Chapter 16 #2
Beatrice did not stand. She looked up at him from the chair with an expression he recognized from the first night they had met — the expression of a woman who was about to refuse a polite version of what she had been offered, in favour of a more truthful one.
"Alexander. Sit down."
"I do not have time to—"
"Sit down. You have time for the next ninety seconds of your life, and you will spend them listening to me, because I will not say this twice."
He sat.
"You will go to the papers tomorrow as the Duke of Wexford," Beatrice said.
"And the papers will print what you give them, because you are a duke and they would be fools not to.
And then, the morning after, every man in London with an interest in this matter will sit down at his breakfast table and ask the same question.
What is his motive? Because that is the first question they will ask.
They will not ask whether you are telling the truth.
They will ask why a duke would destroy other dukes.
And the answers they will reach for are the obvious ones.
Revenge. Ambition. Madness. A spell, perhaps, cast in some hot country eight years ago.
Whatever Cornwall has prepared in those columns, you will hand him the audience for it by going alone. "
Alexander said nothing.
"You cannot make them believe you, Alexander.
Not by yourself. You are one of them. Dukes do not destroy other dukes, and so a duke who is trying to must have something wrong with him.
That is the shape of their thinking, and you cannot argue them out of it.
You can only put someone beside you whose presence asks a different question. "
"And that someone is you."
"That someone is me." She held his eyes.
"I have spent fifteen years being treated as a useful eccentric by the polite half of this city.
I have been laughed at, written about, dismissed, indulged, and once, memorably, refused entry at the Albemarle Club.
I have also fed approximately nine thousand people who would otherwise have starved, and the women who have helped me do it are scattered across every parish in London and married into every rank of household between Whitechapel and St. James's.
When I stand in that courtroom, Alexander, the question those breakfast tables ask is no longer what is his motive.
It becomes what does she know that we do not.
Because the women of London have been listening to me for fifteen years, and they will believe me before they believe their husbands.
And the women of London, in the end, are who decides what the men of London are permitted to ignore. "
Alexander was silent for a long moment.
"You are saying I cannot buy what you are loaning me."
"I am saying you are about to attack half the men who run this country, and you cannot do it from inside their own house.
You need someone outside it. Someone who has been outside it on purpose for half her adult life.
You may have my name, my circle, my women, and my fifteen years. I am offering them. Take them."
"Beatrice. They will come for you. They will not forgive you for it."
"They have not forgiven me for the last fifteen years.
I have got rather used to it." Her mouth curved very slightly.
"And in any case, I am sixty-one years old, Alexander.
I have been waiting most of my life for the chance to put men like the Duke of Cornwall in a witness box.
I am not going to spend it standing in a back room while a younger man does it for me. "
Alexander rose. He crossed to the fire. He stood with his hand on the mantel for a long moment.
"Then you will help me," he said at last. "But quietly.
From the shadows. We can arrange it so that you direct the women, you provide the names, you brief the witnesses — and no one ever knows your hand was in any of it.
You can do all of the work and take none of the danger. That is the version I will accept."
"That is not the version on offer."
"Beatrice—"
"I will not stand in a back room, Alexander.
I will not. I have not earned the back room.
I will stand beside you in the courtroom, in my own clothes, under my own name, and I will watch them sentenced.
You will not take that from me. You will not take fifteen years of being treated as a fool and reward me at the end of it by hiding me.
I will be there. In daylight. You may either accept it or do this without me, and if you do it without me you will lose. "
She rose. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. She stood looking at him across the fire with the particular composure of a woman who had spent her life being underestimated and had finally found a use for it.
Alexander looked at her for a long moment.
"All right," he said. "In daylight. Beside me."
"In daylight. Beside you."
"Then we begin tomorrow."
"We began the moment I walked through your door.
" Beatrice drew her cloak about her again.
"I will send to my women tonight. By morning I shall have the names of every witness we will need, and by the day after, statements from at least three of them.
You will have your supply line within the week — Jack will manage.
I will have my courtroom within the month.
And Catherine—" She paused at the door. "Catherine I cannot reach yet.
They have her locked too close. But once the story breaks, her father will have other concerns than keeping her in her room. We will get to her then."
"Beatrice."
She paused.
"Thank you."
"You can thank me," she said, "from a witness box. Until then, work."
She let herself out.
Alexander stood by the fire for a long time after the door had closed. He did not move. He did not pour a drink. He did not pace.
At last he crossed to his desk and unlocked the drawer where the portfolio had lived for almost five months, and he sat down with it open in front of him, and he began to write.
◆◆◆
The next day, the breakfast room felt smaller than usual that morning. The Earl stood at the window with his coffee, which he had not drunk. Lady Eleanor sat at the table. Catherine took her usual chair and looked at her plate and said nothing.
The Earl turned from the window.
"Your mother and I have something to tell you, Catherine. There is to be an engagement announced. You are to marry Edward Cornwall. The announcement will appear in the Times within the week."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Lady Eleanor set down her cup with a small, precise sound. "Charles."
"It is arranged."
"It is not arranged with me." Eleanor's voice was entirely level.
"Edward Cornwall. You told me yourself not three months ago that the boy was an embarrassment to his father's name.
That he had neither his father's intelligence nor his father's discipline, and that any woman who married him would spend her life managing the consequences of it. "
"Circumstances have changed."
"What circumstances?" Eleanor looked at her husband, and her eyes were not warm. "What has happened that transforms a man you described as an embarrassment into a suitable husband for our daughter?"
The Earl looked at Catherine.
"Ask her," he said.
Eleanor turned. Catherine was looking at the tablecloth. Her hands in her lap were very still.
"Catherine," her mother said gently. "What is your father referring to?"
Catherine said nothing.
The Earl made a short sound. "Of course. Nothing. No explanation, no apology, no acknowledgment that she owes either of us the courtesy of an answer." He set his glass down. "You should be ashamed of yourself, Catherine."
Something moved across Catherine's face. She looked up.
"Shame," she said quietly, "is not what I feel."
"Then what do you feel?" His voice had an edge she had rarely heard in it — not anger exactly, but something harder and more tired than anger. "Pride, perhaps? Satisfaction at having humiliated this family? Amusement at the risks you have taken with everything I have spent my life building?"
Catherine looked at him and said nothing. There was nothing, she understood, that could be said.
The Earl looked at her for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice had changed — the anger folded away into something quieter and more difficult to hear.
"It is not your fault. That is the worst of it.
I did this." He turned back toward the window.
"I wanted to give you a mind. I wanted to give you the world as it actually is, not the comfortable version of it, because I believed you deserved better than comfortable lies.
I wanted to make you formidable." A pause.
"What I made instead is a woman who will sacrifice her own family for strangers.
Who walks out of this house in the middle of the night because her principles matter more to her than the people who love her.
" His voice did not break, but it came close. "I did that. I taught you that."
Catherine rose from the table. She did not run. She walked with great care to the door, and Eleanor saw, as she passed, that her eyes were full.
Then she was gone, and the breakfast room was very quiet.
Eleanor waited until her daughter's footsteps had faded on the stairs. Then she turned to her husband.
"Tell me what happened. All of it."
He told her. The nights Catherine had been gone. The house in Bryanston Square. The Duke of Wexford. The hours she had been alone in that house, and with whom, and until what hour of the morning.
Eleanor listened without interrupting. When he had finished, she was quiet for a moment.
"And how do you know all of this?"
"Cornwall had men watching the Duke. They saw her."
Eleanor folded her hands on the table. "How very convenient," she said.
"I beg your pardon?"