Page 64 of The English Wife

The reminder sobered them both. Janie felt the full oddity of it, entertaining a stranger in Bay’s house, while Bay’s body lay cold and still in the frost-blasted ground of Green-Wood Cemetery.

For Bay, she reminded herself. Her association with Mr. Burke was for Bay. To discover the truth of his death.

The library felt surprisingly cozy for such an imposing room. A hastily lit fire smoldered in the grate beneath a vast stone mantel looted from a French château, casting a warm light over shelves made of oak inlaid with maple. The walls between the shelves and the ceiling had been hung with red silk chased with gold, a pattern echoed in the long drapes that were elegantly looped back from the long, arched windows on the western wall, providing a view of the grounds and a tantalizing glimpse of the river below. Paintings hung pendent in gilded oval frames, portraits all of them, a parade of Van Duyvils, copied, she imagined, from the portraits in the old house, ancestors in periwigs and mobcaps, ruffled fichus and brown snuff coats, coquettish ringlets and bristling whiskers. Janie recognized her mother, resplendent in jewels in the costume of the early 1880s, sometime before her father’s death. And there was her father, quietly pleased, she imagined, to be back among books.

The watch pinned to Janie’s bodice said it was just past three, but the early winter dusk was already beginning to fall, painting the landscape in shades of pewter and gray, making the red opulence of the library seem even warmer in contrast.

Mrs. Gerritt set the tea tray between the windows and, leaving the door pointedly ajar, left them to their tea. Or something stronger.

There was a decanter on a silver tray, surrounded by glasses of Austrian crystal. It was filled with an amber liquid. Defiantly, Janie bypassed the tea tray and took up the decanter, finding it rather more difficult to grasp than she had expected. It had been made for larger hands than hers.

Trying to look as though she imbibed spirits every day, she said, “Would you rather tea or sherry?”

“I rather doubt that’s sherry,” said Mr. Burke, “but I’ll risk it if you will.”

Clumsily, Janie poured one glass, then another, grateful, in an odd way, that Mr. Burke didn’t offer to help. Whatever it was, it certainly didn’t smell like sherry. It had a peaty smell that made her think a bit of her father’s library, although whether it was because her father liked old books or had enjoyed a drink or two in the evenings, she couldn’t say.

Mr. Burke accepted his glass from her and raised it in a toast. “To your very good health, Miss Van Duyvil.”

“And yours.” Janie screwed up her courage and tilted the glass back as he did, only to find her throat on fire. It burned all the way up her nose and along her ears. Her eyes watered with it.

“That,” she said hoarsely, when she could speak again, “is not sherry.”

“Best Laphroaig, I should think,” said Mr. Burke appreciatively. “Sip. Don’t gulp.”

Janie coughed again and held the glass up to squint at the liquid. It looked deceptively innocent in the firelight, like weak tea with honey. “Is this what men slink off to drink?”

“Among other things.” Mr. Burke held up his glass to her in salute. “But seldom sherry.”

“So you say,” said Janie, and took another experimental sip. It made her feel quite dissipated and worldly. And why not? she thought defiantly. The world had turned upside down. It was foolish to apply the old rules, the old standards.

And she was so very sick of being proper.

“Do you know,” said Mr. Burke meditatively, “that while the whisky is aging, a fair bit disappears, into the air, as it were. They call that portion the angels’ share.”

The words made the hairs on the back of Janie’s neck rise. She took another sip of her drink, holding the taste on her tongue. “It’s a bit eerie to think of unseen beings drinking from the cask.”

Lifting his glass up to the firelight, Mr. Burke recited, “Yesterday upon the stair / I met a man who wasn’t there. / He wasn’t there again today. / I wish, I wish he’d go away.”

Janie caught herself looking over her shoulder, squinting at the shadows. “Did you just make that up?”

“I write in prose, not verse. It’s a bit of doggerel a friend sent me. Hughes Mearns. It’s a song for a play he’s writing. But it does rather hit it, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Janie soberly, “it does. Rather too well.”

An unseen head on a bed. An unseen hand stoking the grate.

Mr. Burke set his glass down on the table beside him, resting his hands on his knees. “Would you like me to take a look at the room in the other house before I leave?”

“Will it appear in an illustrated supplement in The World?”

“Not unless there’s a body hidden there.” Mr. Burke grimaced. “Sorry. In the newsroom, we … well, the worse it is, the more of a joke we make it. It’s a way to get through the day without being sick.”

Janie gave a slight nod to show him she understood. The room nodded a bit with her. “I almost wish there were a body on the bed.” That hadn’t come out quite right somehow. She wrinkled her nose. “It seems rather horrible to hope for a corpse, doesn’t it? It’s not that I want Annabelle to be dead. But it seems so cruel to let Viola and Sebastian hold out the hope that she might return to them. If her body were found … if we could bury her and let them mourn her.”

“Then they wouldn’t have to someday face the fact that their mother might be a murderer.” Mr. Burke looked at her steadily, looked at her until she was forced to meet his gaze. “You’ve considered it, too, haven’t you? That Annabelle might still be alive.”

THIRTEEN