His head tipped. “Yes. You must want it very much, to risk the gallows.”
“And you don’t want enough,” she said. “Your wife was a monster. But so were the men who conspired with her. And if you had shown them half the spine you’ve shown me, perhaps Bertram would not have been my problem to solve. Murder? How unoriginal. You might have been cleverer. You might have made them pay. But instead, you decided to cower here in the dark!”
She had the satisfaction of seeing him pale before she stepped out the door. And then a thought struck her.
She reached into her apron and tossed the letters at his head. “My parting gift!” And then she turned the lock, closing him in, and picked up the portfolio.
A thud came behind her. He would try to break down the door now, of course. How predictable. She squared her shoulders and walked quickly for the main stairs.
* * *
Alastair vaulted down the staircase, straight past the astonished porter for the servants’ passage to the ground floor. He had not entered it in years; this section of the house was theirs, not his. She would not be here anyway. She was long gone; it had taken him too much time to batter down the door, six inches of solid oak.
He knew he would not find her, but his feet did not consult his brain. His boots hammered heavily on the wooden steps. When he reached the ground floor, domestics scattered, gawking. Jones appeared. “Your Grace! Is something amiss? May I—”
Alastair threw open the door to the housekeeper’s room.
The sitting room was small, plainly furnished. It smelled like her, like roses, like goddamned deceit. He snorted to clear his nose of it. I am sorry, she’d said—the witch! Not only upstairs, either: she had said it in the garden, too. She had been plotting this for some time.
His gullibility knew no bounds.
Through a narrow doorway was the spartan cell where his newest jezebel had slept. Had he found her here, he might have strangled her with his bare hands.
She was not so stupid, though. She had fled. What had she left behind?
He ripped the drawers out of the chest. Empty. The desk: empty, too. The walls were bare save three illustrations clipped out of magazines. A man and woman, hand in hand, walked a village lane. In a parlor on Christmas morning, a mother and father presented a small, bowtied puppy to a young child. A country cottage at dusk on a snowy evening, a lamp glowing in the window.
He felt his mouth twist. The last print, he knew. It had been famous for decades. He himself had kept a copy of it as a boy, drawn to it for no reason he could name.
If the cartoonists at Punch liked to draw oversexed aristocrats, the illustrators at ladies’ magazines were no less predictable. Their object of fixation was all the more grotesque, for it was an out-and-out lie: connubial bliss; domestic idylls; virtue. The lure of a home that offered protection against the cold and dark.
He could have pitied her for believing in these things. Instead, he would despise her for it. She was a fraud. She was no more entitled to such things than he. How dared she have imagined otherwise?
He ripped the pictures off the wall. One by one he shredded them, tatters falling onto the cot. Déjà vu made the world lurch. He had ripped up the first letters from Margaret, too.
If you had shown them half the spine you’ve shown me, perhaps Bertram would not have been my problem to solve. But instead, you decided to cower here in the dark.
He turned on his heel and strode out into the servants’ hall. His jezebel was right in one regard. He was done cowering. He knew now what tied him to this house, to this city, to life itself: revenge. He was done living for ideals. He was living for himself now.
Bertram would pay. So, too, the others: Nelson, Fellowes, Barclay. And Olivia Johnson? Safety was what she desired. It would be his great pleasure to ensure she never felt it again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Olivia kept her head down as she passed through the black iron gates into St. James Park. Strollers wandered down the path, sipping mugs of fresh milk and fussing over children, full of Christmas cheer. Vendors hawked baked apples, hot chocolate, and fried oysters. The grass was littered with brown paper cones stained with grease.
As she walked, she pretended great concern with avoiding the rubbish. It excused her from having to look into people’s faces, and to let them see hers. She wore a staid walking dress of unremarkable brown wool, purchased secondhand from a dolly shop along with the only hat she had seen there that looked unlikely to carry fleas. A Christmas present to herself, she thought blackly. But the hat covered only half of her head; she felt the warmth of the sun on her brow, which meant that her hair was also catching the light, making a gleaming beacon for anyone who looked for her.
Nobody was looking for her. Not yet. She had been very cautious in her approach, having gone all the way to Hampstead to rent a room, these past four nights. She had even taken the train back to Broad Street to post the letter to Bertram.
She had not signed her name. There was no use in baiting a bear before the trap was fully laid. But in the letter, she had laid out the evidence against him: enough to hang him in public opinion, and to prosecute him, too. The building society of which he was the director, and that he had hawked to the lower classes as a fine opportunity for investment, was a sham. Of the developments his investors had funded, he had built only a quarter, and the dividends had gone directly into his own pockets. The documents evidenced his crime quite clearly.
The details of her letter ensured that he would not trust this matter to Thomas Moore, or any hired hand. He would come himself, and when he did, she and her pistol would make clear to him that he must cut her a wide berth for the rest of his natural life if he did not wish to be ruined.
The bird-keeper’s cottage came into view. She scowled at the knots in her stomach. There was no cause to be nervous. She was armed in more ways than one. She was not walking to her doom now. She was walking toward her freedom. God knew she had paid dearly for it.
No. She would not allow herself to think of Alastair.
* * *
There were rooms in the club in which conversation was discouraged. The dining room was not one of them—though a stranger, stumbling inside, might have been forgiven for thinking otherwise. Tracking the avid, rapt attention of the other diners, this stranger might have imagined that some miracle was unfolding at the table by the window, when in fact all that transpired was the meeting of two brothers, nothing more.
“I thought you’d booked a private room,” said Michael.
The onlooker also might have wondered that these two were brothers—for the one was pale and blond, lean after a long period of deprivation, and eating heartily, for he was trying to flesh out. The other was dark haired, as robust and tanned as a farmer—but he picked at his steak like an invalid.
“You misunderstood,” said Alastair. He had not booked the private room for this luncheon. Right now, he wished his presence advertised.
“I count a dozen stares,” Michael said moodily. “You could have charged admission.”
He’d forgotten how easily Michael sulked. “Buck up. They aren’t staring at you.” But he could feel the stares like ants crawling over his nape. His back felt painfully exposed, braced for the impact of an arrow.
Let it fly. He would welcome it. These past four days, he had been gripped by a rage so pure and intense that it made him giddy, like fine whisky. His calisthenics no longer sufficed to trammel it. Bloodshed would be a better cure.
Michael produced an unhappy sigh. In reply, Alastair gave him a smile, easy, confident, meant to reassure: the old routine, picked up again as easily as a shirt. “Let them look,” he said. “I expect they’ve missed me.”
Michael laid down his fork. “You’ve been following the news, I hope? Don’t expect to find your place reserved for you. You’ll need to knock down a few pins, first. Bertram, for instance—”
“I’m aware.” Alastair was aware of very little else, in fact. In the sleeplessness of these past four
nights, he’d been laying plans. Johnson and Bertram, Nelson and Barclay, Fellowes—the chant had run through his head so often that it was beginning to take on a melody. “Do you have the records I asked for?”
Michael retrieved them from his jacket, a padded envelope whose thickness would be evident from across the room. That these were the employee rolls from the hospital would not be evident. “As you’ll see, the damage from the hospital’s closure was extensive.” The closure you effected for no reason, he did not add. “We lost several doctors. I had to raise their salaries considerably to lure them back.”
Alastair nodded. The hospital was a charitable endeavor, which he funded—and which he had briefly closed, during his blackest days, to punish his brother, a doctor by trade, who had founded it. “That’s fine.”
“You can’t blame them for demanding it.” Michael shrugged. “They have no way of knowing if you’ll decide to shut the place down again.”
“But I won’t.”
“Of course not.” Michael stared at his plate, grim faced. “I was . . . surprised to receive your note, I must say.”
They were coming to it now. It had taken only three courses and some grumbling. “My apology was long overdue.”
Michael reached for his wineglass, gave it a quarter turn on the tablecloth. “It’s in the past now, I suppose.” He could not have sounded more hollow.
It would be easier, of course, not to force the issue. But Alastair knew that if he wanted to repair this breach, he would have to expose his throat. “Your wife would disagree with you. And if you’re honest, you’ll admit that you haven’t forgiven me.”
Michael’s mouth flattened. He said nothing.
A flash of insight struck. Alastair smiled, genuinely amused. “You fear you’ll send me into another decline? Is that why you’re tiptoeing around it?”
“Well. You can’t blame me for worrying.”
Alastair caught himself lifting his own wineglass, and made his hand return to the table. He did not deserve the comfort of tipsiness for this conversation. “I disappointed you,” he said bluntly. “I behaved with reckless, irrational bile. I regret it extremely. You cannot know how much.”
Michael’s face darkened. “She could not understand your opposition to her.”
Very well, let them pretend this quarrel centered solely on Elizabeth Chudderley’s—Elizabeth de Grey’s—hurt feelings, and had nothing to do with Michael himself. “Tell me how I may make amends to her,” Alastair said. “Shall I write to her directly? I’d imagined she would not want to hear from me.”
“She would read a letter, I think.”
“Then I’ll write to her at once.”
Michael leaned forward, giving him a searching frown. “If you could only explain to me why you did it. That is—I know how deeply you were injured, how bitterly you took Margaret’s deceit. You had cause to be furious, but never at me, Al.” Here he looked down to his plate again, but not before Alastair caught a glimpse of his bewilderment, his pain. “You had no right to force my hand. Or to endanger the hospital—and every single patient there. Three hundred of them, transferred without notice!”
Here lay the heart of the breach. “No. I had no right.” Surely it had been madness that had led him to shut down the hospital. And while he would have chosen a different bride for his brother, one less beautiful, less sociable, less worldly than Elizabeth Chudderley . . . someone less confident of her charms, who did not remind him so much of his late wife . . .
That battle was lost. And he could not account for his actions, for he no longer understood them, though he remembered them with perfect clarity. How much he had cared about the wrong things—and then, how little he had cared at all.
But now there was a new battle. “Tell me,” he said, “what I must do to have your trust and love again.”
Michael blinked. “My trust, or my love? Because you know you have the latter. The former will be more costly to you.”
This had always been Michael’s special skill: to see love and trust as separate things. In Alastair’s view, neither was worth having separately. “Both,” he said.
Michael nodded, then took to sawing at his steak.
In the silence, Alastair grew aware again of the stares from the room. He could feel, like an open wound, the doors behind him, through which anyone might enter, any of the four men on his list, any of these men’s confidants. If he turned now, he might encounter a knowing sneer, a snicker, a furtive grin. Someone who knew.
And he would slice those smiles off their faces. If he could not stop the news from spreading, then he would make it the worst mistake a man could commit, to know it, and to discuss it freely.
He schooled his breath. He allowed himself a single sip of his wine. He glanced across the room, making note of who nodded at him, and who quickly looked away.
This was his club. This was his seat, by the window. This was his place. Anyone who wished to challenge him would pay for it. He was taking back what belonged to him—starting with his brother’s good opinion.
He turned back to Michael. “Tell me,” he said, taking care to speak gently, the better to coax the dove into hand. “How may I make amends?”
Michael cleared his throat. “For my sake, Elizabeth is willing to move forward, let bygones be bygones. And as for me . . . time, I believe. That is what it will require. And your company,” he added gruffly. “God help me. But for some lunatic reason, I seem to have missed you.”
“Then of course you will have my company, whenever you like.”
Michael flashed him a startled smile. “My God. Not even an attempt to pawn me off on your secretary? Schedule me in? It’s clear something has changed. I think this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever seen you humble!”
Alastair managed a fine laugh, perfectly balanced between amusement and abashment. For if humility was what his brother needed to see, then very well, humility it was.
But it was not, of course, humility that kept his spine straight (if you had shown them half the spine you’ve shown me, Olivia Johnson had said with contempt) as they made conversation over port and dessert, with the entirety of the room still ogling him. And afterward, in the hallway, as they paused to make plans, he recognized that while he was truly contrite, and entirely genuine in his intention to write a pretty note of apology to Michael’s wife, these feelings were more conceptual truths than embodied sensations.
He stood there, watching Michael walk out the door, and had the uncanny sense he had performed very well in a play: he had recited the proper lines with the appropriate amount of feigned conviction, and the audience had responded positively.
The falsity troubled him. His relationship with his brother had never felt rote. He loved Michael. Even now, he knew he loved his brother. But he wanted to feel it again. He wanted to feel something healthy, wholesome, and good. Something, moreover, that was true.
In time. All in good time.
He leaned against the wall, taking advantage of this odd remove to watch passersby disguise their surprise at seeing him. Old acquaintances, who probably counted themselves as friends, stopped in astonishment and hastened to speak with him, smiling and pumping his hand, expressing their gladness at the meeting.
And here, too, he excelled, managing to intimate, with his own smiles and a certain warm tone, that they had indeed been much missed, their proposals for dinner gladly received, the old confederacy officially resumed—as though nothing had changed during the endless months in which the world had moved on and he had not.
But all the time, as he made idle talk and remembered the rusted reflexes of charm, he wondered, Do you know what a fool I have been made? Will you be wise enough to hide it, if you do? For I will not spare you, either.
And after almost an hour, his wait ended. Bertram stepped through the double doors into the lobby.
* * *
Revenge was not a descriptive term. It was a category, within which fell a thousand possibilities, ranging f
rom a mild snub in the street (face turned, a social death) to a blade against the neck, a jugular severed, a hot, wet murder. Savages painted their faces in the blood of their enemies. It had its appeal. But with a slit throat, the enemy could not speak—and Alastair required answers.
Bertram, of course, mistook him for a gentleman. Bertram did not imagine he was carrying a knife; otherwise, he would not have agreed to accompany Alastair down this hallway, which grew progressively dimmer the farther they withdrew from the dining hall. Bertram had a great deal of faith in the civility of his enemy. The fool.
But once Alastair had stepped into the room after him, once the lock was turned and they faced each other, he saw Bertram catch a glimpse of another possibility.
The man went pale. He retreated a pace and reached into his jacket.
“It’s your choice,” Alastair said.
Bertram hesitated. Then he felt down the buttons of his waistcoat, as though that had always been his intention. “Duke,” he said flatly. No pretense of old friendship here, though he had once dined nightly at Alastair’s house, and familiarly called him Marwick, and put his head close to Margaret’s as they laughed at shared jokes.
There were so many reasons for savagery. Alastair saw now how stray memories might chip away at a man, a crack here, a crack there, until the wall broke, and the rage, undammed, rushed out and destroyed all in its path.
But to have his revenge, while also keeping his place at this club, at the table by the window—to have his revenge and his brother as well, and Elizabeth’s forgiveness (for that was necessary, if he meant to keep his brother)—well, for that alone, Alastair would not reach into his own jacket pocket, where he could feel the weight of a stiletto, which he knew would do its job neatly, with a minimum of gore.
“Sit,” he said.
Bertram had once taken orders with unusual eagerness. For a man fifteen years’ Alastair’s elder, his ingratiating manner had made him slightly pitiable, if also—what irony—reliable. Trustworthy.
But Bertram had since gotten his hands on power. “No,” he said. “I will not sit. But I am glad you wished to talk. There’s something you’ll want to hear.”