Page 12 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

He took off his spectacles. He did not clean them or set them down. He only held them, as though he had forgotten what they were for.

“And Steele permitted this?”

"Steele forbade it." The words came out harder than I meant them to. "He argued with me the better part of an evening. He had a dozen reasons and not one of them was foolish. I went anyway. So whatever you are preparing to lay at his door, it belongs at mine. I chose it. Knowing all of it, I would choose it again."

A muscle moved in his jaw. He said nothing, which was Cosmos's way of saying a great deal.

"The pistol was in my pocket,” I went on. "For myself. Against the chance the night went wrong. And it did. I gave the signal from a bathroom window, and when I opened the door to go down and away, there was a man standing on the other side of it. Half masked. He knew my name. He knew a great deal he had no business knowing." I made my voice flat, a recitation, because flatness was the only thing holding it level. "I reached for the pistol. He was faster. He caught my wrist and turned it until I cried out. He took the weapon out of my hand as easily as lifting a glass from a tray. Then he had me carried off. Steele reached me before I was harmed." I drew a breath. "That is what the papers did not have. That is what I did not give you. The pistol never came back to me. It stayed with the masked man, from that night to now.”

There was more, and I did not say it. I had never said it—not to Steele, not to anyone. I did not say it now: that the man had wound a loose curl about his gloved finger and called himself fascinated, that he had spoken of taming me the way another man might speak of breaking a horse, that he had looked at me with the patient appetite of a collector who has decided upon a piece and is content to wait for it. Cosmos had weight enough to bear at the moment. He did not need to hear that I was the thing all of this was for.

For a long moment my brother remained silent. When he spoke, it was slowly, the way he worked at everything, from the root upward.

"He has had it since the river," he said. "He kept our father's pistol in some drawer of his own, for months." His gaze came up to mine. "And this morning it was found beside a dead man at Kew, where it could not fail to be traced to me."

"Yes."

"Which means he did not choose me." He set the spectacles down at last, with great care, as though they might shatter from a rough thought alone. "He chose you. I am only the lever he means to use. Put me in a cell, and there is no length you would not go to, no bargain you would refuse, to have me out of it."

I had braced for his anger. I had not braced for this—for him to arrive, unaided, at the precise shape of the trap, and to look at me across it with no blame in his face at all.

"Yes," I said again, and the word came out unsteady.

"Then I will not give him the satisfaction of watching me be frightened," Cosmos said. "And neither will you." He came around the desk and, for the first time since I had entered the room, he was simply my brother again, eight-and-twenty and tired and reaching for my hands the way he had reached for them when we were children and the house had emptied of everyone who was meant to keep us. "You should have told me when it happened, Rosie. Not for the pistol. For you." His grip tightened. "But you will not carry the next part alone. Whatever he wants of you, he will have to come through this family to take it. And we are a great deal more trouble than he has reckoned on."

For the second time that day I did not weep, though it cost me. I had crossed Grosvenor Square that morning to ask one man for help. I had not expected to end the day being offered it, unasked, in a darkened study, by the brother I had spent months lying to in order to keep him safe.

"There is a duke across the square," I said, when I trusted my voice, "who believes he can manage this entirely on his own."

Cosmos made a sound that, in a better hour, might have been a laugh. "Then he has not been paying attention to either of us."

Chapter

Six

A Matter Best Managed

Finch worked out of a ground-floor office in Hatton Garden, with a diamond merchant on one side of him and a man who mended watches on the other, so that the passage always smelled of tobacco and ink beneath the cold mineral edge of the jewelers’ trade. No duke should have business at such an address, which was one of the reasons for its worth to me.

I rapped twice. Before I could lower my hand, the door opened.

“Your Grace.” Amusement flickered behind Finch’s eyes. I had sent no word ahead, and still I hadn’t caught him unaware. But then I rarely did.

“Finch.” I stepped into his office, which lay in the usual disorder—the single desk, the pair of mismatched chairs, the old filing cabinet, and the tide of newspapers, directories, and loose paper that were the enquiry agent’s working stock.

London hung in pieces on the wall, a map for every quarter. On the sill a teapot kept its low warmth, and at its elbow stood a bottle of whiskey I knew by sight, being my own. Milford sent it over from my private reserve at intervals, along with whatever the kitchen had in surplus. Finch took both as he took most kindnesses, glad they’d been offered but never presuming upon them.

He lifted a stack of directories from the nearer chair and set them on the floor. I remained standing.

“You’ve the look of a man who has had a morning,” Finch said, settling into the chair behind his desk.

“I have had a body at Kew Gardens and an hour at Scotland Yard.”

“I heard about the first. The Earl of Rosehaven’s pistol, beside a dead man in the Palm House.” He weighed me a moment. “I do not yet have the dead man’s name. I take it you do.”

“Sir Basil Crane. Baronet. A house in Belgravia beyond his means, and—if I have his measure—debts to match. I want everything you can find on him.”

Finch reached for his notebook and pencil. “The same terms as the other work?”