Chapter 34
Chapter
Thirty-Four
A Free Man
Scotland Yard spent the next week making up for a very bad year.
There were arrests in Wapping, Limehouse, Hammersmith, Clerkenwell, and three streets in Soho where respectable brass plates had apparently concealed enterprises that were respectable only in the matter of rent.
Two warehouses were sealed. Four bank accounts were stopped.
Men who had spent twenty years believing themselves invisible discovered that Mercer had kept excellent records.
Mercer himself remained invisible.
Graves put men at the railway stations and the docks. His description went to Liverpool, Southampton, and Dover. Nothing came of it.
I had told Graves on the river that he would not find Mercer. He did not enjoy being reminded of it.
The newspapers enjoyed everything else.
Scotland Yard had spent the previous autumn being told by every newspaper in Britain what it had failed to do in Whitechapel. Now it had a criminal organization spread across London, accounts going back twenty years, warehouses full of evidence and prisoners arriving at Bow Street in batches.
They made the most of it. I did not begrudge them.
On the sixth day, a man employed by Drayton—the real name of the man we’d known as Harcourt—decided that loyalty to a dead employer was less useful than avoiding the gallows. He came forward and identified the man who had killed Sir Basil Crane.
George Pritchard had worked at Mallow and Company when work was required and elsewhere when it was not. According to the man who gave him up, Drayton had paid Pritchard to kill Crane and move the body.
Apparently, Mercer had been asked to arrange it, but he’d refused the job. He had told Drayton that he managed money, men, and transport. If Drayton wanted a gentleman murdered in a garden, he could arrange it himself.
I did not mistake that for virtue. There are men who will help build a gallows and object only when asked to pull the lever.
Pritchard was arrested before dawn the following morning. By noon he had been identified by a second witness. Before the afternoon was out, he had been charged with the murder of Sir Basil Crane.
After that, matters moved very quickly.
Steele had kept Gathorne and Sir Hugo Rennell informed from the moment Mercer’s papers reached Scotland Yard. Gathorne had everything prepared. Sir Hugo had only been waiting for the evidence that would finally destroy the case against Cosmos.
The moment Pritchard was charged, Sir Hugo went to court. Before seven that evening, he arrived at Rosehaven House, where our family was waiting for dinner to be announced.
“Tomorrow morning,” he said.
I was on my feet before Honeycutt had finished closing the drawing room door behind him.
“Tomorrow?”
“Eight o’clock. Holloway will have the order tonight.”
For a moment, nobody said anything.
Then I sat down again because my knees had ceased to be useful.
Grandmother reached for the bell. “Champagne, I think.” She had been dining at Rosehaven the entire week, because she didn’t want to miss a thing.
The following morning, I was at the gate at half past seven, which is the sort of thing one does and then has to sit with for thirty minutes.
At two minutes past eight a wicket in the great gate came open, the way a small door does inside a large one, and my brother walked out of Holloway Prison into Camden Road in the coat he had been arrested in.
He stood on the pavement for a moment looking at the traffic like a man checking a sum.
And then he saw the Rosehaven carriage and me standing beside it.
He got both his arms around me hard enough to hurt and his face down into my shoulder in the open street. He did not say a thing.
I held him.
That was all.
When he finally let go, he looked at me and cleared his throat. “You look terrible.”
“So do you.”
“Yes.”
I kissed his cheek. “Get in the carriage, Cosmos. Everyone’s waiting at home for you.”
He did not speak on the Camden Road. Not through Bloomsbury. Not through the park. He sat with his hands on his knees and looked out of the window as London went past.
When his jaw did something, I put my hand over his and looked out of my own window and let him alone.
Rosehaven House came apart at the seams in a good way.
Fox delivered eleven days of greenhouse accounts standing at attention in the drawing room.
Every watering. Every feeding. Three cuttings struck.
One sundew lost and confessed to at once with the manner of a man expecting to be broken on the spot.
Cosmos heard him out to the end. “How did the sundew go?”
Fox swallowed. “Root rot.”
“Too much water?”
“Yes.”
“Then we have learned something.”
“Yes.”
Cosmos held out his hand. Fox stared at it, then shook it.
Laurel announced that she had finished Gibbon. “All of it,” she said. “The decline was long but the fall was surprisingly quick, and I have opinions.”
“I never doubted it.”
Holly and Ivy arrived together and spoke at once until nobody understood either of them.
Then Chrissie arrived.
She stopped three steps into the drawing room. Cosmos looked at her. Neither moved for perhaps two seconds.
Then he came to his feet. “Chrissie.”
She crossed the room and went straight into his arms.
Petunia could not be removed at all. She attached herself to Cosmos and stayed there for the better part of an hour. She sat on his lap through his breakfast and conducted a full inquiry into the elephant. “Did you have him with you every day?”
“Every day.”
“Even at night?”
“Especially at night.”
“Did Justice sit upon Inspector Dodson?”
“With great severity.”
“Did the other gentlemen see him?”
“They did.”
“Did they like him?”
“One offered me half a crown for him.”
Petunia gasped.
“I refused.”
She considered this.
“Good.”
Cosmos ate nothing whatever.
Grandmother pretended not to notice. The rest of us pretended not to notice Grandmother pretending not to notice.
It was a very successful breakfast.
Claire came at two. She had waited for Cosmos to reunite with us. “He has had enough people taking things from him,” she had written the night before after my note had reached her. “He needs a few hours with his family before I intrude.”
“You would not have intruded, Claire,” I told her when Honeycutt brought her to the morning room.
And then Cosmos was there. And something very private, and not meant for anyone’s eyes but theirs, was shared. I left the room, quietly closing the door behind me.
Grandmother appeared from nowhere. “Perhaps some tea?”
I had no need of tea. Neither did the rest of the family. But we drank it anyway in the drawing room. While we waited, Laurel read the same page of a book for twenty minutes. Chrissie embroidered a hundred stitches and removed most of them. Holly and Ivy played chess without moving a piece.
Petunia didn’t even try to appear to be doing something. She simply lay on the carpet and stared at the door.
It was nearly an hour later when it opened and Cosmos and Claire came in, hand in hand.
My brother had spent eleven days in Holloway Prison accused of murder. He was thin, badly shaved and wearing a coat that no longer fit. He looked happier than I had ever seen him.
Claire had been crying. She was also radiant.
Grandmother set down her teacup.
Cosmos looked around the room. “Claire has agreed to marry me.”
Petunia screamed. The twins screamed. Laurel dropped her book. Chrissie covered her mouth with both hands. Fox simply nodded.
I went straight to Claire and put my arms around her. “Oh, thank God.”
She laughed into my shoulder.
Behind me, Grandmother said, “Thursday.”
The room went quiet.
Cosmos blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“The ceremony will be held on Thursday,” Grandmother repeated. “Eleven o’clock. My house. Wilton Place.”
Claire stared at her.
So did I. “Grandmother—”
“You’ll need to obtain a special license, Cosmos. It should be available in two days’ time. The drawing room will take the family for the ceremony. The dining room will take the breakfast afterward. Mrs. Ellison owes me flowers after that monstrosity she inflicted upon us at Easter.”
Cosmos looked at me. I looked at Grandmother. “How long have you been planning this?”
She gave me a look of profound disappointment. “Rosalynd. Your brother has been in love with Claire for months. How could I not plan for it?”
Claire began laughing again.
Cosmos shook his head.
Grandmother rose. “Now, I shall require everyone’s attention at ten tomorrow morning.
We will have a rehearsal. Chrissie, you will play the pianoforte.
A wedding piece. Laurel, find something suitable to read.
Fox, you will help with the flowers. Holly and Ivy, I shall discover tasks for you which neither of you can ruin. ”
“We never ruin things,” Holly said.
Grandmother continued as though she had not spoken.
“Petunia.”
“Yes, Grandmother?”
“You may carry the ring.”
Petunia went very still.
“The ring?”
“If you can be trusted.”
“I can.”
“We shall see.”
Grandmother walked out.
There was silence for perhaps three seconds. Then the entire room erupted again.
I stepped back and looked at Cosmos.
He had Claire’s hand in his. He was too thin. There were shadows under his eyes that would take weeks to leave.
But he was home. He was free. And in three days he was going to marry the woman he loved.
For the first time in nearly two weeks, there was nothing left to rescue my brother from.
And I had no idea what to do with myself.