Chapter 35 #2
Mrs. Forsythe was a pleasant, unremarkable woman in her middle forties who spoke little and observed much, and whose presence in the drawing room served the purpose I had assigned to it: she was a prop, a piece of social furniture, a person whose inclusion on the guest list would make the evening appear ordinary.
She smiled at the appropriate moments, made the appropriate small talk about the weather and the opera and the latest scandal in the newspapers, and asked no questions that might disturb the surface of the evening's careful calm.
I felt a faint sympathy for her, a sympathy that was entirely misplaced, because she had no idea what she had been drawn into, and if she had, she would have fled, and her flight would have been the rational response of a sensible person to a situation that was, in every meaningful sense, deeply dangerous.
Cecilia appeared at eight o'clock precisely.
She descended the staircase with the measured grace of a woman who has made physical elegance into a discipline, and the drawing room, which had been humming with the low, sociable noise of people making conversation, fell silent for the space of perhaps three seconds, which was long enough.
She was wearing a gown of ivory silk that caught the gaslight and held it, so that she seemed to be luminous from within, and her auburn hair was arranged in a style that was both elaborate and apparently effortless, coils and braids secured with pins that might have been diamond or might have been paste and were, in either case, precisely calculated to draw the eye upward to the line of her jaw and the curve of her throat and the set of her shoulders, which were bare and pale and perfect.
Her only ornament was a single strand of pearls, and the restraint of the ornament was itself a statement, a communication of confidence so total that it did not require embellishment.
She looked well. I had seen her look better, in the hours after the night in her drawing room, when the composure was temporarily loosened and something else showed through, something rawer and more dangerous and, God help me, more compelling.
But she looked well, and the looking well was itself a performance, and the performance was flawless, and the flawlessness was, at this particular moment in the history of my investigation and my life, the most terrifying thing I had ever witnessed.
She greeted each guest in turn, and each greeting was calibrated to its recipient: warmth for Lady Pemberton, warmth of the sort that suggested an established friendship; respect for Lord Pemberton, respect that acknowledged his status without flattering it; polite interest for Mrs. Forsythe, the interest of a hostess who is pleased that her guests have come and who wishes them to feel welcome; and for Sir Geoffrey, a small incline of the head and a smile that was precisely one degree warmer than courtesy required and precisely one degree cooler than warmth would have been, a smile that communicated recognition without intimacy and respect without submission.
She saved me for last. She always saved me for last. The delay was deliberate, a small exercise of power that told me, and told anyone observant enough to notice, that I was the most significant person in the room and that she wished me to know it.
"Inspector," she said, and her voice was low and warm and gave nothing away. "How kind of you to come."
"I would not have missed it," I said, and the words were true, and their truth was the most damning evidence of my own degradation, because I should not have wanted to be here, and I did want to be here, and the wanting and the should-not-wanting coexisted in me like two animals in a cage, each watching the other with the wary attention of creatures that are not yet certain whether they are allies or prey.
She held my gaze for a moment longer than the social norm permitted, and at that moment, I saw something flicker behind her eyes, something that was not the calculated warmth of her hostess's mask but was instead a quality I could not name, a quality that might have been amusement or might have been anxiety or might have been something else entirely, and then the moment passed, and she turned to the room and said, with the bright authority of a woman who has never doubted her right to command any space she enters, "Shall we go in to dinner? "
The dining room at Blackwood House was a long, high-ceilinged chamber that had been designed, in the previous century, for the entertainment of large numbers of people, and which Cecilia had, since taking up residence, refined into something more intimate without sacrificing its inherent grandeur.
The table was set for seven: white linen, silver candlesticks, crystal glasses that caught the light and scattered it in small, sharp rainbows across the polished surface of the mahogany.
The arrangement of the candelabras was precise, the spacing of the place settings mathematically exact, and the flowers on the table — white roses, again, and sprigs of myrtle, the traditional emblem of marriage — were so arranged as to create a visual rhythm that led the eye from one end of the table to the other and back again without ever allowing it to rest.
The seating had been arranged with Cecilia's characteristic precision.
She sat at the head of the table, her position a statement of authority that was unambiguous.
Sir Geoffrey was placed at her right hand, which was the position of honour, and which I understood as a calculated gesture: she was granting him precedence, acknowledging his institutional power, and communicating, through the language of social ritual, that she recognised the seriousness of the situation and was prepared to engage with it on its own terms. Lord Pemberton sat at her left, providing the social ballast of an established aristocrat whose presence lent the evening the air of respectability that Cecilia wished to project.
I was placed halfway down the table, between Lady Pemberton and Mrs. Forsythe, a position that was neither honourable nor insulting but was, I recognised, deliberately marginal.
Cecilia did not wish me to be close enough to the significant conversation to intervene in it.
She wished me to observe from a distance, and she wished the distance itself to be a statement: I was present, but I was not central.
The case had moved beyond my capacity to influence, and the dinner party was designed, among its other purposes, to communicate that fact to me with the elegant cruelty that was Cecilia's signature mode of expression.
The first course was consommé, served in shallow porcelain bowls that were painted with scenes of classical mythology and which, I suspected, were worth more than my annual salary.
The soup was excellent, its clarity achieved through a process of clarification so labour-intensive that it required the attention of a dedicated cook for the better part of a day.
I ate it without tasting it, because my attention was elsewhere, on the room and the people in it and the currents of tension that flowed beneath the surface of the evening like undercurrents beneath calm water.
Lady Pemberton made conversation about the forthcoming Ascot meeting, and Lord Pemberton responded with observations about the form of various horses that suggested he had studied the matter closely.
Mrs. Forsythe contributed a remark about the opera, which she had attended the previous evening and which she described, with the particular vagueness of a person who attends the opera because attendance is expected and not because she has any strong feeling about the music, as "very pleasant, though rather long.
" Cecilia presided over the conversation with the serene attentiveness of a woman who is simultaneously present in the room and operating on a level that the room cannot access, responding to each contribution with the appropriate degree of interest, guiding the conversation away from topics that might be dangerous and toward topics that were safely neutral, and doing all of this while maintaining, in every gesture and expression, the impression of a woman who is simply enjoying a dinner party with her friends.
Sir Geoffrey ate his consommé with the unhurried deliberation of a man who is accustomed to dinners that are meetings, and whose appetite, or lack of it, is subordinated to the requirements of the occasion.
He spoke little during the first course, confining his contributions to monosyllabic responses to Lady Pemberton's conversational overtures and the occasional polite inquiry directed at Mrs. Forsythe, who appeared flattered by the attention and slightly intimidated by the source.
He did not look at Cecilia more than was necessary.
He did not need to. The quality of his silence was itself a communication, a form of pressure that was all the more effective for being invisible.
The second course was filet of sole, accompanied by a sauce of butter and capers and served on a bed of spinach that had been cooked to the precise moment at which its colour changed from the bright green of youth to the darker green of experience.
The wine was a Chablis, served at the correct temperature and in the correct glass, and the pairing was, I was told by Lord Pemberton, who knew about such things, impeccable.
I drank the wine and watched the room and felt, with a growing sense of dread, the approach of the moment that I knew was coming.