Page 37 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“He entered service again almost immediately.”

“With whom?”

“An elderly gentleman.”

Something in me tightened.

“What elderly gentleman?”

“I should know it.” She gazed into the distance while she searched her memory. “I wrote the reference myself.”

I waited.

Her brow furrowed. “It began with an H.” And then her eyes widened. “Harcourt. Sir Reginald Harcourt, that’s who it was.”

I went very still. The gentleman at the musicale. The one with the coughing fit.

For a moment I simply stared at her. Could it be? Benson had gone into Harcourt’s service. Crane had been seen in Harcourt’s company. And Benson possessed precisely the sort of knowledge Crane had used against Claire.

A chill found me, there in Claire’s morning room, with the silks bright in their basket at our feet.

“Rosalynd,” Claire said softly. “What is it?”

I drew a long breath. “I think Crane learned about the potion from Benson.”

“How?”

“Crane was a sycophant, a hanger-on who befriended people for their secrets. He may have attached himself to Harcourt expecting to find something useful. Instead, he found Benson.”

She stared at me. “You mean Benson told him?”

“I think it’s a possibility. One that we’ll need to explore.” I came to my feet. “I hate to rush off, but I must get this information to Steele so he can alert Finch.” I kissed her cheek.

“You will let me know what comes of it.” It was not a question.

“Of course.”

But before I left I stopped by the kitchen and had a pointed discussion with her cook.

Chapter

Fourteen

A Gentleman of No Consequence

The Argosy stood on the west side of St. James’s Street, four doors up from a bootmaker and a comfortable distance below White’s, which was precisely where it wished to stand. It was a club for men who had risen far enough to want a good address and not far enough to be asked anywhere better.

Sir Basil Crane had belonged to it. Under its roof, a month past, Cosmos had struck him in a private room he had believed to be private. And somewhere in its books, if Whitfield’s figures told the truth, stood the name of Walter Marsh, a member of two years’ standing whose subscription was paid with washed money.

I had never before had occasion to enter the place. That afternoon I had three.

The porter knew me before I had gained the top step. Porters always do; recognition is the whole of their trade.

“Your Grace.”

“Good afternoon. I should like a word with Mr. Morris, if he can be spared.”

Finch had furnished the steward’s name, along with the observation that a man who had kept the doors of gentlemen’s clubs for thirty years knew more of the members than their confessors did, and charged less for absolution. The porter did not ask my business. A duke’s business is presumed sufficient. He showed me into the hall and murmured something to a page. Within two minutes Morris himself appeared—a spare, upright man of fifty or thereabouts, in the black coat of his office, with the composed face of a servant who had spent his life watching gentlemen misbehave and being paid to forget it.