Page 117 of The English Wife

“I don’t know.” That was the truth. She didn’t know why Bay had gone outside. The illuminations had been designed to appear over the folly. She could remember the lights crackling and bursting over her head as she knelt by Bay’s body, the incongruity of the triumphal flare in the sky and the devastation below. But there had been nothing in the folly itself, no reason for Bay to be there. The fireworks had been blasted into the sky from elsewhere on the grounds.

Unless he had wanted to look at them from below?

But why? The full effect had been made to be seen from the balcony. She knew, because she had read about it in the papers. The Van Duyvil acorns and rising sun, the Lacey birds and arrows, and, at the culmination, an intertwined A and B.

Annabelle and Bayard.

Her brother’s guests had eaten and danced and oohed at the fireworks, never knowing that their host lay dead in the folly by the river.

“Miss Van Duyvil?”

Janie felt her cheeks flush. “Yes?”

“What did you see then?” The coroner’s voice was very gentle. No wonder. He probably thought he was dealing with a half-wit.

“My brother,” she said. “He was lying on the flagstones of the folly. There was … there was a knife in his chest.”

The coroner nodded to the bailiff. “This knife?”

The bulbous gems still glistened in the hilt, cabochon sapphires and rubies. It looked so innocent, but for the rusty stains along the blade. Janie swallowed the bile rising in her throat. “Yes.”

“Do you know whose it might have been?” There was no urgency to the question; they knew this already.

Janie nodded, doing her best to keep her voice steady. “Yes. My brother’s. It was part of his costume.”

Like her mother’s pearls or the aquamarines sewn into Annabelle’s dress. Nothing but a bauble. A bauble with a blade.

“When you arrived at the folly, was there any sign of Mrs. Bayard Van Duyvil?”

“Yes.” Janie could feel the change of mood in the room. Giles Lacey, looking at her from beneath hooded lids—did he practice? she wondered irrelevantly—her mother, face frozen in the expressionless disdain that was her way of ignoring everything that displeased her; Anne, twisting the tail of a fox around and around one finger. “I saw my sister-in-law in the river.”

“Are you quite certain, Miss Van Duyvil?”

The dark, the snow, the flickering light of the lanterns. Memory played tricks. People remembered what they thought they ought to have seen. But this wasn’t what she thought she ought to have seen; this is what she had seen.

“Yes,” Janie said determinedly. “The river wasn’t frozen yet.”

But cold, so cold.

The coroner beckoned to the bailiff, who came forward bearing a single shoe.

“Miss Van Duyvil, do you recognize this shoe?”

The satin shimmered against the dull tones of the courtroom like Cinderella’s glass slipper.

“That is Annabelle’s shoe. She was wearing pale blue.” Pale blue that sparkled like water. But not like those waters. The waters of the Hudson had been a dark gray that night, cold and treacherous.

The tides in the Hudson ran strong, and Annabelle’s dress had been heavy, sewn with gems.

Of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes.

The coroner gestured again to the bailiff, who replaced the shoe on its stand. “And do you recognize this brooch, Miss Van Duyvil?”

The bailiff silently displayed the diamond brooch. In the courtroom, among the peeling paint and the scarred wood, it looked like a child’s bauble, a chunk of glass set in wire. Until the facets caught the light and it blazed as no glass ever had.

Slowly, she shook her head. “That wasn’t Annabelle’s.”

“Are you quite certain, Miss Van Duyvil?” The coroner glanced out the window, where the snow had been falling since morning. Falling and stopping, falling and stopping.