Page 18 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

Cosmos rose from behind his desk. "Thank you for coming." He appeared in no better shape than his sister.

"Would you like some tea?" Rosalynd asked. Even in trying circumstances, etiquette had to be observed.

"No, thank you."

"Take a seat, Steele," Cosmos said. "This is going to take a while."

I accommodated myself in the chair across from his desk. When no word from either of them was forthcoming, I said, "You said you had news."

"Yesterday, when I spoke with you," Rosalynd said, "we wondered about a motive that would tie Cosmos to the victim."

My gaze traveled between brother and sister. "I gather you found one."

She nodded.

Cosmos dropped into his chair and, in a very tired voice, said, "It has to do with Claire."

"Lady Edmunds?" I asked.

"Yes. We have been…seeing each other."

Seeing—a rather euphemistic word for what I had observed at ballrooms. They cared for one another. Deeply.

"In plain terms," Cosmos said, "Crane was blackmailing her."

"Ah."

Rosalynd rounded on me. "Is that all you have to say?"

"For now." I brushed a nonexistent speck from my trousers. "I'll have more when I'm offered a more extensive explanation."

"He's right, Rosie."

Between the two of them, they laid it before me. Claire's husband had regularly taken a potion prescribed by his physician when his vigor had flagged. On the night of his death, he had taken more than had been advised, and his heart had failed. Both his physician and the chemist had testified at the inquest about the potion. The verdict had been death by natural causes.

Crane had come to Claire in April and named a price for not asking a coroner whether her husband's heart had been helped to its rest. By her. She had paid him, the sum climbing as such sums climb, and had told no one.

But Cosmos had found out nonetheless.

"I tracked him down to his club," Cosmos said. He did not look away while he spoke, which I respected and which did him no good at all. "I sought out a private room and told Crane the payments would stop. He said something I will not repeat before Rosie. That’s when I struck him." A muscle moved in his jaw. "I didn't think we were overheard."

"But clearly you were."

Cosmos bowed his head. "Yes."

I sat in that study and felt the trap close—not with violence, but with the soft completion of a thing built by a patient hand.

A pistol by the body was a riddle Dodson might worry for weeks. A pistol by the body of a man the Earl of Rosehaven had publicly quarreled with and struck a month before—that was not a riddle. That was a rope, strong enough to hang him.

The man in the mask had not needed to invent Cosmos's guilt. He had only needed to find a guilt already made and lay his corpse upon it.

"You see it," Rosalynd said, watching my face. She had always been able to read it, which was inconvenient at certain times.

"I see that Dodson is perhaps two days from a witness and three from a warrant." There was no kindness in softening it. They had not summoned me to be lied to gently. "And I see that you will do anything to stop your brother from hanging."

Something flickered in her eyes—not triumph. She was too tired for triumph, and too kind to take it in front of her brother. But she did not pretend to misunderstand me.

"Then we are agreed I am in it,” she said.