Chapter 22
The Accusation
T he Duchess of Malfort's drawing room was a temple to the principle that wealth, when sufficiently concentrated, can approximate taste.
The room was large, furnished in the prevailing fashion for the homes of women who possessed titles but not discrimination: gilded chairs upholstered in silk the colour of arterial blood, porcelain figurines arranged on marble mantelpieces, paintings in heavy frames that called more attention to the frames than to the paintings, and everywhere, on every surface and in every corner, the accumulated clutter of a lifetime of acquisition without selection.
The air was thick with the smell of lilies, which the Duchess favoured because she believed they conveyed elegance, and the scent was so cloying that breathing required effort.
I had been invited to the gathering, as I was invited to most gatherings, because my presence conferred a kind of social legitimacy that the Duchess valued more than she valued my company.
I was the tragic widow, the woman who had lost three husbands and borne her sorrows with a dignity that inspired admiration and pity in equal measure, and every hostess in Mayfair wanted me at her table because my grief was a decoration, a talking point, a testament to the solemnity of her occasion.
I accepted these invitations with the same mechanical gratitude I brought to all social obligations, understanding that the gatherings were not occasions for enjoyment but for reconnaissance, and the reconnaissance served purposes that none of the other guests could have imagined.
I was seated on a sofa between Lady Pemberton, who was discussing the relative merits of different brands of face powder with the desperate intensity of a woman for whom the subject was of genuine importance, and Mrs. Fanshawe, who was telling a story about a cousin who had recently returned from India and who, according to Mrs. Fanshawe, had been profoundly altered by the experience, though the nature of the alteration remained, after five minutes of narration, unclear.
I was wearing a gown of silver-grey silk, high-necked and long-sleeved, appropriate for the late stages of half-mourning, and my hair was arranged in a coil secured with jet pins, and my expression was the expression I wore at all such gatherings: composed, attentive, faintly melancholy, the expression of a woman who has known sorrow and has been refined by it.
The gathering numbered perhaps twenty women, all of them drawn from the upper reaches of London society, and the conversation moved through its customary channels: the weather, the upcoming season, the latest scandal involving a junior member of the Foreign Office and a woman who was not his wife.
I participated in the conversation with the minimum required contribution, a remark here, a nod there, the occasional smile that suggested I was listening when in fact I was doing something quite different, which was observing.
I observed everything. I observed the way Lady Pemberton's eyes darted toward the door every time it opened, the nervous tic of a woman expecting someone or dreading someone.
I observed the way Mrs. Fanshawe's voice rose when she mentioned her cousin's return, the unconscious vocalisation of a woman who was not as indifferent to the story she was telling as she wished to appear.
I observed the way the Duchess moved through the room with the particular quality of a woman who is constantly calculating the social value of her guests and arranging them accordingly, shifting configurations of chairs and couches to ensure that the most important people were positioned where they could be seen by the most other important people.
And I observed Lady Penelope Ashford.
Penelope was standing near the fireplace, holding a cup of tea she was not drinking, engaged in conversation with Mrs. Thorne and Lady Caroline March.
She was dressed in violet, a colour that did not suit her, and the violet was embellished with lace that was too elaborate for the afternoon and jewellery that was too numerous for good taste.
She looked, as she usually looked, like a woman who was trying too hard, and the trying was visible in every detail of her appearance, in the carefully arranged dyed hair that could not quite conceal the grey at the roots, in the rouge that was applied with too heavy a hand, in the jewels that glittered at her throat and wrists and earlobes with the desperate brightness of a woman for whom display was not a choice but a compulsion.
I had been watching Penelope for months.
She was, in the taxonomy of threats that I maintained in my mind, a category three risk: persistent, irritating, but manageable.
She disliked me. The dislike was not subtle; it was the kind of open, poorly concealed animosity that characterises the social warfare of women who lack the intelligence or the discipline to disguise their true feelings.
Penelope envied my youth, my beauty, my social position, and the envy manifested itself in the weapons available to her: gossip, insinuation, exclusion, the systematic deployment of social hostility that was the preferred arsenal of women who could not compete on merit.
I had endured her hostility with the indifference I brought to all social friction.
Penelope was a creature of limited intellect and unlimited malice, and the combination rendered her more amusing than dangerous.
Her gossip was too transparent to be effective, her insinuations too obvious to land, her attempts at exclusion too clumsy to succeed against a woman who possessed the social capital that I had spent years accumulating.
I had, on several occasions, considered neutralising her entirely, destroying her social standing with the same methodical precision I brought to all threats, but I had decided against it, because Penelope's hostility, while irritating, served a useful purpose: it identified her as an enemy, and enemies who identify themselves are easier to monitor than enemies who do not.
The conversation shifted. The Duchess mentioned the upcoming charity bazaar at the Albert Hall, and the mention produced the usual ripple of interest and obligation that such events generated, and several of the women began discussing their contributions, the items they would donate, the stalls they would oversee.
I listened with half my attention. The other half was occupied with a problem of considerably greater importance: the question of Hartwell, and the question of Sebastian, and the question of what I was going to do about the fact that, as of last night, the investigation into the deaths of my three husbands had been formally authorised by Scotland Yard.
The formalisation of the investigation changed everything.
As long as Sebastian had been operating on his own, pursuing his suspicions without official support, he had been containable.
I could manage him through the methods I had been employing for months: seduction, misdirection, the strategic deployment of vulnerability.
But with official authorisation came resources, colleagues, institutional backing, and the kind of momentum that individual desire, however strong, could not withstand.
Hartwell was the immediate problem. He had broken.
His testimony, however compromised, was now part of the official record, and his documents were in Sebastian's possession.
The documents could not be uncreated. The testimony could not be unsaid.
The best I could do was to undermine Hartwell's credibility before he testified, to cast doubt on his character and his motives, to transform him from a credible witness into a desperate man seeking to deflect blame for his own failures.
This was achievable. I had already begun the process, planting seeds of doubt about Hartwell's professional conduct among the legal circles in which he moved, suggesting that his mental health had been deteriorating, that he had been making erratic decisions, that his firm was in financial difficulty and that his testimony was motivated by the hope of a favourable outcome in unrelated proceedings.
The seeds would grow. It would take weeks, perhaps months, but they would grow, and by the time Hartwell was called to testify, his credibility would be so thoroughly undermined that his evidence would be worthless.
Sebastian was a more complex problem. Last night had demonstrated, in the most visceral possible way, that his commitment to the investigation was fragile, that it existed in a state of permanent tension with his desire for me, and that the tension could be exploited to neutralise the threat he represented.
But exploitation was a strategy that required constant renewal, and each renewal carried the risk that the tension would resolve in favour of the investigation rather than the desire, that Sebastian would find, in some reserve of professional will that I had not yet exhausted, the strength to present his evidence despite his compromise.
I could not rely on desire alone. I needed to remove the evidence itself, or to ensure that the evidence was so thoroughly discredited that no magistrate would accept it, and the discrediting required a more comprehensive approach than the systematic seduction of a single detective.
I was thinking about this, turning the problem over in my mind with the methodical patience I brought to all strategic challenges, when I noticed that the conversation in the drawing room had acquired a new quality.
The quality was silence. Not total silence, but the particular silence that falls over a room when someone has said something unexpected, something that has disrupted the flow of social discourse and created a vacuum into which attention is drawn like water into a drain.