Chapter 16 #3
I practised another smile. This one was broader, the smile I used at social gatherings when meeting new acquaintances, the smile that said I am pleased to make your acquaintance, I have heard good things about you, I am sure we shall be great friends.
It required more work. The eyes had to brighten as well as the mouth, and the slight inclination of the head had to convey openness rather than deference.
It was a larger production, and larger productions carry greater risk of detection, because they involve more moving parts and more moving parts mean more opportunities for error.
I released the second smile and studied my reflection.
And for one second, perhaps half a second, I did not know whether the smile I had been wearing was genuine or performed.
The distinction had never mattered before.
Genuine or performed, the effect was the same: the observer believed, and the observer's belief was the desired outcome.
The machinery did not care whether the smile was real.
It produced the result with the same efficiency regardless of input.
A smile was a smile. An expression was an expression.
The interior state of the woman behind the face was irrelevant to the audience, because the audience could not see the interior state and would not know what to do with it if they could.
But Sebastian Aldric could see it. Or believed he could.
He looked at me the way no one had ever looked at me, not with desire, not with suspicion, not with the social curiosity that most men brought to their observations of women, but with something else, something that I could not name and could not manage, and the inability to name it and the inability to manage it were the same thing, because for me, naming was managing, and if I could not name a thing, I could not control it.
I dismissed the thought. It was unproductive.
The dinner party at the Harcourts' would require my full attention: Lady Harcourt was an ally but an unreliable one, prone to gossip and susceptible to flattery, and there would be guests present whose loyalties I had not yet determined.
I completed my toilette with Dorothea's assistance, reviewed my appearance one final time in the mirror, confirmed that every element was correct, and went downstairs to the carriage.
The Harcourts' house was in Belgravia, a short drive through streets that gleamed with the wet sheen of a recent rain.
The February evening was cold but clear, and the gas lamps along the square burned with a brightness that seemed almost aggressive, as though London were determined to assert itself against the darkness.
I sat in the corner of my carriage and watched the city move past the window and thought about Sebastian, because thinking about Sebastian had become, over the past three months, something I did with the regularity and inevitability of a habit, and habits, even for someone of my disposition, acquire a gravity that is difficult to resist.
He was right about me. I knew this with the same certainty that I knew my own name, my own age, the exact location of every object in my possession.
He was right, and he could not prove it, and the combination of his rightness and his helplessness was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in years.
I had encountered opposition before. I had encountered suspicion, even informed suspicion, from servants and physicians and the occasional overly perceptive acquaintance.
But I had never encountered someone who saw me as clearly as Sebastian did and who, having seen me, continued to look.
Most men, when they glimpsed the machinery behind the face, flinched.
They looked away. They preferred the performance to the reality, because the performance was beautiful and the reality was not, and beauty is more comfortable than truth.
Sebastian did not flinch. He looked harder. And the looking harder was the problem, because looking harder is the first step toward finding, and finding is the first step toward destroying, and destruction, for the first time in my adult life, was something I did not entirely wish to contemplate.
The dinner party was adequate. I performed my role with the precision I brought to every social engagement: the sympathetic widow, the gracious guest, the woman whose losses had refined her rather than diminished her.
Lady Harcourt seated me beside Sir Reginald Post, a baronet of advanced years and limited conversation, whose primary topics of interest were the breeding of foxhounds and the decline of the Anglican clergy.
I listened to both with the attentive patience that people mistook for genuine interest and that I recognised as simply the efficient deployment of my attention in the service of a larger strategy.
Across the table, I could see Lady Penelope Ashford, who had been invited, I suspected, for the specific purpose of creating friction.
Penelope had been circling me for months, her aggression barely concealed beneath a veneer of sympathy so transparent that it would have been comical if it had not been so obviously calculated.
She wanted what I had: the social position, the wealth, the attention that accrued to a beautiful and tragic widow.
She could not have it, and she knew she could not have it, and the knowledge had curdled inside her into something bitter and vindictive, and the vindictiveness was beginning to leak out in ways that required management.
I made a note to address Lady Penelope. Soon, but not yet.
The timing had to be precise. Destroying a social rival was like preparing a poison: the dose had to be exact, the delivery had to be flawless, and the victim had to be given every opportunity to destroy herself before you lifted a finger.
The best social annihilations, Vivienne had taught me, were the ones in which the target believed she was acting of her own free will right up until the moment she realised, too late, that every choice she had made had been guided by an invisible hand.
I returned home at midnight. Edmund was asleep.
Dorothea had left a lamp burning in the hallway and a glass of milk on the kitchen table, in case I was hungry, which I was not.
I climbed the stairs to my study, locked the door, and sat at my desk in the quiet house, and I reviewed the state of my affairs with the meticulous care I brought to every strategic assessment.
Sebastian was becoming a problem. Not an insurmountable one, but a problem nonetheless.
His investigation had stalled, which was good, but his determination had not, which was less good.
The false leads I had planted were consuming his time and his professional credibility, and Superintendent Graves was applying pressure, and his colleagues were beginning to distance themselves.
All of this was proceeding according to plan.
But the anonymous note I had placed in his rooms the previous week, the note about courage, was a gamble.
I had intended it to provoke him into impulsive action, because impulsive action is easier to counter than patient investigation, and impulsive men make mistakes that patient men do not.
But I had not anticipated, when I wrote the note, the effect it would have on me.
Standing in his rooms had been a violation, and not merely of his privacy.
I had entered the space where he lived, the space where he slept and ate and thought, and the intimacy of the act had produced in me a sensation I could not immediately classify.
It was not guilt. I do not experience guilt.
It was not anxiety, because I had taken precautions against discovery.
It was something else, something that occupied the same neural territory as curiosity but carried a charge that curiosity alone could not account for.
I had stood beside his bed. I had looked at his pillow, which was slightly dented from the shape of his head, and at the blanket, which was pushed aside in the careless way of someone who sleeps without resting.
His room was spare and functional: a bed, a desk, a chair, a small bookshelf stocked with legal manuals and volumes of criminal case reports.
No decoration. No personal effects. The room of a man who exists for his work and has nothing left over for his life.
And I had felt, standing in that room, something that I had not felt since I was a child standing in my mother's morning room in Hampstead, the sensation of encountering something I did not fully understand.
I sat at my desk and reviewed my options.
Hartwell was stable, for the present. He was frightened of me, and frightened men are reliable up to the point at which their fear becomes unbearable, at which point they break.
I would need to monitor him. Dorothea was useful but watchful, and watchful servants are dangerous servants, because watching leads to thinking, and thinking leads to questions, and questions lead to answers that are better left undiscovered.
Edmund was Edmund, the one variable in my calculations that I could not reduce to a strategic variable, the one element of my life that existed outside the framework of cost and benefit and managed risk.
I opened my desk drawer and removed the small leather-bound diary in which I kept my records.
The diary was written in a cipher of my own devising, based on a substitution system that used Greek letters for the most sensitive entries.
It contained the names of my husbands and the methods I had employed, the dosages I had administered, the timelines I had followed, the apothecaries I had visited, the accomplices I had engaged and subsequently disposed of.
It was, in the language of the law, a confession, and if it were ever deciphered, it would hang me.
I closed the diary and returned it to the drawer. The drawer locked with a soft click, and the click was satisfying, the sound of a mechanism engaging, a system closing itself against intrusion.
I went to bed. I did not sleep for a long time.
I lay in the dark and listened to the house settle around me, the creaking of floorboards and the distant ticking of clocks and the faint sound of Edmund murmuring in his sleep two rooms away, and I thought about Sebastian's eyes and the way they saw through me, and I thought about my mother standing on the beach at Margate with the wind in her hair, and I thought about the smile in the mirror and the half-second in which I had not known whether it was real, and I understood, with a clarity that was almost painful, that the machinery was beginning to develop a fault that no amount of maintenance could repair.
I did not know what the fault was. I did not know whether it mattered. But for the first time in my life, I found myself interested in something that I could not control, and the interest itself was a form of surrender that I did not yet know how to resist.