Chapter 10
The Performance of Sorrow
T he morning after was, I reflected, always the more interesting part.
Any woman of moderate accomplishment can engineer a seduction.
The mechanics are straightforward: a locked door, a measure of wine, the right dress, the right light, the right words spoken at the right moment in the right tone.
I had performed these mechanics with the precision of a surgeon and the aesthetic sense of a painter, and the result had been satisfactory.
Sebastian Aldric had surrendered completely, and his surrender had given me everything I required.
He was compromised. He was entangled. He could no longer pursue me without exposing himself, and the exposure would destroy him professionally and, I suspected, personally.
Men of his temperament do not recover from the knowledge that they have failed at their own principles.
But the seduction itself was the lesser part of the operation. The greater part, the part that required genuine skill, was the morning after. The management of what follows. The transformation of a single night into a permanent arrangement.
I sat at my desk in the study and reviewed the previous evening with the dispassionate attention I brought to my ledgers.
The interview had proceeded as planned. I had fed him details about the brandy that were true in content and misleading in emphasis.
I had offered the information about my mother's death as a distraction, a thread for him to pull that would lead him toward a narrative of familial misfortune rather than criminal conspiracy.
The invitation to stay for wine had been the pivot point, and from that moment, the outcome had been inevitable.
What I had not planned for, and what required careful consideration now, was my own response to the act.
I had climaxed. This was unusual. In my experience, physical pleasure during intercourse was something I observed in my partners rather than experienced myself.
With Arthur, I had performed enthusiasm with the same precision I brought to all performances, simulating the appropriate sounds and movements while my mind wandered to more interesting subjects.
With Henry, I had simply endured. With Richard, towards the end, I had been grateful that his increasing illness had reduced his interest in the marital bed.
Sex, in my experience, was a tool. It was a means of securing cooperation, of cementing loyalty, of extracting information from men who were too foolish to understand that their desire was being weaponised against them.
I had never, in the course of three marriages and several strategically useful affairs, experienced genuine physical pleasure during the act.
Last night, I had. Not a small climax, easily concealed.
A substantial one, the kind that begins in the base of the spine and radiates outward through the body in waves, leaving the mind blank and the breath short and the limbs heavy.
I had not planned it. I had not performed it.
It had arrived unbidden, and its arrival had been as disorienting as a sudden noise in a quiet room.
I examined the experience now, turning it over in my mind the way I might examine a new specimen under a magnifying glass.
What had caused it? Not emotional attachment.
I was not capable of emotional attachment, and the notion that Sebastian Aldric had somehow triggered one was absurd.
Not technique. He had been a passive participant, lying beneath me while I controlled every aspect of the encounter.
Not novelty. I had been in this position before, both literally and figuratively.
The most likely explanation was that my body had responded to a prolonged period of abstinence.
Richard's illness had ended our physical relations more than a year before his death.
I had not sought a lover since. The body has its own rhythms, its own hungers, and an intelligent woman does not pretend that those hungers do not exist. She manages them.
Last night, in the heat of the encounter, my body had simply managed itself, and the pleasure had been a biological response to stimulation, nothing more.
A reflex. No different from the shiver that follows a plunge into cold water.
I found this explanation convincing. I did not entirely believe it, but I found it convincing, and in the absence of a better hypothesis, I filed it and moved on.
The more pressing matter was the management of Sebastian.
He had left Blackwood House last night in a state of considerable disarray, and a man in disarray is either a liability or an asset, depending on how he is handled.
Left to his own devices, he would retreat into self-recrimination and professional anxiety, and from that retreat he might emerge with renewed determination to pursue me, using the guilt of his own compromise as fuel for the investigation.
He was that kind of man. A moralist. A man who believed that his own failings could be atoned for through effort and rigour.
If I allowed him to marshal his resources, he would return to the Yard and begin pulling threads with the same obsessive attention he had brought to the case before I slept with him.
I could not allow that. I needed to keep him off-balance, to prevent him from regaining his professional footing. The most effective method was to feed him information that appeared valuable but led nowhere, consuming his time and energy while producing nothing of substance.
I drew a sheet of paper toward me and began to compose.
The first false lead: the Earl's business dealings.
Richard had been a poor manager of his estates, a fact I had noted in my own records and that was a matter of public record at the College of Arms. His financial difficulties were genuine, but they were the result of his own negligence and alcoholism, not of any external threat.
However, if I could create the impression that Richard had been involved in a dispute with a business associate, Sebastian would pursue the lead and waste weeks interviewing clerks and reviewing contracts that had nothing to do with the case.
I wrote: "Lord Ashworth was engaged in a disagreement with a Manchester manufacturer, a Mr. Harrogate, regarding a contract for the supply of textiles to the Suffolk estate. The disagreement was acrimonious. Lord Ashworth was, I believe, quite fearful of Mr. Harrogate's temper."
This was plausible enough to be pursued and false enough to lead nowhere.
Harrogate was a real person, a textile supplier with whom Richard had indeed had a minor disagreement about delivery schedules.
The disagreement had been resolved amicably.
There was no threat, no animosity, no connection to Richard's death.
But Sebastian would not know that. He would find Harrogate's name in the Ashworth ledgers, he would travel to Manchester to interview him, and he would spend days in correspondence and interviews that would produce nothing.
The second false lead: the Viscount's gambling debts.
Arthur Pendleton had indeed been a gambler in his youth, and his debts were a matter of record at his former club in St. James's.
But the debts had been settled before our marriage, and they had no bearing on his death.
If Sebastian learned of them, however, he might construct a narrative in which Arthur's gambling attracted dangerous associates, one of whom might have had a motive for poisoning him.
The narrative was flimsy, but investigators in desperation will grasp at flimsy narratives, and Sebastian was desperate.
I did not write this lead down. It was better to plant it verbally, in a future conversation, where I could deliver it with the appropriate air of reluctant disclosure, as though I were sharing something I had intended to keep private.
The third false lead: Henry Ravenscroft's business associates.
Henry had been an industrialist, and industrialists, by their nature, attract enemies.
Henry had been coarse and aggressive in his business dealings, and there were men in Manchester who had reason to resent him.
One in particular, a man named Crutchley, had lost a contract to Henry's firm and had been vocal in his displeasure.
If Sebastian were to interview Crutchley, he would hear a great deal about Henry's unpopularity but nothing that connected any of it to his death.
Three false leads, each designed to consume weeks of investigative effort, each leading away from the truth and toward alternative explanations.
The beauty of the strategy was its economy.
I did not need to fabricate evidence. I needed only to direct attention toward facts that were real but irrelevant, and the natural human tendency to find patterns would do the rest. Sebastian would assemble these fragments into a picture that made sense, a picture of three dead men with dangerous associates and financial entanglements, and the picture would be entirely wrong.
I set down my pen and reviewed the page. The handwriting was steady, the prose clean and unambiguous. I was satisfied.