Page 11 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

"I'll see to it."

The door flew open. Petunia in tears. She flung herself against me and buried her face in my skirt. "The police are going to hang Cosmos." Of course, she knew. She had a talent for learning things.

I cupped my hand around her chin and raised it. “No, they won’t, sweetheart.”

A sob escaped her. “You'll stop them?"

“The duke and I will."

A last hiccup. A wipe of her face. And then a tremulous smile. "It will be fine then. The duke can do anything." And with that she walked out of the room, followed by a somber Laurel.

After I ascertained Fox was trimming the heads of the flowers for their benefit, I proceeded to my bedchamber. I did not draw open the curtains. I did not light the lamp. The dark suited me.

I had taken the pistol from Cosmos's desk because I wanted a weapon and did not wish to account for the wanting. And then it had been taken from me by the same masked man who came uninvited to my masquerade ball and told me he had it. The single fact that would lift the suspicion from Cosmos—that the pistol was stolen from me—was the fact I could not give without laying my entire history with that man on Dodson's desk.

Two hours later, the knock came soft, two raps. I knew it for Tilly's before she entered.

"Milady. His Lordship is home. He's in his study. He asks that you come to him."

Cosmos rarely summoned anyone. He went to people, or he sent a fond, distracted note that one might answer at leisure. He did not sit in his study and call his sister down to it.

"Thank you, Tilly."

I did not change my gown or do anything to my hair. Whatever was about to happen, I would not meet it freshly powdered, as though I had something to set right in the glass first. I went down as I was.

His study door was shut. It was always shut. When he wasn’t in it, he kept it locked against Petunia's curiosity and Fox's experiments.

"Come,” he said when I knocked.

He stood at the window with his back to the door, still in the clothes he had been taken away in. He had not lit a lamp either. The two of us, it seemed, had arrived at the same end.

"Cosmos. Are you⁠—"

"They let me go. No charge." He said it to the window. "Dodson was very sorry to do it. He made certain I understood that the sorrow was temporary." He turned, and the keen, patient gaze I had known my whole life had something in it I had seen only once before. "Sit down, Rosie."

I sat.

"I have spent the better part of today being asked about a pistol," he said. "Our father's pistol. The one I keep—kept—in this room, in a drawer, where it has sat untouched for years. I told them, in perfect honesty, that I had no notion how it came to be lying beside a dead man at Kew Gardens." He set his hands on the back of his desk chair. His voice did not rise, which was worse than if it had.

I remained still, for I knew there was more to come.

“I can only surmise you took it. So you will tell me all of it. And you will not spare me the parts you think will frighten me, because I have spent the morning frightened past the reach of anything you could add to it."

So I told him.

I went back to the beginning, to an afternoon while he was at a lecture, when I had come into this very room, opened the second drawer of his desk, and lifted our father's pistol from its case. "I wanted a weapon," I said. "I did not wish to explain to you why I wanted one. So I took it, and shut the drawer, and let you go on believing it sat where it had always sat."

"Why did you want a weapon, Rosie?"

"Because of what I meant to do with it."

And then I gave him the Floralia—not the laundered thing the newspapers had run, the one he had read over his breakfast and folded down in disgust. The whole of it.

Beneath the masks and the costumes the Floralia had been a market. The goods were girls, taken off the streets and out of service positions and frightened into silence, sold for an evening to men who would never answer for it because no one with the power to make them look had ever bothered. Steele, his brother Nicky, and Finch, the enquiry agent, had set themselves to dragging the thing into daylight. That daylight, in the end, had meant a newspaperman, an illustrator, and a scandal too large for society to unsee.

"And your part in it?” Cosmos asked.

"They needed someone inside. Among the women. Someone to find the moment and signal Steele and the other men on the river." I held his gaze, because to look away would have been its own kind of lie. "I dressed as one of them, Cosmos. A red gown. A mask. I rode on a barge full of women who had chosen to be there, and let every soul aboard believe I was one of them. It was the only way in."