Page 128 of The English Wife

“See?” said Mr. Lacey triumphantly. “I told you—”

“Some people thought the gypsies took them,” said Burke, his voice carrying over the other man’s. “Others suspected Mr. Lacey. A groom reported hearing cries from the stables.”

Mr. Lacey’s eyes darted around the room. “What does a groom know? All right, damn you. He heard something. But it wasn’t what you think. He heard me trying to get that witch to tell me what she’d done with Annabelle.”

“Unless,” retorted Burke, “he’d heard you murdering Annabelle Lacey.”

If Mr. Lacey wasn’t horrified, he was doing a good job of pretending it. “Murder Annabelle? I loved her. I would never have hurt her.”

“So you say. It’s not so pleasant when the shoe is on the other foot, is it, Mr. Lacey?” Burke was all reporter now, following up on a lead. “You can make accusations, but you can’t take them.”

“Enough.” Mrs. Van Duyvil’s voice made them all start. “It was her fault. All of it. That Georgiana.”

Mrs. Van Duyvil came to a stop on the far side of the room, where her own portrait hung in pride of place, so that she seemed to be glaring at them twice over. Janie’s mother had never liked that portrait, had felt the painter had failed to do her justice, so it had been long since exiled from the house in Newport, to a dark corner on Thirty-Sixth Street, and then, at last, as a gift to Bay and Annabelle for their new home. In the painting, she was dressed in the grand tenue of the early ’80s, her magnificent pearls hanging in long strands around her neck and her bosom adorned with a large diamond brooch.

A very familiar diamond brooch.

Janie felt the cold seeping down the back of her neck. A goose walking over her grave, Mrs. Gerritt would say. But it wasn’t her grave it was walking over.

“You,” her mother said, jabbing a finger at Burke. “You claim to be a journalist. Do your job properly. Tell the world about the imposter who lied and cheated and killed my son. Tell them that it was all her fault, all of it. If Bayard hadn’t married that woman…”

Her mother’s words crashed and eddied around her as Janie stared at the portrait over her mother’s head, the brooch on her painted chest, the giant round diamond in the middle with the finials radiating out like the rays of an icy sun.

“That’s your brooch.” Janie wasn’t aware that she had spoken until her mother broke off to look at her sharply.

“Did you say something, Janie?”

It was a look that told her she was to be sent to bed with supper on a tray, given a tisane, silenced. But Janie wouldn’t be silenced, not anymore.

“That brooch,” she said, and her voice was stronger than she would have imagined. She lifted a finger to point at the painting above her mother’s head. “The brooch they found by the folly. It was yours.”

The wind shook the windows. The coals cracked and sparked on the grate. Anne drew in her breath with a sharp hiss.

Mrs. Van Duyvil stared at the portrait as though she had never seen it before. “A maid—” she began, and then, with more conviction, “Anne always has her fingers in my jewel box. She must have borrowed it.”

Wordlessly, Anne shook her head.

“Would someone tell me what the devil is going on?” demanded Giles Lacey. “Who cares about a bloody brooch?”

This time, no one reproved him for language.

“Mother,” said Janie, and her voice felt strange to her ears. “Why was your brooch by the folly?”

Her mother’s hand went to the mourning brooch at her neck, tightening around it so hard that Janie thought it might crack.

“If you must know…” Her lips twisted as she looked behind Janie. “Do make sure you are writing this down, Mr. Burke. I shouldn’t want you to miss anything.”

“Mother?” prompted Janie. The smoke from the fire was making her eyes sting, scraping the back of her throat.

In the silence, the wind howled around the windows like a lost soul.

“My brooch was there because I was there. I was there when that woman killed my son.”

TWENTY-SIX

Cold Spring, 1899

Twelfth Night