Sarah listened, her face betraying no emotion, her hands flat on her lap, her eyes holding Violet’s. She sat as she had sat through the mornings in Violet’s room, patient and composed, waiting for the next instruction.
When Violet finished, the lamp guttered and the room was quiet.
Sarah offered nothing.
“Elizabeth, Catherine, and Margaret. They trusted you. Elizabeth—” Henry's voice failed him. He stopped, drew a breath, and tried again. “Elizabeth was carrying a child.”
Sarah’s lower lip drew in against her teeth for an instant, then released. But she swallowed whatever rose and looked at the wall above Violet’s shoulder and said nothing.
The silence stretched. Poole’s pencil was still.
“Your work was ordinary.” Violet let the word sit for a moment. “A competent woman would have known that belladonna cannot hide behind rue indefinitely. Half the quantity along with arsenic would have passed any palate for years. But you were heavy-handed, and I tasted it.”
Sarah’s chin lifted. The faintest colour rose at her throat.
“And the evidence you left behind.” Her voice was almost pitying now. “A handkerchief stiff with henbane, when any apprentice would have burned the cloth. A bottle missing, muslin still damp.” She chuckled. “You are a stillroom maid who learned enough to be dangerous and not quite enough to be invisible.”
Sarah’s nostrils flared. A muscle stood at the corner of her jaw. Her eyes moved to Violet with a venom Henry had never seen before. For an instant, half a breath, her lips parted as though something was fighting to come through her teeth. But she held. She held and held and held.
Violet looked at Henry. He looked at her. And he knew what she was asking. Henry straightened. “Hatchett. A word.”
A door opened. Edmund came in ahead of Kit. His hat in his hands, his face drawn, his eyes moving around the room without settling. Hatchett had told him only that the duke required his presence. He had not been told who was waiting.
He saw Sarah.
The colour left his face. First the cheeks, then the lips. He stopped two paces inside the door.
Sarah looked at him. In twenty years of service, Henry had never seen her face unguarded. He had thought, on the carriage ride here, that the sight of Edmund might crack her composure. He was wrong. What happened was worse. The composure did not break. It softened. The hard set of her mouth eased. The line between her brows, which had not moved through any of Violet’s accusations, smoothed. She looked at Edmund with an expression so close to tenderness that Henry’s stomach turned.
“Sit down, Edmund,” Henry said.
Edmund sat. The chair scraped against the stone. He was across the table from her now, close enough to touch. His hands were shaking.
“Tell me it is not true.” His voice was barely audible. “Sarah, please. Tell me what the Runners say is a lie, an error.”
She studied him. The lamplight held her eyes, and whatever lived behind them: grief, patience, triumph.
“Cousin Edmund.” Violet spoke gently. Henry placed a hand on the small of his wife’s back. “We have evidence that Sarah killed three Duchesses of Iredell and attempted to murder the Duke of Iredell and myself.”
Edmund stared at Violet. Then at Sarah.
“Why?” His voice broke on the word. “What could you have possibly…”
Sarah held his gaze and said nothing for a minute. Then said, “I was making room, Edmund.”
She said it quietly. She said it in the same voice she had used to sayyour tea is ready. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him across the table with an expression of absolute patience.
The silence in the room was terrible.
“Making room,” Edmund repeated.
“You promised to marry me. I believed you. I believe you still.”
Edmund put his hand over his mouth and pressed it there. When he spoke, the words came through his fingers. “I was eighteen. We were together once. I said things I should not have said. I did not understand what I was promising.”
Sarah tilted her head. “You did not understand.”
Air seemed to leave the room.
