Chapter 30
The Possession
T he tremor did not stop. It had begun the moment Dorothea told me about the conversation at the Museum, and it had not subsided in the hours since.
It was not visible. I had ensured that. The control I maintained over my physical manifestations was absolute, the product of decades of training that had begun, as all my training had begun, with Vivienne, who had understood, with the clinical precision of a woman who regarded the human body as an instrument to be mastered, that the first and most essential step in the manipulation of others was the manipulation of oneself.
I could regulate my breathing, my heart rate, my skin temperature, the dilation of my pupils, the tension in my jaw.
I could produce tears on command and suppress them with equal facility.
I could maintain a smile for thirty minutes without the slightest waver in the muscles of my face, and I could extinguish the smile in an instant, replacing it with an expression of cold neutrality that was, to all appearances, as genuine as the smile it had replaced.
But the tremor was internal. It was not a physical sensation, not precisely, though it produced physical symptoms: a tightness in the chest, a constriction in the throat, a faint but persistent tingling in the fingertips, as though the blood were being drawn away from the extremities and redirected to the central organs, the heart and the brain, the two engines of survival.
The sensation was familiar in its general character but unprecedented in its intensity, and the intensity was, I recognised with the detached analytical attention I brought to all unusual phenomena, a direct consequence of the information Dorothea had provided.
Sebastian had spoken to Edmund. Edmund had spoken about the locked cupboard.
Sebastian now knew, with a specificity that Dorothea's second-hand testimony could not provide, that there was a locked cabinet in the stillroom of Blackwood House, that the cabinet contained small, clear, unlabelled bottles, and that I, Cecilia Blackwood, became angry when the cabinet was observed or questioned.
The information was not, in itself, fatal.
Sebastian had known about the cabinet since the early days of the investigation, through Dorothea's initial report.
He had not, at that time, pursued the lead with any particular vigour, partly because he had no legal basis for a search and partly because, I suspected, the cabinet was a curiosity rather than a priority, one more strange detail in an investigation that was already overflowing with strange details.
But the information from Edmund was different.
It was confirmation, not from a servant whose testimony could be challenged on grounds of credibility and motive, but from my brother, a person who was, by virtue of his relationship to me and his position in the household, in a position to know things that no one else could know.
The confirmation gave the lead a weight and a specificity that it had previously lacked, and the weight and the specificity transformed it from a curiosity into a target.
I stood in my study, the curtains drawn against the evening, the gas lamp hissing on the desk, the notebook open in front of me, and I calculated.
The calculation was, in its structure, the same kind of calculation I had performed a thousand times before: the identification of a threat, the assessment of its severity, the development of a countermeasure, and the deployment of resources to implement the countermeasure.
But the calculation felt different. It was not colder or more urgent or more precise than usual.
It was, if anything, more controlled, more deliberate, more measured, as though the machinery of my thinking, sensing the disruption caused by the tremor, had compensated by increasing the precision of its operations, the way a ship's compass, disturbed by magnetic interference, adjusts its readings to maintain the true bearing.
The threat was the cabinet. If Sebastian obtained access to the cabinet and its contents, the game was over.
The bottles, even if empty, would contain residue that a competent chemist could analyse.
The residue, if it matched the compounds that had killed my husbands, would be evidence of a kind that no amount of social manoeuvring or legal argument could explain away.
The cabinet was the single most dangerous object in my world, and the danger it represented was, I acknowledged, the result of a miscalculation I had made years ago, when I had decided to store my working materials in the stillroom rather than disposing of them after each use.
The decision had been pragmatic at the time: the compounds were difficult to procure, and storing them eliminated the need for repeated purchases, each of which was a risk in itself.
But the pragmatism had become a vulnerability, and the vulnerability was now, through Edmund's guileless chatter, exposed to the one person who could exploit it.
I had two options. The first was to remove the cabinet and its contents before Sebastian could obtain access.
This was the safer option, the option that a purely rational actor would choose without hesitation.
The removal would eliminate the evidence, close the vulnerability, and reduce the threat to a level that could be managed by the social and institutional countermeasures already in operation.
The removal was, in every strategic sense, the correct course of action.
The second option was to do nothing and to rely on the other countermeasures, the social pressure, the institutional erosion, the systematic destruction of Sebastian's credibility, to prevent him from reaching the point at which a search of the cabinet became possible.
This was the riskier option, because it depended on factors that were not entirely within my control: the willingness of Sebastian's superiors to continue constraining him, the willingness of the legal system to deny him a warrant, the willingness of the social world to maintain its indifference to the investigation.
But it was also the option that preserved the status quo, and the status quo, whatever its risks, had the advantage of familiarity, and familiarity, in the calculus of survival, was not nothing.
I chose the first option. The removal would take place tonight, after the household had retired.
I would go to the stillroom, open the cabinet, remove the bottles, and dispose of them in a manner that was permanent and irreversible.
The disposal was a problem I had solved before: the compounds could be dissolved in acid and flushed through the drains, a method that was crude but effective, and that left no trace that any laboratory analysis could detect.
The cabinet itself, emptied of its contents, would contain nothing but the residue of years of use, and the residue, without the bottles to provide context and comparison, would be suggestive but not conclusive, and suggestive, in the absence of corroboration, was not evidence.
I closed the notebook and went upstairs.
Edmund's room was at the end of the corridor, a small, comfortable space that I had furnished with the particular care I brought to all aspects of his environment: the books he liked on the shelves, the drawing materials arranged on the desk, the bed with its soft blankets and its ironed sheets, the window that overlooked the garden where, in better weather, he liked to sit and watch the birds.
The room was designed to be a safe place, a space that was entirely under my control, and the control was, I acknowledged, the expression of the same possessive instinct that governed every aspect of my relationship with my brother.
I opened the door. Edmund was sitting at his desk, drawing.
The drawing was of a mummy case, one of the cases from the Egyptian gallery at the Museum, and the rendering was surprisingly accurate, the painted face reproduced with a fidelity that belied the limitations of his cognitive abilities.
His brow was furrowed in concentration, his tongue protruding slightly from the corner of his mouth, the familiar posture of a person who is engaged in an activity that absorbs him completely.
He looked up when I entered. His face changed, the furrow smoothing, the tongue retracting, the eyes widening with the pleasure of a child who is visited by the person he loves most.
"Cecilia. Look. I am drawing the mummy lady. The one who looks like she is trying not to laugh. I met a man at the Museum today who liked the mummies too. He was kind. I asked him to come back next Thursday. Is that all right?"
The question was innocent. The innocence was the thing that made it so devastating.
Edmund had invited Sebastian to meet him again, and he was asking my permission, because my permission was the governing principle of his existence, and the permission, if granted, would give Sebastian regular access to the one person in my household who could, without knowing it, provide him with the information he needed to destroy me.