Page 19 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

"We are agreed," I said, and felt the last of a thing I had guarded against go quietly over the wall.

There would be no keeping her from this. There never had been. Finch had told me I was a fool to believe otherwise. I had paid him for the truth and disliked him for delivering it. And here it was, proven this gray morning, with the woman in question standing five feet away.

"You asked me here for more than to reveal a motive."

"I did," Cosmos said.

"Go on."

"We need to learn the details about how the body was found. A man shot at Kew Gardens would bleed into the ground. He fouls the gravel, the leaf litter, the soil. He leaves the precise signature of the place he died in—on his clothes, in his hair, under his nails." His hands tightened on the arms of the chair. "I have not been made privy to those facts. I need to know them. For if the body bears substances that do not belong at Kew, then he was not killed there. He was murdered somewhere else and brought to Kew along with my pistol to tie me to his death."

His eyes held mine.

"I need to examine his clothes, Steele. I need to view the body. If I am afforded that opportunity, I will tell you within the hour what part of England killed him. And that is a thread that runs away from me, not toward me, because I did not kill him."

"You cannot examine them yourself," I said. "You are the Yard's chief suspect this morning. They will not let you within a mile of the evidence."

"The Yard won't. But the surgeon who has the body is Merrick. He and I have stood over a dozen poisoned stomachs together, and he owes me his good name on at least two of them." Cosmos almost smiled, but did not. "He will not defy Dodson openly. And Inspector Graves does not have the authority to interfere in another man's case. But a duke may ask to view the deceased. You've done it before and, blast you, taken my sister with you."

"Cosmos," Rosalynd said in a soft voice. "It was my decision to view the victim in the Thames investigation. Steele tried to talk me out of it. He did not succeed."

"He could have—never mind." Cosmos struggled to regain his composure. "A duke may bring his man with him. If you are the one who asks, and I am the man you bring, Merrick will look the other way long enough for me to read what Crane was wearing. I cannot remove a thread of it. But I need not. I need only be in the room with my eyes and ten minutes' light."

I turned it over. It was not without risk, his plan. If Dodson learned that the Earl of Rosehaven had stood over the body he was suspected of making, he would build a tower upon it. But it was a true thing, the first move in the whole affair that ran toward the truth instead of away from it.

I came to my feet. "Very well. I shall send word to Merrick this morning. Once he allows it, I will bring you with me."

"Then there is my part,” Rosalynd said.

I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

"Cosmos can read the ground a man died on. You can open doors that rank opens. But neither of you can sit in drawing rooms and learn from women the truth of Crane—who he flattered, who he feared, and who he owed." Her voice grew steadier with every word. "None of that opens to a hired man. It opens to me, and only to me."

It was what Finch had told me, almost to the word. And I had answered Finch with a flat refusal. I had no refusal left in me. I had only the old fear, and that fear no longer had anywhere to stand.

"It opens to you," I said, laying my hands upon her brother's desk as I stood. "With conditions. You go nowhere on Crane's account that you would not otherwise go, and you go to no house unless I know where you are. Whatever you learn comes to me that same evening. We decide what to do next together."

I heard how it sounded. Even now I was trying to place safeguards around her instead of trusting her judgment. She would hear it, certainly. Whether she would accept it was another matter. Yet I could not bring myself to speak differently. Loving her had never taught me how to stop wanting her safe.

For a long moment she held my gaze. The gray morning light and the months during which we had loved one another stood between us. A love that could no longer be.

"Two of the three," she said at last. "I will tell you the same evening, and I will go to no house you do not know about." She lifted her chin. "But I will not promise to go only where a lady might. Because the thing we are hunting does not stop at the edge of polite society, and that means neither can I."

It was more than I had any right to and less than I could bear. I understood at last what Finch had tried to tell me. Partnership was not keeping her behind me. It was trusting her to stand beside me.

I would guard her where I could. She would go where I could not. Together, perhaps, we might reach the truth.

"Then we begin," I said.

Out beyond the window the square was alive—a maid beating a step, a cart upon the cobbles, the ordinary city that did not know a faceless man had laid a careful corpse to catch a woman, and that the woman's family had just, very quietly, declined to let her be caught.

Crane's murder had given us a trail to follow. The other trail remained mine alone. I knew, with a certainty, that they would lead to the same man.

Rosalynd must never discover it.

I would see to that.

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