Chapter 30 #3
Edmund was the only creature in the world whose happiness mattered to me.
The mattering was not a moral sentiment.
It was not empathy or compassion or tenderness, those qualities that normal people experienced and that I, by the nature of my condition, could not experience.
The mattering was possessive, territorial, primal.
Edmund's happiness was my happiness, not because I derived pleasure from his pleasure but because his happiness was a component of the order I had imposed upon the world, and the order was the architecture of my survival, and any disruption to the order was, by definition, a threat to the survival.
If I forbade him the Museum, I would disrupt the order.
The disruption would be small, in the larger scheme of things, a single outing replaced by another activity, a single pleasure replaced by another.
But the disruption would be visible in Edmund's behaviour, and the visibility would communicate itself to the people around him, and the communication would, in the indirect but relentless way of these things, reach Sebastian, who would interpret it as confirmation of his suspicions, and the confirmation would feed his determination and sustain his investigation and prolong the war that I was trying, with every resource at my disposal, to end.
I made my decision. The decision was not the decision a purely strategic actor would have made.
The decision was, I acknowledged, compromised by the tremor, by the pressure, by the thing I could not name, and the compromise was a weakness, and weaknesses were dangerous, and the acknowledgment of the weakness did not make it less dangerous.
But the acknowledgment was honest, and honesty, even with oneself, was, in my experience, the most effective tool for managing the things that could not be managed by any other means.
"You may go to the Museum," I said. "But Dorothea will stay with you at all times. And you will not speak to the man with the scar again. If he approaches you, you will tell Dorothea, and she will bring you home."
Edmund's face brightened. The brightness was immediate and total, the brightness of a child who has been given something he feared he would lose, and the brightness was, I recognised with a sensation that was not quite pleasure and not quite satisfaction, the thing that I had built the order to protect.
"Thank you, Cecilia," he said. "You are the best sister in the world."
He returned to his drawing. I stood in the doorway and watched him, and the watching was, as it always was, both a comfort and a torment, a comfort because Edmund was safe and present and mine, and a torment because the safety was contingent and the contingency depended on factors that were, increasingly, beyond my control.
I closed the door and went back downstairs to the study.
The notebook was still open on the desk.
I sat and read through the plans one more time, checking each element for precision and completeness, and when I was satisfied, I added a new item to the list: the removal of the cabinet's contents, to be executed tonight, after the household had retired.
I closed the notebook. I turned off the lamp.
I sat in the dark and felt the tremor, and the pressure, and the thing I could not name, and I thought about Sebastian, who was somewhere in London, planning his next move, and about Edmund, who was upstairs drawing a mummy case and thinking about scarab beetles, and about the cabinet in the stillroom, which contained the evidence of three murders and which would, before the night was over, contain nothing but empty air and the faint, lingering scent of the compounds that had, over the course of eight years, made me one of the wealthiest and most dangerous women in England.
The tremor persisted. The war continued.
And somewhere, in the deep, unlit territory where the thing I could not name kept its own counsel, a calculation was being performed that I could not observe, could not control, and could not, despite all my training and all my precision, ignore.
The calculation was about Sebastian. Not about Sebastian as a threat or a variable or a strategic problem, but about Sebastian as a person, a person who saw me, who understood me, who pursued me with a determination that was, by any standard, irrational, and whose irrationality was, I was beginning to suspect, the thing that made him not merely dangerous but irresistible.
I could kill him. The calculation was brief and clinical.
A single dose of the compound I had used on Hartwell, administered in his evening brandy or his morning coffee or the glass of water he kept on his bedside table, would end the investigation permanently and eliminate the most dangerous person in my world.
The method was proven. The logistics were straightforward.
The risk of detection was minimal, because Sebastian lived alone, had no close family, and would, in death, be attributed to the same kind of heart failure or gastric complaint that had served me so well in the past.
But I did not move. I did not plan. I did not even open the notebook to add the item to the list. The inaction was not strategic.
It was not the result of a cost-benefit analysis or a risk assessment or a calculation of any kind.
It was something else, something that operated below the level of calculation, in the territory where the tremor lived, and the something was, I understood with a clarity that was itself a kind of revelation, the single most incomprehensible phenomenon I had ever encountered in a life devoted to the comprehension and control of phenomena.
I did not want to live in a world without Sebastian Aldric in it.
This was not love. I was incapable of love, and I had never pretended otherwise, not even to myself.
What I felt for Sebastian was not tenderness or compassion or the desire for his happiness.
It was something more primitive and more obscure, a recognition that he was the only person in my experience who had seen through the performance and remained standing, and that the seeing-through was, in itself, a form of existence, a proof that I was not invisible, that the mask I wore was not impenetrable, that somewhere, behind the curtain of calculated femininity and strategic vulnerability, there was a person who could be perceived, if only by one person, and the perception was, whatever its consequences, the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me.
I could not kill him. The inability was not moral, because I had no morals in the conventional sense, and it was not practical, because killing him was, from a purely strategic perspective, the most efficient solution to the problem he represented.
The inability was, I suspected, something I would never fully understand, and the not-understanding was itself a source of the tremor, because I was not accustomed to not understanding my own responses, and the lack of comprehension was, in the architecture of my carefully ordered mind, a gap that could not be filled and that therefore could not be ignored.
I stood and went to the stillroom. The house was quiet.
The servants had retired. Edmund was asleep, his door closed, his breathing even and regular through the panels of the wood.
I moved through the darkened corridors with the silent efficiency of a woman who knows every floorboard, every riser, every threshold, and who can navigate the house in complete darkness without making a sound.
The stillroom was off the kitchen, a small, windowless space that smelled of dried herbs and beeswax and the faint, chemical undertone of the compounds I had stored there. I lit a candle and opened the cabinet.
The bottles were arranged on three shelves, a dozen in total, small and clear and unlabelled, exactly as Edmund had described them.
Some were full. Some were partially depleted.
Some were empty. The contents were, to the naked eye, indistinguishable from one another, but I knew what each bottle contained: digitalis compounds for cardiac acceleration, arsenic trioxide for the slow, systematic destruction that I had employed against Richard, and a reserve of atropine, kept for emergencies, for the moments when a plan went awry and a rapid, decisive action was required.
I removed the bottles, one by one, and placed them in a cloth bag I had brought for the purpose.
The removal took less than five minutes.
When the cabinet was empty, I wiped the shelves with a cloth dampened with vinegar, which would neutralise any residue that might remain, and I closed the cabinet and locked it and returned the key to the chain around my neck, where it had hung, day and night, for the past eight years.
I carried the bag to the scullery, where a stone sink and a drain provided the means of disposal.
I opened each bottle and poured its contents into a basin of dilute sulphuric acid that I had prepared the previous evening and left, covered with a cloth, on the draining board.
The acid hissed and fumed as it consumed the compounds, and the fumes were acrid and unpleasant, and I worked quickly and efficiently, emptying each bottle, rinsing it, and placing it in a second bag, which I would later break into pieces and distribute among the household refuse.
When the last bottle was emptied, I poured the acid solution down the drain and ran water through the pipes for five minutes, flushing the system until the water ran clear and the chemical smell had faded to a trace, a ghost of its former intensity, barely detectable even to my trained senses.
I returned to the study. The candle had burned low.
The room was in shadow. I sat at the desk and opened the notebook and, with a steady hand, recorded the removal of the cabinet's contents and the method of disposal.
The record was precise and detailed, because records were the mechanism through which I maintained control over my operations, and the control was the mechanism through which I survived.
I closed the notebook. I extinguished the candle.
I sat in the dark and listened to the house, and to the city beyond the house, and to the night that contained both the house and the city and everything in them, including Sebastian Aldric, who was, I knew, somewhere in the darkness, thinking about me, and about Edmund, and about the cabinet that was now empty, and that would, when he finally found a way to search it, contain nothing but the residue of a cleaning and the absence of everything he was looking for.
The war continued. The tremor persisted.
And in the deep, unlit territory where the thing I could not name kept its own counsel, the calculation about Sebastian continued too, unresolved and unresolvable, a loop of incomprehension that would, I suspected, continue for as long as Sebastian continued to exist and to pursue me and to see me with those brown, too-perceptive eyes, and the continuation was, I acknowledged with a finality that was itself a kind of surrender, the one thing in my life that I could not plan for, control, or predict, and the unpredictability was, in the ordered architecture of my existence, both the most dangerous and the most interesting thing of all.
I went upstairs to bed. The war was not over.
But the cabinet was empty, and Edmund was safe, and Sebastian, for all his persistence and all his intelligence and all his infuriating, irrational determination, was still alive, and the aliveness was, I understood as I lay in the dark and listened to the house settle around me, the one outcome of the evening's operations that I had not planned and could not explain, and that I was, despite every rational argument to the contrary, unwilling to change.