Chapter 18 #2
Hartwell had broken. I was as certain of this as I had ever been certain of anything.
The question was not whether he had broken but how and to whom.
He was a man who had been complicit in my affairs for years, a man who had known or suspected the truth about three deaths and had chosen silence, and men who choose silence do not suddenly choose speech unless something has happened to change the calculus of their self-interest. Something had happened.
Something had pushed Hartwell past the tipping point, had made the risk of silence greater than the risk of confession.
The most obvious candidate was Sebastian.
It was always Sebastian. He was the only variable in my calculations that had not been resolved, the only force in my landscape that operated with sufficient intelligence and sufficient persistence to threaten the equilibrium I had spent years constructing.
Hartwell knew Sebastian was investigating the deaths.
He had known since December, because I had told him, in the course of one of our regular meetings, that a detective from Scotland Yard had been making inquiries about the Earl's final illness.
Hartwell had nodded and made a note in his portfolio and said nothing, because Hartwell always said nothing, and I had believed that the silence would hold, because silence, in my experience, was the default state of frightened men.
But frightened men do not remain frightened indefinitely. They become desperate, and desperate men do desperate things, and the most desperate thing a frightened man can do is tell the truth.
I needed to know whether Hartwell had gone to Sebastian. I needed to know what he had told him. And I needed to know how much time I had before the information he had shared was translated from private conversation into official action.
I summoned Dorothea.
She appeared within minutes, as she always did, materialising in the doorway of my study with the quiet efficiency that made her the most tolerable servant I had ever employed.
Her face was composed, her hands folded before her, her dark eyes fixed on mine with the particular attentiveness of someone who has learned that the lady of the house notices everything and forgives nothing.
"Dorothea. I have a task for you. It requires discretion."
"I am accustomed to discretion, ma'am."
"You are. That is why I am asking you and not Mrs. Parfitt.
" I kept my voice level, pleasant, the voice of an employer making a routine request of a trusted servant.
"I wish to know whether Sir William Hartwell has visited an address near Scotland Yard within the past week.
The address is on Great Scotland Yard, number fourteen, I believe.
It is a boarding house. I do not require you to make inquiries of the residents or the landlady.
I simply need to know whether Sir William's carriage was seen in that street. "
Dorothea absorbed this instruction without visible reaction. She had served me long enough to understand that the questions I asked were never the questions I actually wanted answered, and that the surface of my requests concealed depths that were better left unplumbed.
"I can make inquiries without being observed," she said. "The street is busy at most hours, and the market on Whitehall draws considerable traffic. I would not be remarked upon."
"Good. I should like the information by this evening, if possible."
"Very well, ma'am."
She withdrew. I heard her footsteps recede down the hallway, soft and precise, and then the sound of the back door opening and closing as she left by the servants' entrance.
Dorothea was efficient. She would have the information I needed within hours.
The question was what I would do with it once I had it, and the answer to that question depended on variables I could not yet determine.
I sat at my desk and reviewed my position with the cold precision I brought to every strategic assessment.
Hartwell had documents. I knew this because I had been his client for six years, and I knew how he worked.
He kept copies of everything, meticulous copies, filed in systems so elaborate that they constituted a private archive of every transaction and correspondence he had ever handled.
If he had gone to Sebastian, he had brought documents with him, because Hartwell would not make an accusation without evidence, and the evidence he possessed was more dangerous than any testimony he could offer.
The physician's letters. The insurance policy.
Perhaps the correspondence between himself and Dr. Hale, in which the doctor's growing alarm was documented in detail.
These were not the kind of documents that could be dismissed as the product of a fevered imagination.
They were paper, ink, dates, signatures.
They existed in the material world, and the material world, unlike the world of suspicion and pattern, was the world in which the law operated.
My position, which had seemed impregnable six months ago, was now revealed as something more fragile.
I had built it on three assumptions: that no one would notice the pattern, that no one would pursue the pattern if they noticed it, and that no one who possessed evidence would be willing to speak.
The first assumption had been disproved in November, when Sebastian had appeared at my door with his notebook and his too-sharp eyes.
The second had been disproved by his persistence, which had survived every obstacle I had placed in his path.
And now the third assumption was crumbling, because Hartwell had broken, and Hartwell's breaking meant that the evidence I had believed safely buried in his filing cabinets was now sitting on a desk in a boarding house near Scotland Yard, being read by the one man in London who had both the intelligence to understand it and the determination to act on it.
I allowed myself a moment of stillness. Not fear, because fear is an indulgence I do not permit myself, but stillness, the kind of stillness that a general imposes on herself before a battle, the moment of absolute calm in which the full scope of the challenge is acknowledged and accepted.
I was in danger. Not immediate danger, not the kind that requires flight or concealment, but the slower, more insidious danger of a case being built, evidence being accumulated, and a net being drawn tighter with each passing week.
The system, which had protected me for years through inertia and indifference, was beginning to stir, and if it stirred too much, it would begin to move, and if it moved, it would move in my direction.
I opened the drawer of my desk and removed the leather-bound diary.
I held it in my hands for a moment, feeling the weight of it, the weight of everything it contained, the dosages and timelines and methods that would, if they were ever read by the wrong person, end my life as thoroughly as any executioner's rope.
The diary was my most dangerous possession and my most necessary one.
It was the record of my work, the archive of my achievement, and the proof of everything I had done.
I returned it to the drawer and locked the drawer and placed the key in its usual position inside the lining of my reticule, and the familiar ritual of concealment calmed me, as familiar rituals do, by asserting the primacy of habit over uncertainty.
The question was not whether to act but how.
I had several options, each carrying its own risks and rewards.
I could approach Hartwell directly and remind him of the consequences of speaking, a strategy that had worked in the past but that carried the risk of confirming his fears and accelerating his cooperation with Sebastian.
I could attempt to discredit him before he testified, by spreading rumours about his professional conduct or his personal finances, a strategy that was slower but more durable and that would undermine the credibility of any evidence he presented.
I could destroy the evidence itself, by gaining access to his files and removing the documents in question, a strategy that was elegant in theory but hazardous in practice, requiring either coercion of Hartwell's staff or a physical intrusion into his offices, either of which would leave traces that could be traced back to me.
Or I could confront Sebastian directly.
The thought had been forming in my mind since the moment Hartwell left my drawing room, and now, sitting at my desk in the quiet house with the afternoon light fading and the gas lamps still unlit, I allowed myself to examine it.
Sebastian was compromised. He had been compromised since December, since the night in my drawing room when he had set aside his notebook and his professional detachment and allowed himself to be led into territory from which there was no easy return.
He was compromised professionally by his inability to present the case to his superiors without exposing his own entanglement, and he was compromised personally by the desire that, I knew, still burned beneath the surface of his investigative restraint.
He had come to my door twice since the Ouroboros, both times under the guise of official business, and both times I had read in his eyes the conflict between the man who wanted to arrest me and the man who wanted to touch me, and both times the conflict had resolved, in the end, in my favour, because desire, when it is strong enough, is a more powerful motivator than duty, and my desire was to control him, and I was very, very good at getting what I desired.