Page 24 of The English Wife

“Dead women hold no balls?” Mr. Burke looked at her with something like smugness. Janie didn’t like it. “Annabelle Lacey disappeared from her home in Lincolnshire in the spring of 1891. It’s a matter of record. The housekeeper found a shoe beside the bank of the river and a hair ribbon caught on a twig.”

A shoe, lying on its side, melting snow creating a dark stain on the pale satin. A scarf, spangled with jewels, floating on the water.

Janie blinked again, banishing the images. “No. That was last week, not eight years ago.”

“Would you like to read the telegram from my colleague at The Lincolnshire Standard? Miss Lacey’s cousin, Mr. Lacey, went to some effort to have her declared dead. The local coroner, apparently, refused to sanction an inquest on the ground of insufficient evidence.” Mr. Burke folded his arms across his chest, his eyes on Janie’s face. “Do you still want to know the truth whatever the costs, Miss Van Duyvil?”

Janie eyed him warily. “How did you learn all this?”

Mr. Burke bent and picked up a fallen twig from the rim of the fountain, snapping off the branches, one by one. “The telegraph is a remarkable thing, isn’t it? It stretches clear across the Atlantic.”

It was strange to think of those wires clicking and clicking, noon and night, carrying secrets from one end of the world to the other, turning the Atlantic into a fishpond, the globe into something one could fit inside one’s pocket. She had known Annabelle for five years, and yet Mr. Burke, if he was indeed speaking the truth, knew more of Annabelle’s past in one exchange of the telegraph than Janie had learned in five years.

Mr. Burke might be lying. He might have fabricated it all out of thin air, in an attempt to scare her back to the serenity of the drawing room.

Serenity? Ha. Janie lifted her chin. “Was there anything else?”

Mr. Burke looked at her sideways, a long, appraising look. After a moment, he said, “It takes seven years in England for a missing person to be deemed deceased. In 1898, Mr. Lacey applied again to have his cousin’s death made official. Something about an inheritance, I gather.” His voice was carefully bland. “One can only imagine his surprise when he was told that she was alive, married, and living in America.”

They paused in front of the statue of Nathan Hale. Someone had left a wreath on the pedestal; the garland was wilted, the ribbon frayed. Janie stared at the frostbitten flowers. “Annabelle never spoke about her life in England.”

Not even at the beginning, that first summer in Newport, when all the clucking matrons and disappointed debutantes had tried to draw her out, making pointed comments about her aristocratic connections. Annabelle had merely smiled and changed the subject, quietly regal in a way that put the petty jealousies of others to scorn.

Janie had taken it as a sign of good breeding. But what if it was something more?

Mr. Burke clasped his hands behind his back, seeming to scrutinize Mr. Hale. “So you have two possibilities. Either Annabelle Lacey died and the woman you knew as Annabelle Lacey was an imposter—or Annabelle Lacey, for reasons best known to herself, found it expedient to disappear. Until she married your brother.”

Janie looked away from Nathan Hale’s incorruptible face, into that of the man beside her. It was, she thought, an interesting face, all long, lean lines and unexpected angles. Secrets were written in the hollows of those cheeks, in the long, flexible line of his lips—his own and those of others. And Janie realized, for the first time, the magnitude of what she was taking on, the cost that might come of bearing the secrets of others.

“Well?” said Mr. Burke. “Have you heard enough?”

Above her, Nathan Hale gazed off into the clouds, scorning her weakness. Here was a man who hadn’t folded in the face of danger. He had been executed here, on this spot, just a little more than a century before, giving his life so that a principle might stand.

“No,” said Janie crisply. “My offer stands.”

Mr. Burke raised a brow. “Money for information?”

Janie nodded.

“What if,” said Mr. Burke, his eyes fixed on Janie’s, “money isn’t what I want?”

He was trying to scare her. She knew that. But she couldn’t quite keep her voice as steady as she would have liked as she asked, “What do you want, Mr. Burke?”

Mr. Burke straightened. “Information,” he said crisply. “You might call it … a window into your world.”

Janie could have kicked him. “Isn’t the kitchen door enough for you?”

Mr. Burke smiled dangerously. “Don’t worry. I don’t intend to sully the premises. One can only learn so much below stairs. It’s not every day one has access to the daughter of the house.” He was trying to provoke her. Again. “Well, Miss Van Duyvil? Do you accept my terms?”

Janie wondered if this was how Faust had felt when he’d summoned Mephistopheles. Somehow, these pacts ceased to seem like such a good idea once the devil was driving the bargain. “Yes. On one condition.”

“Only one?” said Mr. Burke. “You surprise me.”

Janie refused to be goaded. “If we are to work together, I will need your pledge of honesty. No lies, no omissions, no half truths.”

Mr. Burke gave a short bark of a laugh. “You don’t ask for much, do you? Only the moon.” When Janie didn’t budge, he said softly, “What of you, Miss Van Duyvil? Will you give the same to me?”

The golden dome of the World loomed behind them, a reminder that any careless word might be printed tens of thousands times over, projected to everyone with the three cents to buy the evening edition.