Chapter 12 #3
For the first time since he had entered the house, something in Alexander eased — because she had just given him, unprompted, the precise answer he himself had given Catherine in a museum reading room not long ago.
Not because they are good. Because they are owed it.
She had refused the sentimental version in favor of the true one, and a person did not do that to flatter a Duke.
A person did that because they believed it.
She had passed a test she did not know she was sitting.
"Then I will tell you why Catherine brought me here," Alexander said quietly, "and you will understand why I needed to be certain of you first."
Beatrice's gaze sharpened. "Go on."
"You fight the symptoms, Lady Beatrice," Alexander said. "The hunger, the workhouses, the families broken by poverty. You have spent fifteen years treating the wounds." He leaned forward. "I have spent years among the men who hold the knife."
Beatrice's gaze sharpened, but she did not soften into agreement. If anything, she grew more still.
"You are too vague, Your Grace." Her voice was quiet and exact.
"I can feel the shape of something ominous in what you are circling.
But I have not survived fifteen years of this work by acting on feelings and implications.
I will not understand the full picture unless you tell me — plainly — precisely what it is you saw. "
Alexander studied her a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he almost smiled — the grim, humorless smile of a man about to hand over something heavy.
"Very well. Tell me, Lady Beatrice — what do you know of the fall of the East India Company?"
The question visibly surprised her. "The same as anyone.
The Crown dismantled it some years ago, after the rebellion and the scandals that followed.
There were allegations — trafficking, forced labor, practices the Crown had supposedly outlawed long before.
The Company was broken up. The trade it was accused of was driven into the ground for good.
" She frowned. "It is recent history. Why do you ask me about a dead company? "
"Because it is not dead." Alexander's voice dropped, level and cold.
"The Company was dismantled. The men were not.
The names on the documents changed. The crests on the carriages changed.
And the men who had grown rich from that trade looked at the wreckage, and learned a single lesson from it.
" He paused. "Not to stop. To become more careful.
More quiet. More difficult to get caught. "
The room had gone utterly silent.
"What if I told you," Alexander continued, "that the very thing the Crown congratulated itself for ending — the thing it broke an empire's largest company to be rid of — never stopped at all?
That it simply went underground, scattered itself among respectable private ventures, and continued?
That there are men I dine beside, men who sit in the Lords, whose fortunes are built this very year on human beings taken by force and worked to death — and the stones they are made to dig come to London polished and clean and sit at the throats of those men's wives? "
Beatrice did not answer. She had gone the color of ash.
Catherine had gone very still. "You cannot be serious."
Alexander did not look away.
"The slave trade," she said slowly, "was abolished—"
"Officially." Alexander's voice was flat "Slavery, Catherine.
Not the memory of it. Not the shame of a past we have repented.
Now. This year. Funded by London money, protected by London names, and feeding the diamond trade that half this city wears to the opera.
" His jaw tightened. "The abolition your grandfathers celebrated was real.
And these men found the gaps in it, and crawled through, and have been profiting ever since — precisely because no one of conscience can bring themselves to believe it still exists. "
For a long moment Beatrice said nothing at all. When she finally spoke, her composure was intact, but it was the composure of a woman holding herself together by deliberate force.
"Fifteen years," she said quietly. "Fifteen years I have bandaged the wounded at the bottom of the cliff.
And you walk into my sitting room and tell me you have found the men pushing them off the top — and that the cliff is one I was taught, as a girl, had been torn down for good.
" She drew a slow breath. "You have proof of this. "
"Years of it. Names, ledgers, shipping records, correspondence. Enough to put a rope around the right necks — if I am patient, and careful, and do not move before it is complete."
Beatrice rose. Her composure had returned in full, but something beneath it had been permanently rearranged — the strategist recalculating a map that had just doubled in size.
"Then hear me, Your Grace, and I will say no more than this tonight, for trust of the kind you are describing is not given across a single pot of tea.
" She held his eyes. "You have allies you did not know you possessed.
When the time comes that you need what a network of invisible women can do — women no one of consequence ever thinks to watch — you will know where to find us.
I will want to know a great deal more before I commit my people to anything.
But the door is open." A pause. "Consider that more than I have offered anyone in years. "
She moved to the door, then paused, glancing between the two of them with a dry, knowing flicker that took in rather more than had been said aloud.
"I expect you two have a great deal to discuss. I shall be down the hall."
And she left them, closing the door softly behind her.
For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Alexander looked at Catherine — really looked — and saw that the color had not come back into her face either.
She was staring at the fire, her hands very still in her lap, and when she spoke her voice was not quite steady.
"I have spent two years believing I understood the worst of it.
The workhouses. The mills. The children.
I thought I had looked the cruelty of our world full in the face and not flinched.
" She swallowed. "And all this time there was a deeper floor beneath the one I was standing on. And I never even knew to look for it."
"Catherine—"
"How do you carry it?" She turned to him, and her eyes were bright.
"You have known this for years. You have sat at their tables.
You have smiled at them and shaken their hands knowing what they are, knowing what is sitting at their wives' throats.
How do you carry that and not—" Her voice broke.
"How are you not screaming all the time? "
Alexander did not answer with words. He crossed the small distance between them and drew her in, one hand at the back of her head, holding her against him as though he could shield her from a thing she had already heard.
She came willingly, her fingers closing in the fabric of his coat, and for a long moment he simply held her while the fire burned and the weight of it settled over them both.
"You carry it," he said at last, quietly, into her hair, "by not carrying it alone. That is the only way anyone does. It is the only reason I am still standing."
She drew back just far enough to look at him.
Then she kissed him — not the hungry kiss of before, but something slower, steadier, a thing sought for comfort rather than heat.
He answered it in kind, gentle, his hands framing her face as though she were something that could be broken and he had decided she would not be.
When they parted, she rested her forehead against his and breathed.
"Here," she whispered. "In this place, we can be free."
"Free," Alexander repeated, as if testing the weight of a word he had almost forgotten.