Chapter 18
In the days that followed, London moved with the particular energy of a city that has been given something large to argue about and intends to make full use of it.
The case was in every paper, on every tongue, at every dinner table from Whitechapel to Mayfair.
Cornwall's press campaign ran alongside Alexander's legal case like two rivers heading for the same falls, and the city watched both with the avid attention of people who understood, however dimly, that whatever came out of it would change something permanent.
The Duke of Cornwall and seven other men of considerable name had been formally indicted.
The diamond mines, the shipping ledgers, the financial trails — all of it was being argued in print before a single witness had been called.
Lady Beatrice Ashworth's name appeared almost as often as Alexander's, and not always kindly; certain papers had begun to suggest that her involvement was unwomanly, political, of doubtful judgment, and twice now an old story had surfaced about a charitable fund she had once briefly mismanaged, presented in print as something more sinister than the small bookkeeping error it had been.
Beatrice had read those columns calmly and continued her work.
Anthony reported from his dinners that the wind had begun, very slowly, to turn in their favor.
Several lords who had publicly distanced themselves were quietly making it known they had always had concerns. The trial was eight days away.
Catherine was permitted, eventually, to leave the house.
Not alone — there was always an escort, always a footman or her mother's lady's maid at her shoulder, always the careful management of a family acutely aware that its daughter's name was one careless sighting away from the front page.
She moved through the city in a kind of supervised freedom that was its own particular confinement.
She could not go to Beatrice. She could not go to Alexander.
She could not send a letter that did not pass through her father's study first. She walked in the park and attended church and sat at dinner and said very little, and waited.
Three times now Alexander had walked past a fashionable shop or a respectable square on the chance that he might see her, and three times he had not.
◆◆◆
The Harrington Manor was quiet the evening before the trial. The study held only Alexander and the fire and the particular silence of a night with nothing left to prepare for.
He was standing at the window when his mother came in.
She did not announce herself. She never had, in rooms she considered hers by right of thirty years. She simply entered, looked at her son's back, and settled into the chair by the fire with the unhurried ease of a woman who has decided she is staying and sees no need to negotiate it.
"Come and sit down," she said.
Alexander turned from the window. He sat.
Margaret looked at him with the careful attention she had been applying to his face since he was three days old. "Are you nervous?" she asked.
"No."
"No," she agreed. She studied him a moment longer. "But you are sad, my boy. What is it?"
"I do not want to trouble you with it, Mother. You are already bearing enough with all of this — the publicity, the talk, everything the case has brought down on this house."
"The publicity is annoying," Margaret said, with the precise dismissiveness of a woman for whom annoyance and catastrophe occupied entirely different categories. "I have survived worse than being talked about. Now." She folded her hands. "If you will not tell me, who will you tell?"
Alexander was quiet for a moment. Outside, a carriage passed in the street below. The fire shifted in the grate.
"I executed the plan," he said at last. "Everything I promised myself years ago — everything I carried home in that portfolio and spent months building toward.
It is done. Tomorrow it concludes." He paused.
"And I feel nothing that I expected to feel.
Only empty." He looked at his hands. "She knew the stakes.
She understood what association with me could cost her, and she chose it anyway.
Every moment I had with her I cherish. But I would give anything — anything, Mother — to have her back. And I do not see how."
Margaret said nothing for a moment.
"Her father will never agree to a marriage now," Alexander continued.
"He knows everything. He is watching her closely.
I walked into that family's life and I upended it entirely, and whatever feelings the Earl may have had toward me before, I have given him every reason to shut that door permanently.
" He stopped. "I have made her life worse. That is the truth of it."
A single tear escaped before he could prevent it. He did not acknowledge it. Margaret did not draw attention to it.
"You told me," she said quietly, "that she chose this. That she knew the risks and chose them with her eyes open."
"She did."
"Then you did not do this to her. You did it with her.
" Margaret let that settle a moment. "And as for her father —" She paused, her voice shifting into something more precise.
"Alexander. You have lived in this country for twenty-five years.
You grew up in this house, in this world, among men like the Earl of Derby.
You know how they think and how they move and what they respond to.
" She looked at her son steadily. "Use it.
Use what your father taught you, what this world taught you, before the sea taught you everything else. "
She leaned forward slightly.
"You watched Cornwall create a problem and then arrive with the solution to it in the same breath.
That is the game, my boy. That is how powerful men in this city move other powerful men.
You arrive with a difficulty and you arrive with the answer to it, and the man who needs the answer has no choice but to deal with you.
That is what Cornwall did to Charles Fairfax in his study six weeks ago.
That is what every man in your father's set has done at some point in his career, to someone.
" Her voice was very steady. "You can do that, Alexander. You know how. You were taught."
"You are asking me to become Cornwall."
"I am not. Listen to me carefully, because this is the part that matters.
" Margaret's eyes did not leave his. "The difference between you and Cornwall is not in the method.
The method is the same. The difference is in what you ask for in return.
Cornwall arrives with the solution and binds the other man to him by it.
The price is paid in the future, in obligation, in compliance, in silence.
That is what Cornwall does. You will do the opposite.
You will arrive with the solution, and you will offer it, and you will ask for nothing in exchange.
You will give it regardless of whether he gives you what you want.
That is the difference. The method is identical.
The price is different. Cornwall trades.
You give." She paused. "That is the only thing you ever needed to be.
The man who could use the methods of his class without becoming what his class has become.
All you have to do is find a solution and show the Earl that difference and let him draw his own conclusions. "
Alexander looked at his mother for a long moment.
"Thank you," he said.
He rose, pressed her hand briefly, and went out through the French doors into the garden.
The night was cold and very clear. He stood on the dark lawn with his hands in his pockets and his face turned up toward the sky, where the stars were out in their thousands the way they had been over the Atlantic on the first night he had sailed away from England and understood that the world was larger and more complicated than anything he had been taught to expect.
He stood there for a long time, thinking.
By the time he went back inside, he had the beginning of an answer.
◆◆◆
The Earl did not rise when Alexander was shown in.
That was deliberate, and both men knew it. He remained behind his desk with the stillness of a man who has decided that whatever civility the occasion required, warmth was not among his obligations. He gestured to the chair opposite without speaking.
Alexander sat.
"Your Grace," the Earl said, with the precise courtesy of a man deploying the title as a distance rather than an honorific. "I confess I debated whether to receive you at all."
"I am grateful that you did," Alexander said. "I will not take more of your time than the matter requires."
"Then I suggest you begin."
Alexander looked at the Earl across the desk — at the careful composure of a man who was angry and tired and too disciplined to show either fully — and said what he had come to say without preamble.
"I brought trouble into your family. I am aware of that and I do not intend to argue against it.
The men I am pursuing deserved to be pursued, and I will see it through to its conclusion, but you were never my object.
You and your family were the collateral damage of a war you did not choose to be part of, and I owe you the honesty of acknowledging it plainly. "
The Earl's expression did not change. "With respect, Your Grace, if you have come to tell me things I have already arrived at myself, I can assure you that you are spending both our afternoons very poorly."
"I have not," Alexander said.
He reached into his coat and withdrew a sealed envelope, which he placed on the desk between them.