Chapter 17 #2
"We will manage the business concerns," Eleanor continued.
"You have navigated difficult situations before, and you have done it without Cornwall's assistance.
You will do it again." She looked at her husband steadily.
"What you will not do is let this come between you and your daughter.
She is headstrong and she has caused us a great deal of difficulty and she is also the finest thing either of us has ever done. Do not forget that in your anger."
The Earl sat for a long moment with his hands flat on the table, looking at nothing in particular.
"I do not know how to protect her from this," he said at last. The anger had gone out of his voice entirely, leaving something much quieter and considerably harder to hear. "That is the truth of it. I have always known how to protect her. I do not know how to protect her from this."
"No," Eleanor said gently. "But perhaps that is not what she needs from you right now."
She rose and touched his shoulder briefly as she passed, and the Earl sat alone at the table with his untouched lunch and the sound of the street outside, and thought about a girl in a carriage window, and a father who had taught his daughter to see the world as it was, and had never quite anticipated what she would do with the view.
◆◆◆
Beatrice arrived at half past ten with a leather satchel and no preamble. Alexander crossed to the desk without a word, picked up the portfolio, and placed it in her hands.
Then he stood back.
"I have sacrificed everything for this," he said. "My safety. Eight years of my life. And her — she is still in that house and I do not know if I was in time." He looked at Beatrice. "I am not certain it was worth it."
Beatrice looked at him steadily. "I cannot answer that for you, Your Grace. But I can show you something. Would you do me the honor of escorting me for a walk?"
They went on foot without announcement, and within three streets the city found them anyway.
It was not a crowd — nothing so dramatic.
It was a flower seller at a corner who looked up and said, without any performance in it, God bless you, Your Grace.
It was a young workman who removed his cap and spoke haltingly about his brother and a mine and having stopped believing anyone positioned to act ever would.
It was a group of women outside a parish hall who knew Beatrice and came forward with the warmth of people greeting someone they had been waiting to see, and who looked at Alexander with expressions that had no deference and no resentment — only a plain, unadorned relief that he found considerably harder to receive than either.
He walked through it and said nothing for a long time. Then: "I never wanted to start a rebellion."
"You have not started one." Beatrice walked beside him at an unhurried pace.
"Look at them. They are not marching. They are not burning anything.
They are simply breathing differently than they were yesterday.
" She looked at him. "We have given people hope.
That the ruling class is not their natural enemy.
That some of us are willing to look past our own fortunes and accolades and act.
That is what they are thanking us for. Not a rebellion. Hope."
Alexander said nothing, and the streets went about their business around them, ordinary and entirely changed at once.
When they reached Harrington House again they stopped on the pavement. Beatrice turned to him and beneath her composure he saw something genuine, something she had clearly decided to say and would not say twice.
"Fifteen years I have done this work," she said.
"Fifteen years of back rooms and soup kitchens and being laughed at by men who will answer for it now.
You gave me the chance not only to witness this moment but to stand in the light of it.
To be part of it." She paused. "I am grateful for that, Your Grace. More than I will say again."
Alexander took her hand and raised it to his lips. "I am the one who has to be thankful," he said. "I hope you understand that."
Beatrice held his gaze for a moment. Then she tucked the portfolio under her arm, picked up her satchel, and went down the steps and into the street without looking back.
Alexander stood in the doorway and watched her go, and felt, for the first time since he had returned to London, that he was not carrying it alone.
◆◆◆
Cornwall was at his desk when his lawyers arrived. He was calm — the particular calm of a man who has already decided that panic is a luxury he cannot afford and has set it aside permanently.
He listened without interrupting as they laid it out. When they finished he sat for a moment in silence, turning his pen slowly between his fingers.
"What could he possibly have," he said. It was not quite a question.
"And how did he acquire it. Those are the two things we put in front of every journalist, every dinner table, every drawing room in London before they have had time to form their own opinion.
" He set the pen down. "Question the authenticity of every document.
I do not care how genuine they are — I care how they appear to a man reading his morning paper over breakfast before he has spoken to a single lawyer.
Doubt is all we need at this stage. Plant it early and plant it thoroughly. "
"And the diamond operation, Your Grace?" the senior counsel asked.
"Attack him there first and loudest. He inherited that operation.
He has been running it for months, taking the profits, making no public objection.
Let the press ask the question we want asked — if the Duke of Wexford found these practices so reprehensible, why did he continue to benefit from them before suddenly discovering a conscience?
" Cornwall's voice was entirely level. "Righteousness is considerably less convincing when a man has been cashing the receipts. "
The lawyers made their notes.
"The Crown," Cornwall continued, "will remain neutral.
They have no appetite for this fight and I will not attempt to draw them in.
This will be decided by public opinion long before any verdict is reached, and public opinion is the battlefield we prepare for.
" He rose and crossed to the window, looking down into the street.
"Launch the press campaign today. Not tomorrow. Today."
"Your Grace." The senior counsel paused. "There is one further matter. Sir Edmund Thornhill is making arrangements to leave the country. Within the week, by our information."
Cornwall went very still.
"A coward," he said quietly. "Fleeing is an admission of guilt and every newspaper in the country will read it as one.
" His jaw tightened — the only visible sign of what he felt about it.
"I will not run. I have never retreated from anything in my life and I will not begin because a man came back from the dead with a folder of documents and a grudge.
We fight this. Here, in this city, in daylight.
" He looked at both men. "Is that entirely clear? "
"Yes, Your Grace."
He turned back from the window and his expression had shifted — not harder exactly, but with a different quality to it.
"Beatrice Ashworth," he said.
The name sat in the room differently than the others had. Both lawyers waited.
"She has her hand in all of this. Her connection to the people, her reputation in the parishes — that does more damage than any newspaper he could approach.
" He paused. "The documents are the legal problem.
I can fight documents. But she has spent fifteen years making herself untouchable in the public mind, and that I cannot argue against in a courtroom.
" His voice dropped slightly. "Find me something.
Anything. A financial irregularity, an association that does not bear scrutiny, a statement made in the wrong company.
I do not care how old it is. She has built herself into a saint and saints require only one sin to fall.
" He looked at his lawyers steadily. "Find me the sin.
Carefully and quietly, and find it fast."
The senior counsel hesitated. "Your Grace, if it were to emerge that such a search had been conducted—"
"Then conduct it so that it does not emerge." Cornwall sat back down and picked up his pen. "Return at three with the press strategy. And before you go —" he added, without looking up — "find out where Thornhill's ship is sailing to. I want to know before he boards it."
They gathered their papers and left.
Cornwall sat alone in the quiet of his study. Outside, London went about its night entirely indifferent to what had just been decided inside it. He looked at the blank page before him for a moment, and then he began to write.
◆◆◆
Catherine did not know when she finally slept.
She had lain in the dark for a long time, listening to the house settle around her — the creak of the floorboards, the distant sound of a carriage in the street, the small domestic sounds of a household that had continued its ordinary business without any awareness that the world inside her room had been irrevocably altered.
She had stared at the ceiling and thought of nothing deliberately, which was the only way she had ever managed to think of everything at once, and at some point between one breath and the next the ceiling became sky.
African sky. Vast and very blue, the blue of something that had never learned to be modest about itself. The kind of sky that made the English version seem like an apology.
She was standing in tall grass that moved around her in slow, unhurried waves, and the air was warm in a way that English air was never warm — not the damp, reluctant warmth of an August afternoon, but something deeper and more certain, the warmth of a place that had never doubted the sun would return.
She did not know how she had come to be here.
She did not ask. Dreams did not require that courtesy.
He was there.
Not the Duke of Wexford, not the careful composed man who moved through London ballrooms with such deliberate grace — simply Alexander, in shirtsleeves, the formal architecture of him entirely set aside, standing at the edge of the grass where the land opened out into something she could not quite see.
He turned when he heard her, and his face had the expression she had glimpsed only rarely and hoarded carefully — unguarded, unhurried, entirely without performance.
"You came," he said.
"I did not know I was coming," she said. "I simply arrived."
He smiled at that — the real one — and held out his hand, and she took it without hesitation because in this place there was no reason not to, and they walked together through the tall grass toward the open land beyond.
The rain came without warning.
Not English rain — not the sideways, apologetic drizzle of a London November — but real rain, sudden and warm and comprehensive, the kind that arrived like a decision rather than an accident.
It fell straight down through the blue air and Catherine felt it on her face and her hair and her hands and stood very still for a moment, feeling it.
"You should not stand in the rain," she said, though she did not move.
"You told me once," Alexander said beside her, "that you used to stand in it as a child. Before you learned to watch from windows instead."
"I remember."
"Then stand in it now." His hand was still in hers. "There is no one watching."
So she did. She tipped her face up to the warm rain the way she had not done since she was nine years old in her father's garden, and felt it run down her cheeks and her throat and soak through her dress until she was thoroughly and entirely wet and did not care even slightly, and she laughed — the real laugh, the one that arrived before composure could prevent it.
Alexander was watching her with an expression she felt rather than saw, something that had no name in the vocabulary she had been given.
Then they were dancing.
She could not have said when the dancing began or what the music was — only that they were moving together through the rain in the tall grass with the African sky above them and his hand at her waist, and she understood without needing to think about it that this was what he had meant when he spoke of the simple things.
Not the grand gestures. Not the portfolio and the courtroom and the enormous weight of what he had carried home from the sea.
Simply this. Rain and open land and a woman who was not watching from a window.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
A sound reached her from somewhere far away — a persistent, rhythmic sound that did not belong in this place.
She tried to hold onto the warmth, onto his face, onto the rain that was still falling around them — but the sound grew louder and more insistent, and the grass began to thin, and the blue sky overhead faded by degrees, and she understood with the particular helpless clarity of waking that she was losing it.
She opened her eyes.
Her ceiling. The grey light of a London morning behind the curtains. And against the window, steady and cold and entirely English, the sound that had pulled her back — rain. Real rain. The kind that had no warmth in it and no grass beneath it and no one standing beside her in it.
She lay still for a moment, listening to it, and understood exactly where she was.
Then she turned her face into the pillow, and wept — not with despair, not with defeat, but with the specific grief of someone who has held something complete and warm and real in their hands and woken to find the room unchanged and their hands empty.
After a while she stopped.
She rose, and washed her face, and dressed, and went to the window, and watched the street below go about its ordinary London morning, and waited.