Chapter 10 #2
Dorothea entered with the morning tea tray.
She moved with her usual quiet efficiency, setting the cup and saucer on the desk, arranging the toast rack, pouring the tea.
She did not look at me. Since the Earl's death, Dorothea had developed the habit of not looking at me directly, a subservient gesture that I found both useful and faintly irritating.
It was useful because it meant she noticed less than she might otherwise have noticed.
It was irritating because it suggested a degree of fear that I had not entirely earned.
I had been a kind mistress to Dorothea. She had no reason to fear me.
But people sense what they cannot name, and Dorothea had served me long enough to sense that my kindness was, like everything else I offered, a performance.
"Thank you, Dorothea."
"My lady." She curtsied and turned to leave.
"Dorothea."
She paused.
"How is Edmund this morning?"
"Mr. Edmund is well, my lady. He ate his breakfast. He is drawing in the nursery with Miss Hale."
"Good. See that he is kept occupied this morning. I do not wish to be disturbed."
She curtsied again and left, closing the door behind her.
I heard her footsteps in the corridor, soft and quick, the footsteps of a woman who was relieved to be dismissed.
She was a competent maid. Loyal to Edmund, not to me.
She would stay as long as Edmund needed her, and she would leave the moment she believed Edmund was in danger.
I had allowed her this loyalty because it was useful.
She would not betray me as long as Edmund was under my roof, and I had no intention of removing Edmund from my roof.
I drank the tea. It was Earl Grey, brewed to my specifications: strong, with a slice of lemon, no sugar.
The morning light came through the window at a low angle, pale and watery, and the fog had not yet lifted from the square.
The bare branches of the plane trees made dark lines against the grey sky, like cracks in porcelain.
I turned to my correspondence. There were three letters to answer.
The first was from Lady Pemberton, my neighbour in the square, who had written to invite me to a small gathering on the twenty-eighth.
I accepted with appropriate gratitude. The social season was resuming after the mourning period, and I needed to be visible.
A woman who withdraws from society after her husband's death invites speculation.
A woman who re-enters society with grace and dignity invites sympathy.
Sympathy was armour. The more people who saw me as the grieving widow, the dignified survivor, the less likely they were to believe the kind of accusations that a police inspector might one day bring.
The second letter was from Sir William Hartwell, my solicitor.
His letter was brief and characteristically cautious.
He had received my instructions regarding the transfer of the Ashworth estate funds and would proceed accordingly.
He asked, in the careful language of a man who knows too much, whether there was anything else I required.
There was not. Hartwell knew more than was safe for him, a fact I had been monitoring for some time.
He had handled the legal arrangements for all three of my marriages, and a solicitor of even moderate intelligence would have noticed the pattern.
Hartwell was more than moderately intelligent.
He had simply chosen not to notice, because noticing would have required action, and action would have required courage, and courage was not among his virtues.
He was useful, and I had no intention of disposing of him unless his usefulness became outweighed by the threat he posed.
I wrote a brief reply: the transfer should proceed as discussed, and I would call upon him in the new year to review the estate accounts. I sealed the letter and set it aside.
The third letter was from someone I did not recognise.
The envelope was of good quality, cream-coloured, with my name written in a hand that was educated but hurried.
I opened it and found a single sheet of paper, unsigned, containing a message of condolence that was sufficiently generic to have been written by anyone and sufficiently specific in its references to the Earl to suggest that the writer had known him.
I set it aside. Condolence letters arrived daily.
Most were from people I had never met, drawn by the spectacle of aristocratic grief.
They were useful in their way. Each one was a small brick in the wall of sympathy I was constructing around myself.
The correspondence dealt with, I turned to the larger project: the construction of my social rehabilitation.
The next six weeks would be critical. Christmas and the new year brought a round of social engagements, the first since the funeral, and my behaviour at these engagements would determine how London society received me.
I needed to be visible but not ostentatious, grieving but not incapacitated, dignified but not cold.
The balance was delicate, and I had been practising it for weeks.
I had already laid the groundwork through a series of carefully managed interactions with key society figures.
Lady Ashworth had been cultivated through shared charitable work.
Lady Pemberton had been secured through the musical evening.
Mrs. Barrington, the wife of the Home Secretary, had been flattered into friendship by a well-timed compliment about her daughter's piano playing.
Each of these women was a node in the network of social opinion that would determine my reputation, and each had been acquired through a different strategy, calibrated to her particular vulnerabilities and desires.
The narrative I was constructing was simple: I was a woman marked by tragedy, a woman who had lost three husbands to misfortune and who bore her losses with the quiet dignity that English society most admired.
I was not bitter. I was not desperate. I was not, by any reasonable measure, suspicious.
I was simply unlucky, and my unluckiness had earned me the sympathy of everyone who mattered.
Sympathy, as I had learned from my mother, is the most powerful currency in society.
More powerful than money, more powerful than titles, more powerful than beauty.
Beauty attracts envy. Money attracts sycophants.
Titles attract ambition. But sympathy attracts protection, and protection is the only thing that matters when one is vulnerable.
I was not vulnerable. But I needed to appear to be.
I finished my tea and stood and walked to the window.
The fog was thinning. The gas lamps in the square had been extinguished now that daylight had fully arrived, and the bare trees stood in the grey morning like sketches for a painting that had not yet been filled in.
The street below was quiet, the morning traffic not yet begun, and the silence was a pleasant change from the constant rumble of carriages and carts that characterised the London day.
I thought about Sebastian. Not about the seduction, which I had already analysed and filed, but about the man himself.
He was an anomaly in my experience. Most men are transparent.
Their desires are legible, their weaknesses apparent, their responses predictable.
I had been reading men since I was fourteen years old, when Vivienne first began to teach me the art, and in sixteen years of practice, I had encountered only one who had genuinely surprised me.
Sebastian surprised me.
He saw through performance. This was his defining quality, the thing that made him both valuable and dangerous.
At the Pemberton musical evening, he had watched me with an attention that was not social but diagnostic, and I had recognised the quality because it was one I possessed myself.
He saw the seams. He noticed the slight delay between stimulus and response that reveals a performance from a genuine emotion.
He heard the note in a voice that is a fraction too carefully modulated.
He catalogued the gestures that are a beat too precise, the expressions that settle a moment too quickly into their final configuration.
He was, in his way, as skilled at reading people as I was, and the fact that he was a detective, and I was a suspect meant that our skills were opposed.
But he had a weakness, and the weakness was the thing that had made the seduction possible.
He was lonely. Profoundly, structurally lonely.
He had no family, no close friends, no one who knew him well enough to see the cracks in his armour.
He was a self-made man, which meant he had built himself from nothing, and men who build themselves from nothing are always, in my experience, the most vulnerable to the suggestion that someone sees them.
They have spent their lives proving themselves, demonstrating their worth through effort and achievement, and when someone appears to see them, not their achievements but their essential selves, the effect is devastating.
I had seen him. I had looked at him across the Pemberton drawing room and understood him in a way that perhaps no one ever had, and the understanding was not performed.
It was real. I had seen his loneliness and his intelligence and his moral seriousness, and I had understood that these qualities, combined, produced a man who was both admirable and easy to manipulate.
The admiration was genuine. The manipulation was strategic.
The two coexisted without contradiction.
That was the thought I had been avoiding since last night, and I allowed it to surface now, in the quiet of my study, with no one to see my face and no performance required.