Page 116 of The English Wife

Mr. Lacey cracked his gloves against his knee. “I couldn’t have, could I? She was already dead.”

The coroner frowned at his callousness. “What brought you to New York, Mr. Lacey?”

“I wanted to see my cousin,” said Mr. Lacey impatiently. “The architect fellow wrote me telling me that Van Duyvil wanted to rebuild his wife’s childhood home. So I came to see Annabelle. What else was I to think? I didn’t know that Georgie was holding herself out as Annabelle.”

The coroner looked at Mr. Lacey over his spectacles. “But how could Annabelle Lacey be alive if she had already been killed by Georgiana Smith?”

Mr. Lacey looked as though he were trying very hard not to punch something. “I don’t know!”

The coroner bared his teeth in a smile. “You may step down, Mr. Lacey.”

Mr. Lacey blinked at him. “But … I’m not finished.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lacey. If we need you again, we will call you. Bailiff, will you escort Mr. Lacey back to his seat?”

The bailiff wasn’t large, but he had the majesty of the law about him. Mr. Lacey gave him a dirty look, but went. Janie could see the reporters scribbling frantically in their notebooks, some already slipping out the back.

Janie’s eyes followed Mr. Lacey as he retreated to his seat, folding his arms across his chest in a way that signified both boredom and irritation. The irritation seemed genuine. The boredom didn’t. His right leg was jiggling up and down in a way that spoke of anxiety. Anxiety about what?

Janie jumped as an elbow connected with her ribs.

“Janie!” hissed Anne, and nodded towards the stand, where the coroner was calling. “Miss Van Duyvil?”

The walk to the witness stand felt far longer than Janie would have imagined.

She gathered up her skirts and ascended the steps into the witness stand, grateful for the hat brim that helped hide her face. In front of her, the faces of the people crammed onto the benches seemed distorted into caricatures of themselves, mouths too wide, eyes too large, all of them staring at her, marking her every movement, the press artists scribbling pictures of her into their notebooks.

Despite herself, her eyes sought out Burke, sitting to the side of the press bench. He lowered his chin just a fraction, and Janie, who shouldn’t have felt strengthened by the gesture, did. These past few weeks had changed her, toughened her.

Settling herself in the hard, wood chair, Janie looked to the coroner to let him know she was ready.

“You are Miss Jane Van Duyvil?” said the coroner.

“Genevieve,” Janie corrected the coroner, deliberately not looking at Burke. “Miss Genevieve Van Duyvil.”

The coroner made a note. Janie wondered if he were noting her name, or if it was just a tactic designed to lend an appropriate air of gravity to the proceedings and force witnesses to think very, very carefully before they said anything at all. There was, to be fair, a clerk recording the proceedings, but that didn’t have the same weight as a note in the hand of the grand inquisitor.

Or patent medicine salesman, as the case might be. Janie was beginning to have a great respect for the patent medicine salesman. Perhaps Putnam County’s coroner selection process had more sense in it than her mother claimed.

“Miss Van Duyvil,” said the coroner, in a very different voice than the one he had used for Mr. Lacey, “you were at the entertainment at Duyvil’s Kill on the sixth of January?”

Janie nodded. “Illyria,” she said helpfully. “My brother and his wife called the house Illyria. After the island in the Shakespeare play.”

She caught her mother’s eye on her and subsided.

“Yes, thank you.” The coroner looked like he was going to say something and then changed his mind. When he spoke, he chose his words carefully. “When were you made aware that something was … not as it should be?”

Janie arranged her hands in her lap, and then arranged them again. She felt as though she suddenly had too many fingers. “My cousin Mrs. Newland came to find me. My mother had asked that she find my brother and his wife.”

“Your mother … that would be Mrs. Peter Van Duyvil?”

Janie looked at her mother, who was doing a very good job of pretending the vulgar throng behind her simply didn’t exist. Or, for that matter, the coroner, the stenographer, or her daughter on the witness stand. Mrs. Van Duyvil sat like Patience on a Monument, stony in her stoicism. “Yes.”

“What happened then?” There was something hypnotic about the coroner’s even voice.

“We went outside.” She could feel the cold, a shock after the crush in the house, the way her skin prickled at it, the patterns of light from the house turning the frost to something beautiful and sinister. Janie drew in a deep breath. “There were to be illuminations in the garden at midnight, just before the German. We thought, perhaps, Bay—Mr. Van Duyvil—had gone to make sure everything was in place.”

“Had he?”