Page 115 of The English Wife

“There was an old nurse … but she must be ninety if she’s a day. If she’s still with us. But there’s no need, I tell you. Georgiana Smith was Annabelle’s half sister. They looked alike if you didn’t see them next to each other. Anyone would tell you the same.”

“Do you have any affidavits from these ‘anyones’?”

“Affidavits?” Mr. Lacey sputtered. “Why would I have such a thing?”

The coroner persevered. “Could you provide such affidavits if given the time to do so?”

Mr. Lacey frowned at him, no longer amused. “Most of my cousin’s staff left after his death. The girls weren’t out yet. They might have played with some of the tenant farmers’ children in their youth.”

“In other words, no.” The coroner looked up from his notes, saying, with awful clarity, “Mr. Lacey, can you bring any evidence that the woman known as Annabelle Van Duyvil was, in fact, Georgiana Smith?”

“Don’t you think I would know my own cousin?” Mr. Lacey’s voice echoed through the courtroom, rich with frustration. “I tell you, I saw her. It wasn’t Annabelle; it was Georgie.”

“You saw her?” A current of interest went through the room. The journalists picked up their discarded notebooks.

Mr. Lacey blinked for a moment, looking utterly unnerved. “I mean … I saw a picture of her. Mrs. Van Duyvil showed me a picture.” Gaining confidence, he added, “It wasn’t Annabelle.”

“You determined that from a picture,” said the coroner. He didn’t sound convinced. And neither was Janie.

Mr. Lacey half rose in his seat. “Don’t you understand? She’s a murderess. She killed Annabelle, and she killed her husband. And she’ll probably kill someone else if she isn’t brought to justice.”

His words didn’t have nearly the effect they had had the day before.

“That,” said the coroner placidly, “is a very serious allegation. Do you have any proof, Mr. Lacey?”

Mr. Lacey subsided sulkily into his seat. “Annabelle’s body was never found. Just her shoe. It’s probably what gave Georgie the idea. She knew how to set the scene because she knew what it looked like when someone gets pushed into a river.”

“What were the results of the inquest into Miss Lacey’s disappearance, Mr. Lacey?”

Mr. Lacey mumbled something.

“A bit louder, Mr. Lacey.”

“They wouldn’t declare her dead,” muttered Mr. Lacey.

“Let me make sure I have this correct,” said the coroner. “You have no proof that there was such a person as Georgiana Smith—”

“Other than my word!”

“—and no proof that Annabelle Lacey either died or was murdered.”

“Does a confession count as proof?” demanded Mr. Lacey hotly. “Georgie told me herself, just last month.”

The coroner waited until the noise in the courtroom had subsided before pushing his spectacles up on his nose and saying very carefully, “Told you yourself, you say?”

Mr. Lacey looked him in the eye with a lordly sneer. It was both a little too direct and a little too lordly, thought Janie. No one looked at you like that unless they were lying. “That’s what I said.”

“And by last month, you mean January of this year?” Janie watched as Mr. Lacey’s mouth opened and shut. “By your own testimony, Mr. Lacey, you had not seen your cousin since the year … 1891. Is that correct?”

“I never said I saw her.” Mr. Lacey tugged at his cravat. “I meant that she told me by killing her husband and running. If that’s not an admission of guilt, I don’t know what is.”

The people on the benches were twisting and murmuring to each other, doubt spreading through the courtroom like a disease.

The coroner had to raise his voice to be heard over the hum of voices. “When did you arrive in New York, Mr. Lacey?”

Mr. Lacey hesitated just a moment before saying reluctantly, “The seventh of January.”

“The day after Mr. Van Duyvil’s death.” The coroner made a note to himself. Janie could see Mr. Lacey craning his neck to try to read it. Mr. Lacey abruptly pulled his chin back in again as the coroner looked up. “Did you see Mrs. Van Duyvil—Mrs. Bayard Van Duyvil—here in New York?”