Chapter 4 #4
There was another consideration, one that I examined briefly and then set aside, because it did not fit neatly into my calculations, and I distrusted anything that did not.
Sebastian Aldric had seen me. Not the version of me that I presented to the world, the grieving widow in her black crêpe, but the version that existed beneath the performance, the version that was calculating and controlled and fundamentally indifferent to the death of the man whose funeral we had both attended.
He had seen this version, or something adjacent to it, in the quality of my composure, in the precision of my grief, in the gap between what I was performing and what I was feeling, and his recognition of this gap, whether conscious or instinctive, had been written in the focused intensity of his gaze at the graveside.
No one had ever seen me that clearly before.
Not Arthur, who had been too kind and too lonely to look beneath the surface of what I offered him.
Not Henry, who had been too coarse and too self-absorbed to perceive anything that did not directly affect his comfort or his pride.
Not Richard, who had been too fond of brandy and too remote from the realities of his own household to notice anything at all.
None of the men I had known, in marriage or out of it, had possessed the particular quality of attention that Sebastian Aldric brought to bear on the world, the ability to see past the surface of things and to register, with uncomfortable precision, the discrepancies that others overlooked.
This quality made him dangerous. It also made him interesting.
And it was the interest, I suspected, that had stayed my hand when I weighed the option of elimination.
Not sentiment. Not attraction, though I acknowledged, with the same clinical detachment I applied to all self-assessments, that he was not physically disagreeable.
Merely interest. The fascination of a chess master confronted with an opponent whose opening moves suggest a depth of preparation that makes the game worth playing.
I turned from the window and returned to my desk. The letter to Hartwell waited, half-composed, the ink blot on the stationery a small record of the moment the news had arrived. I blotted the stain, discarded the ruined sheet, and began again.
My lady, I wrote. I trust this finds you well.
I write regarding the matter of the Ashworth estate and the need for absolute discretion in the handling of its affairs.
The language of the letter was formal, the tone warm but firm, and beneath the pleasantries ran the clear implication that Hartwell's silence was not merely expected but required, and that the consequences of its absence would be proportionate to the inconvenience it caused.
I sealed the letter, rang for Dorothea, and gave it to her for posting. Then I sat in the quiet of my study, surrounded by the ledgers and the accounts and the accumulated evidence of three successful campaigns, and I allowed my mind to rest, briefly, on the figure of Sebastian Aldric.
He was out there, somewhere in the fog-choked streets of London, asking his questions, assembling his pattern, and with each question and each piece of the pattern, he was moving closer to the truth or farther from it, and I could not yet determine which.
The uncertainty was, I found, not entirely unpleasant.
It was, in its own small way, stimulating, the way that a difficult problem in arithmetic is stimulating, not because the solution is desired but because the process of finding it exercises faculties that might otherwise atrophy.
I had been operating for too long without opposition.
Eight years of strategic marriages and careful eliminations, and no one had come close to seeing through the performance.
The physicians had signed their certificates.
The solicitors had filed their papers. The servants had admired my devotion.
The society had extended its sympathy and its invitations, and no one, in all that time, had looked at me with the sharp, uncomfortable attention of a man who saw too much.
Until now.
I rose, crossed to the mirror that hung above the mantelpiece, and examined my reflection with the critical eye I brought to every other aspect of my presentation.
The black crêpe was immaculate. The jet at my throat caught the lamplight with a dark, gleaming brilliance.
My auburn hair was arranged in its severe mourning chignon, every strand in place, every pin precisely positioned.
My grey eyes gazed back at me from the glass, steady and unreadable, the eyes of a woman who had perfected the art of appearing to feel what she did not feel.
I held my own gaze for a long moment, and in the silence of the study, with the fire crackling in the grate and the fog pressing against the windows, I felt something that I could not immediately classify.
It was not fear. It was not pleasure. It was, I decided, after some reflection, a species of curiosity, the kind that a naturalist might feel upon encountering a specimen of unusual rarity: not personal, not emotional, but intellectual, a recognition that the world contained something unexpected and that the unexpected, when it appeared, demanded attention.
Sebastian Aldric had my attention. For the present, that would have to be enough.