Chapter 38 #2
"Three marriages," he said. "Three deaths.
Three inheritances. The testimony of a former servant of the Cheshire estate.
The memorandum of the late Sir William Hartwell.
The discrepancies in the procurement records of your household.
The opinions of two independent physicians who have reviewed the clinical notes of your late husband, the Earl of Ashworth, and who have concluded that the progression of his symptoms is more consistent with chronic arsenic poisoning than with the gastric complaint recorded on his death certificate.
" He paused again, and this time the pause was longer, and the length of it communicated that the catalogue was not yet complete.
"And the testimony of a French apothecary in Seven Dials, one Monsieur Cruttwell, who has provided a sworn statement confirming the sale of cardiac stimulants to a woman matching your description, over a period of several months in the year 1881 to 1882, under a name that, upon investigation, proved to be fictitious. "
He let the last item hang in the air. The French apothecary.
I had known, from the moment I had first employed Cruttwell's services, that he was a potential liability.
He was a man who kept meticulous records, not because he was scrupulous but because he was afraid, and afraid men who keep records are men who will, when sufficiently pressured, produce those records for the inspection of the authorities.
I had paid him well. I had used a false name.
I had varied my appearance between visits, wearing different hats and different shawls and, on one occasion, a pair of spectacles that were not my own.
But the Home Office had found him, and he had talked, and the talking had produced a sworn statement that was, in its specifics, as damaging as anything in Sir Geoffrey's folder.
I sat in the chair and felt nothing. This was not stoicism.
Stoicism requires the suppression of feeling.
I was not suppressing anything. I was observing, with the same clinical detachment I might bring to the assessment of a chess position, the progress of a game that had, by any reasonable analysis, been lost. The question was not whether I could win.
The question was what the terms of the surrender would be.
"I am not going to ask you whether you committed these acts," Sir Geoffrey said, and the words were delivered with a precision that was almost surgical, because the refusal to ask the question was itself a communication: the Home Office did not need a confession.
They had enough evidence to proceed without one.
"I am going to tell you what the Home Office is prepared to offer, and I am going to ask you to accept it. "
He moved from the window to the table where the small, neat man with the spectacles was sitting, and he picked up a document that had been placed at the centre of the arranged papers, a document that was thicker than I had expected, perhaps fifteen or twenty pages, bound with a ribbon of dark blue silk, and he brought the document to me and placed it in my hands.
His fingers, as he released it, brushed mine, and the contact was brief and impersonal and deliberate, because the brush of fingers was a form of touch that communicated intimacy without warmth, a reminder that this negotiation was being conducted at a proximity that was closer than I might have liked and that the distance between the people in this room and the people who would decide my fate was a distance measured not in miles but in institutional layers, each one more opaque than the last.
I opened the document. The first page was a summary, and the summary was written in the precise, bloodless prose of government bureaucracy, and it laid out, in numbered paragraphs, the terms of what was being offered.
I read it carefully, because careful reading is a form of control, and control, in a room like this one, was the only thing that stood between me and the abyss.
The terms were these: I would surrender the courtesy title of Countess Dowager of Ashworth.
I would not use the title in any public or private communication, in any social or professional context, for the remainder of my life.
The surrender of the title was not optional.
It was the first condition, and it was stated without qualification, and the absence of qualification communicated that the Home Office regarded the title as a form of stolen property, a thing I had acquired through the means that had brought me to this room, and the return of it was the minimum requirement for any further negotiation.
The second condition concerned the estates.
The Pendleton Hall property in Hampshire and its attendant lands, the Ravenscroft mills in Manchester and their associated properties, and the Ashworth Park estate in Suffolk and the Ashworth Grange in Kent — all would be signed over to a trust, the terms of which would be administered by a solicitor appointed by the Home Office and not by me.
The income from these properties would be directed exclusively to the care and maintenance of Edmund Blackwood, my brother, who would be provided with a suitable residence, a full complement of staff, and a quarterly allowance sufficient for his comfort.
The trust would be irrevocable. I would have no further claim to the income from these properties, and no authority over their management.
The trust would be overseen by a board of three trustees, one appointed by the Home Office, one by the Court of Chancery, and one by the solicitor who had been managing Edmund's affairs, a man named Pemberton, whom I did not know and whom, I suspected, had been selected for his willingness to administer the trust in accordance with the Home Office's instructions rather than mine.
The third condition concerned my personal wealth.
The cash, securities, and investments that I had accumulated through my three marriages — the sum total of which was, at current market values, approximately one hundred and sixty thousand pounds — would be subject to a financial settlement.
The settlement was detailed in a schedule attached to the main document, and the schedule allocated the funds as follows: a portion, to be determined by the trustees, would be added to the Edmund trust for his long-term care; a further portion would be held in escrow by the Home Office, as a form of surety against my future conduct; and the remainder — the personal remainder — would be made available to me, in a lump sum, upon my departure from England.
The remainder was, by any standard, generous.
It was enough to live on, comfortably and indefinitely, in any number of countries where English law did not reach and English questions were not asked.
The fourth condition was the one I had expected and the one that mattered most. I would leave England.
I would depart within thirty days of the signing of the agreement.
I would not return. I would not correspond with any person residing in England, except through channels approved by the Home Office, and the approved channels would be limited to communications concerning Edmund's welfare, which would be monitored and could be terminated at the government's discretion.
I would not, under any circumstances, set foot on English soil again.
If I did, the agreement would be voided, and the evidence assembled by the Home Office would be transmitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions, and a warrant for my arrest would be issued within twenty-four hours.
The fifth condition concerned the official record.
The deaths of Viscount Pendleton, Mr. Henry Ravenscroft, and the Earl of Ashworth would remain on the public record as they had been recorded: heart failure, riding accident, and gastric complaint, respectively.
The death of Sir William Hartwell would remain classified as suicide.
No public statement would be made. No investigation would be announced.
The case files would be sealed and placed in the custody of the Home Office, to be retained for a period of not less than fifty years.
The Inspector's investigation would be closed, formally and permanently, and he would be informed that the evidence, while suggestive, did not meet the standard for prosecution.
I read the fifth condition twice, and the second reading confirmed what the first reading had suggested: the government was not protecting me.
The government was protecting itself. The suppression of the evidence was not an act of mercy toward a woman who had killed three men and arranged a fourth death to cover her tracks.
It was an act of institutional self-preservation, a decision to bury the truth because the truth, if exposed, would reveal not only what I had done but what the system had allowed me to do, and the revelation of what the system had allowed would shake public confidence in the institutions that govern England to a degree that the government, for reasons that were entirely its own, was not prepared to tolerate.