“Come back to me.” He let it sit between them. “I have spent six days in this bed thinking about what a man owes a woman who said that to him while he was dying. And I concluded that he owes her the truth about what she is to him. Which is why I sent for Brigg.”
“Henry.” She picked up one of the torn quarters. Her thumb moved over the ink of her own signature, the careful hand she had used that night at Thornwick, sitting across from a man she did not know. “I signed this believing I was purchasing my family’s survival and my sisters’ future with my body. I had calculated the cost, and I was willing to pay it, and I did not expect to be happy. I expected to be useful. I expected to endure.”
She set the piece down.
“I did not expect you to pour my tea with your own hands to make certain no one had poisoned it. I did not expect you to smash a chemist’s shop because he had been rude to me. I did not expect to hear you defend my mother’s name to men who could ruin you.” Her voice caught but held. “I did not expect to fall in love with a man who was so determined not to be loved that he made it nearly impossible.”
He turned his hand over, palm up.
“I should have told you the morning after our wedding what I will tell you now,” he said. “When I heard that you refused Trowbridge’s money and rejected his plea for retraction, I pretended I did not already know I had married the most remarkable woman in England.”
She put her hand in his and held it. Then she gathered the torn pieces of the contract, crossed to the hearth, and fed them to thefire one quarter at a time. She watched each piece catch and curl and blacken, and when the last of it was ash, she turned back to him.
“Now,” she said. “We begin.”
Chapter thirty-seven
Bow Street
Henry
The carriage ride to Bow Street nearly undid him. Every rut in the road sent a jolt through his ribs. Kit sat opposite, watching with a blankness that Henry now knew was not blank at all. His wife sat beside him. He had suggested, foolishly, that she may not wish to put herself through such an unpleasant task. The room would be undoubtedly filthy, filled with filthy people, but she had not answered and was in the carriage before he boarded. He had spent enough of their marriage shutting doors between them. He did not shut this one.
Kit helped him down at Bow Street, then Violet. Hatchett met them at the entrance and led them through a passage that smelled of damp stone and tallow.
“She has not spoken since last evening,” Hatchett said. “She asked for water. She asked for a blanket. She has not asked for a solicitor.”
“Has she confessed?”
“Not a word, Your Grace. Not a syllable. She sits and she waits.”
They came to a door. Hatchett opened it and stood aside.
The room was small and bare. A table, two chairs, and a single oil lamp that gave the stone walls a yellow cast and left the corners dark. The air was close and damp and had in it the smell of bodies that had occupied the space before them. Poole, the younger Runner, sat in the corner with his leather notebook open on his knee.
Sarah Baker sat in one of the chairs with her hands folded in her lap, her back straight, her hair pinned neatly as though she were about to bring up a breakfast tray. She did not look up when the door opened.
Henry offered the chair across from her to his duchess and stood behind it. Sarah’s eyes moved across his face and down to Violet’s, then to Violet’s hand, which was resting flat on her belly. Her gaze settled on Violet’s face. A faint curve touched the corner of her mouth. It was not quite a smile.
“Your Graces,” she said.
“Sarah,” Henry said.
Henry had thought, in the carriage, that he would begin with the shaving soap, or with the tea, or with the belladonna. He had thought he would be angry. He had been angry for days, a deep and steady fury that had kept him upright through the dressing, the stairs, the carriage ride. But now, standing across from a woman he had known since she was a child of six in the kitchen passage with flour on her nose, the anger tangled with something less serviceable.
“Why?” he asked.
She looked at him.
Silence.
Violet began. She laid the evidence on the table between them the way a merchant lays out cloth, piece by piece, without flourish.
The belladonna in the fertility tea. She described the hidden room behind the dresser, the rue seeds placed in the dresser’s path, and how Kit had witnessed them crushed to powder beneath her foot.
At this, Sarah’s mouth curved. The faintest smile, there and gone, as though she had been paid a professional compliment. She examined a crease in her skirt.
Violet stopped and waited for her reaction. When none came, she continued. The henbane on the handkerchief, the note hidden in Margaret’s book. She described the arsenic in Henry’s shaving soap, the garlic smell when heated over a flame.
