. There was a difference.
We went back upriver on a police launch with the light going long and yellow across the water.
Steele put his coat round me as we had boarded it for the river air was cold, even in July.
I did not argue. Not only did it warm me, but I got to breathe the scent of him.
Finch slept sitting up with his mouth open, which he would have denied if he’d been told.
But neither Steele nor I did. The man deserved his rest.
Once we arrived at Wapping, we boarded Steele’s carriage which had waited for him. Finch chose to hail a hansom cab, rather than ride with us. I imagined he slept during that ride as well.
On the way back to Grosvenor Square, I had a great deal to say. First and foremost, my sister. “Chrissie reached you, I gather?”
“She did. She was perfect, Rosalynd. She told me you’d been taken from the modiste.
I invited her to stay at Steele House, but she refused.
She said she needed to return to Rosehaven because somebody had to hold the house.
I had Milford escort her, along with one of my pistols, which I instructed him to give to Honeycutt.
And then I sent additional footmen. You will have a grand reception once you arrive home. ”
For the first time in many hours, I breathed easy. “She ran across the square in a torn gown.”
“Yes.”
“In front of every window in Mayfair. She knew exactly what it would cost her, and she did it anyway.”
“I hardly think she would deem it too high a price to pay.”
“Her entire season, lost. And she’s worked so hard to be a success.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I have a mother who has been waiting years for a reason to go to war with somebody.”
That made me laugh. “And then there’s grandmother and her battalion of dowagers.”
“There you go.”
I gazed out the window and watched the city come back to us by degrees. Marshes, then yards, then warehouses and finally the bridges. It looked no different. I had half expected it to.
It was evening when we arrived at Grosvenor Square.
The lamps were lit. Somebody’s carriage was setting down at the far corner. And there were a dozen windows with somebody at them, because Mayfair had been given the best afternoon it had had in a decade and was not finished with it yet.
Let them look.
Honeycutt had the door open before we reached the third step. He had met every single thing our family had ever done with the same face. It held for three seconds. Then his chin went. For the space of three seconds, it trembled. But then he got it back under control. He stood aside and bowed me in.
“Welcome home, my lady.”
That was as much as he was allowed before my entire family descended on me with Petunia leading the pack.
She hit me somewhere around the knees. Grandmother reached me a moment later and put both arms around me, which gave Laurel and Holly and Ivy permission to do the same. And then Fox, the man of the house for the moment, came forward and hugged me as well. Chrissie came last.
Once I’d unentangled myself, I held out my arms to her.
“Oh, Rosie.” That was all she managed.
She came into them hard enough to drive me back half a step, and then there were Rosehavens everywhere.
Arms and hands and tears and questions, none of which anybody waited to have answered.
Petunia had attached herself to my skirts and would not be removed.
Grandmother was issuing orders for tea, brandy, hot water and supper.
Laurel was crying, and so were the twins. Chrissie simply held on.
Over her shoulder, I found Steele still standing just inside the door.
Grandmother saw him at the same moment. “Steele. You will stay to dinner.”
“Thank you, Lady Rosehaven, but not tonight.”
I looked at him.
“You need your family, Rosalynd,” he said. “And you need rest.”
There was nothing unreasonable in either statement. I disliked them both.
He must have seen it. He also knew what I was thinking. “I will speak to Graves and the solicitors first thing in the morning. The moment there is anything to tell you about Cosmos, I will come myself.”
“The moment?”
“The moment.”
I held his eyes for another second. “All right.”
Something eased in his face. He bowed to Grandmother, then to me. “Good night, Rosalynd.”
“Good night, Steele.” I missed him even as I was saying his name.
Honeycutt closed the door behind him, for once not wearing his censorious expression.
I would need to bathe and change before supper, but it could wait for a little while. For the first time since men had walked into Madame Delacroix’s that afternoon, everyone I loved was exactly where I knew them to be.
Well, almost everyone.