Chapter 18
A Tremor in the Machinery
I knew something was wrong the moment William Hartwell entered the drawing room.
He was late, which was unusual. Hartwell was a man who treated punctuality as a moral obligation, arriving for every appointment with the clockwork precision of a train, and in the six years I had been employing his firm, he had never once kept me waiting.
Today he was seven minutes late, and when he appeared in the doorway, he was not merely late but discomposed, his collar slightly askew, his spectacles smudged, his coat buttoned incorrectly, small errors that would have been invisible to a casual observer but that registered on my senses with the force of alarms. Hartwell was not a man who buttoned his coat incorrectly.
Hartwell was not a man who allowed his spectacles to be smudged.
Something had disrupted the mechanism of his composure, and the disruption was significant enough to produce visible error.
"Sir William. How good of you to come." I rose from the sofa and extended my hand, and he took it, and his grip was damp and uncertain, the grip of a man whose mind was elsewhere.
His palm was cold, despite the warmth of the afternoon.
I released his hand and gestured to the chair opposite mine, the chair I had placed deliberately so that the light from the window fell across his face and left mine in shadow, and he sat, and the moment he sat, I saw the second sign: he did not arrange his coat beneath him.
He simply sat, heavily, gracelessly, the way a man sits when he is too preoccupied to manage the social choreography of posture.
Dorothea brought tea. Hartwell accepted a cup and held it without drinking.
His gaze drifted to the window, to the fireplace, to the painting above the mantelpiece, a mediocre landscape in the Dutch style that I had inherited from Richard and kept because removing it would have required an explanation I did not wish to give.
He looked everywhere except at me, and the avoidance was so marked, so deliberate, that it ceased to be an absence of attention and became instead a presence of its own, a negative space that was more communicative than any glance.
"Shall we review the estate accounts?" I said, keeping my voice pleasant and businesslike, the voice of a competent woman managing her affairs with the assistance of a trusted professional. "I received the quarterly report last week, and there are several items I wished to discuss."
"Yes. Of course." Hartwell opened his portfolio, and I observed that his hands were not entirely steady.
The documents inside were the usual papers, the ledgers and receipts and correspondence that constituted the routine business of managing a large estate, and he placed them on the table between us with the careful precision of a man who is aware that his movements are being watched and is attempting to compensate for the irregularity of his manner.
I allowed the meeting to proceed in its customary manner for ten minutes.
We discussed the rents from the Suffolk estate, which had been slightly lower than projected owing to a poor harvest. We reviewed the status of the investments that Hartwell's firm managed on my behalf, a portfolio of stocks and securities that yielded a comfortable annual income.
We addressed a minor legal matter concerning the boundary between Ashworth Park and a neighbouring property, a dispute that had been simmering for years and showed no signs of resolution.
I conducted this portion of the meeting with the same meticulous attention I brought to every financial discussion, asking precise questions and noting the answers, and throughout, I watched Hartwell with the concentrated focus of someone reading a text in a language she knows fluently but which is being spoken with a foreign accent.
The accent, in this case, was fear. Not the low, chronic anxiety of a man who has been frightened for a long time and has grown accustomed to the sensation, but the acute, electric fear of a man who has recently done something he believes will have consequences.
His answers were slightly delayed, each one arriving a half-beat later than it should have, as though he were composing each response twice, once for the surface and once for the calculation beneath it.
His eyes met mine briefly and then skittered away, like a stone thrown across water, touching and bouncing and never quite settling.
His breathing was shallow, controlled, the breathing of someone who is consciously preventing himself from hyperventilating.
Something had happened. Something had shifted in the architecture of Hartwell's relationship to me, and the shift had occurred recently, within the past forty-eight hours, I estimated, based on the degree of deterioration in his composure.
Hartwell was not a man who deteriorated gradually.
He was, in his way, a professional, and professionals maintain their performances until the moment they cannot, and then they collapse all at once, like a dam that holds the water and holds the water and then, in a single instant, lets it through.
"I wonder," I said, setting down my teacup with a soft click, "whether there is something else you wished to discuss, Sir William. You seem preoccupied."
The directness of the question startled him.
I watched the startle travel through his body, the brief widening of the eyes, the tightening of the shoulders, the almost imperceptible recoil of his chin, and I noted each reaction with the diagnostic precision I applied to every human encounter.
He recovered quickly, but not quickly enough.
The recovery itself was a data point, an indication that he had a recovery to make, that his baseline composure had already been compromised, and he was now operating from a position of damage rather than equilibrium.
"Not at all, Lady Ashworth. I am simply tired. I have been working late on a complex matter, and I fear the hours have begun to tell."
"A complex matter?" I kept my voice light, conversational. "Anything you are at liberty to discuss?"
"No. A client matter. Confidential, I am afraid.
" He reached for his teacup and drank, and the act of drinking was another data point, because Hartwell did not drink tea during meetings.
He never had. He accepted the cup because refusing it would have been rude, but he never consumed it, allowing it to grow cold beside him as a prop rather than a refreshment.
The fact that he was drinking now meant that he needed something to do with his hands and his mouth, something to occupy the physical apparatus that would otherwise betray him through fidgeting or silence.
"I see." I smiled. The smile was warm, sympathetic, the smile of a woman who understands the pressures of professional life and who extends her compassion accordingly.
"You must take care of yourself, Sir William.
I rely upon you more than you know, and I should be most distressed if overwork were to affect your health. "
The words were pleasant. Their effect was not.
Hartwell flinched, visibly, a contraction of the muscles around his eyes that lasted perhaps a quarter of a second but that was, to my trained observation, as loud as a shout.
I rely upon you. The sentence was innocuous on its surface, a conventional expression of professional regard.
Beneath the surface, in the subtext that Hartwell was hearing with every nerve he possessed, it was a reminder, and the reminder was this: you are mine.
You have always been mine. And what is mine, I do not easily release.
"I am quite well, Lady Ashworth. I thank you for your concern."
"Of course." I paused. "Shall we continue with the accounts?"
We continued. But the meeting had changed, and we both knew it.
The pretence of normal business was now exactly that, a pretence, a screen behind which Hartwell was hiding and which I was looking through with the calm, patient attention of someone who has all the time in the world and no intention of allowing the hidden thing to remain hidden.
I allowed another fifteen minutes to pass, discussing rents and investments and boundary disputes, and then I brought the meeting to a close with the same gracious efficiency with which I conducted all my social and professional affairs.
"It has been a most productive afternoon, Sir William. Thank you for your time."
He stood. He gathered his papers with hands that were slightly steadier than they had been, and I noted that the improvement was itself suspicious, because the improvement suggested that he was regaining his composure now that the encounter was ending, which meant that the composure had been lost specifically because of the encounter, which meant that the encounter itself was the source of his distress.
"Until next month, then," he said.
"Until next month."
I walked him to the front door. Dorothea had his coat and hat ready, and he accepted them and put them on with the mechanical movements of a man operating on autopilot, his mind already elsewhere, already in whatever private space he had constructed to contain the thing he was not telling me.
I watched him descend the front steps and walk toward his carriage, which was waiting at the kerb, and I watched him climb into it and pull the door shut, and I watched the carriage move away down Grosvenor Square and disappear into the afternoon traffic, and throughout this observation, I was thinking.