Chapter 8
After the Interview
I had chosen the study for a reason. A drawing room offers too many avenues of retreat.
A woman may excuse herself to ring for tea, to check on a child, to adjust the flowers.
The drawing room is a social space, governed by the comfortable fiction that nothing of consequence occurs within it.
My study, by contrast, is a private room.
When a woman receives a man in her study, she is making a statement about her own authority.
She is the lady of the house, and this is where she conducts her affairs.
The word is chosen with care. Affairs, plural.
Business, estate management, and, if necessary, the dismantling of police inspectors.
Sebastian Aldric sat in the chair across from my desk with the particular tension of a man who knows he is not where he ought to be.
The chair was upholstered in dark green leather, positioned so that the light from the window fell across his face and left mine in the softer shadow of the bookshelves.
I had arranged it that way months ago, when the room was first redecorated after Richard's death.
One prepares for eventualities. I had not anticipated this particular one, but the principle holds.
He was asking about the brandy again.
"The Earl was partial to a particular blend from Hennessy," I said, folding my hands in my lap.
My voice carried the faintest tremor. Practised, measured.
The tremor of a woman who has wept herself dry and now finds that certain memories retain the capacity to wound.
"He had it delivered from Paris twice a year.
I have not had the heart to dispose of the remaining bottles.
" I allowed my gaze to drift toward the window, as though the grey December light held some answer to grief that I had not yet found.
"I suppose I should. The servants tell me it is unwise to keep alcohol one does not intend to consume. "
"And the physician," Sebastian said. "Dr. Hale. He visited regularly in the final months?"
"Three times a week toward the end." I returned my attention to him with what I hoped read as weary patience.
The patience of someone who has answered these questions before and will answer them again, because the dead are owed that much, even when the living are exhausted by it.
"Richard had suffered from gastric complaints for some years.
Dr. Hale attributed it to rich food and an excess of brandy.
He prescribed bismuth and bed rest." A pause, calibrated to suggest reluctance.
"The bismuth did nothing. But then, nothing was going to, was it? "
I watched him write this down in his notebook.
His handwriting was precise, even angular.
The handwriting of a man who believes that facts, properly recorded, will eventually yield truth.
It was endearing, in its way. Like watching a child collect shells on a beach and believing he has captured the sea.
"You mentioned, during our first conversation, that the Earl's condition worsened in the spring of this year," he continued, turning a page. "Can you be more specific about the timeline?"
I could. I could be very specific. I could tell him that the deterioration accelerated in March, that Richard began losing weight at a rate of approximately two pounds per week, that the peripheral numbness in his hands and feet began in July, that his liver began to fail in May.
I could tell him all of this with the clinical precision of a physician's chart, because I had recorded every detail in a diary I kept locked in the desk drawer behind me, a diary written in code, a diary that would hang me if anyone ever broke its cipher.
Instead, I told him what a grieving widow would tell him.
"It is difficult to recall precisely. The weeks ran together.
There were good days and bad days. Toward the end, there were mostly bad ones.
" I pressed the tips of my fingers to my temple, a gesture of fatigue.
"I am sorry, Inspector. I know you need precision, and I am not being as helpful as I might be.
It is simply that some memories are more painful than others, and I find that the ones from those last months are the ones I have worked hardest to set aside. "
It was a masterful deflection. Even I, who am not given to self-congratulation, could appreciate its elegance.
I had answered his question by declining to answer it, wrapped the refusal in an apology, and positioned myself as a woman too wounded to be of use.
Any further pressure would seem cruel. And Sebastian Aldric, for all his sharpness, was not a cruel man.
That was his weakness. A cruel man would have pushed.
A cruel man would have seen the deflection for what it was and exploited it.
But Sebastian carried his conscience like a stone in his pocket, and it weighed on him in ways that made him predictable.
He closed his notebook. He did not push.
I let the silence hold for a moment. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked.
Outside, a hansom cab rattled past on the cobbles of Grosvenor Square, and the sound was muffled by the fog that had settled over London like a grey wool blanket pulled up to the city's chin.
The gas lamps in the street below would be lit by now, their light diffused by the damp air into amber halos.
"Inspector," I said.
He looked up.
"Would you care for a glass of wine before you go?"
The question was innocent on its surface, or as innocent as anything I say can be.
I watched his face for the hesitation, and I found it there, a brief tightening around the jaw that told me he knew the offer was unwise.
Then I watched him override his own judgment, because he had been sitting across from me for an hour and a half, and in that time he had been performing the role of the detached investigator while his eyes betrayed him at every turn.
He looked at my hands. He looked at my mouth.
He looked at the fall of my collar against my throat, where the half-mourning grey of my dress met the pale skin beneath.
Men are not as subtle as they imagine themselves to be.
Their gazes have weight, and Sebastian Aldric's had been pressing against me for the duration of the interview like a hand I could feel but chose not to acknowledge.
"That is very kind of you, Lady Ashworth," he said. "I should not impose."
"You are not imposing. It is five o'clock.
I have had no one to share a glass with since Richard died, and I find I weary of drinking alone.
" I smiled, and the smile was the most dangerous thing in the room, though he could not have known that.
"Consider it a small mercy extended to a widow who has spent the afternoon answering questions that make her relive the worst months of her life. "
That was calculated cruelty dressed as vulnerability. I was using his decency against him, and I knew it, and the knowing was part of the pleasure. He stood. He buttoned his jacket, a nervous gesture, the kind a man performs when he is about to do something he knows he should not do.
"Very well," he said. "A single glass."
I led him from the study to the drawing room.
Dorothea had gone to market; I had dismissed her an hour before the interview with instructions not to return before seven.
The house was empty except for Edmund, who was in the nursery with Miss Hale, absorbed in one of his picture books.
The drawing room was on the ground floor, at the rear of the house, separated from the street by the garden and its bare winter trees.
It was the most private room in Blackwood House.
I had chosen it for that reason, just as I had chosen the study.
I poured the wine. A Bordeaux, a Margaux from a good vintage.
I had selected it that morning with the same care I brought to every other aspect of this evening.
The wine was not important. The pouring was not important.
What was important was the architecture of the moment: me standing by the sideboard, him standing three feet away, the silence between us filled with everything that social convention forbade us from saying.
"You have been thorough in your inquiries," I said, handing him the glass. Our fingers touched. I allowed the contact to last one half-second longer than propriety demanded. "I confess I find it both unsettling and, in some peculiar way, reassuring. It means someone is paying attention."
"Three deaths in one family warrant attention." He took the wine. He did not drink it. He held it as though it were evidence.
"Four, if you count my mother." I said this lightly, turning toward the window, and I felt his attention sharpen behind me.
I had not mentioned my mother before. This was a new thread, offered deliberately, to be pulled or ignored as he chose.
"She died when I was nineteen. Heart failure, like Viscount Pendleton. Like Richard."
"I was not aware of that."
"No. There would be no reason for you to be. My mother's death was a private matter. She had been unwell for some time." I turned back to face him. "I mention it only because your questions about patterns have made me think about my own."
The lie was a construction of such elegance that I could admire it from multiple angles.
It contained truth. My mother had died of heart failure.
The pattern was real, if one defined pattern loosely enough.
And by offering it, I was inviting Sebastian to see me not as a suspect but as a woman marked by tragedy, a woman for whom death was a recurring companion.
The sympathy I saw in his eyes told me the bait had been taken.
He drank the wine.
"I did not intend to cause you additional distress, Lady Ashworth. My questions are routine."