Page 73 of The English Wife

Janie set the candle down on the bureau and busied herself looking into drawers she already knew to be empty. “Why this room?” Nothing but a scattering of hairpins, a dusting of powder, a stray handkerchief. “Why not a room closer to the landing?”

“For that very reason. Less obvious if someone came looking.” Burke plucked the handkerchief from the drawer and examined the scrap of fabric, turning it one way, then another. The linen was whisper thin, edged with lace. “A bit fine for a nursery maid, isn’t this?”

“Is there a rule that nursery maids must have cambric handkerchiefs?”

“Fancy nursery maids you have here.” He lifted the handkerchief to reveal three intertwined letters, barely visible, white on white, an A and a V flanking a D. Annabelle Van Duyvil.

“Annabelle was always in the nursery.” Janie could picture her sister-in-law, in the big rocking chair, Bast on her lap, Viola on the floor, her head against her mother’s knee. “She might have dropped it.”

“Perhaps.” Mr. Burke tucked the handkerchief in his pocket and dropped to his knees before the hearth, squinting at the ashes. “Shine that light over here, would you?”

Janie knelt beside him, the candle in her hand. “I saw Annabelle in the water.”

“You thought you saw Annabelle in the water.” Mr. Burke eschewed the poker, gently feeling among the ashes with his finger. “Ex pede Herculem.”

He was testing her. Or, perhaps, she thought with dawning awareness, proving something to her. “I saw no feet, particularly not those belonging to Hercules.”

Mr. Burke held up a scrap, blew gently on it, and put it aside. “It’s an axiom attributed to Pythagoras. From the part, one can assume the whole. You saw something belonging to Annabelle in the water and assumed it must be Annabelle.”

“I saw Annabelle,” said Janie, but she wasn’t quite as sure as she had been. What had she seen, really? A shoe? A shadow? “You think Annabelle took her jewels and fled.”

“Stopping here to burn her papers and any photographs that might be used to identify her.”

No. Janie wasn’t quite sure why her reaction was so immediate and so negative, but she knew that Mr. Burke was wrong. She cast about for logic and came up only with, “You said it yourself: Why kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? The jewels Annabelle was wearing were only a small fraction of what she might have had.”

“And you said it yourself,” Mr. Burke countered. “In the fairy tale, they kill the goose.”

Janie shifted on her knees. One was beginning to cramp. “You said that.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“It’s a story.” In the story, the farmer and his wife had killed the goose in the hopes of a windfall. “Even if Annabelle inherited under Bay’s will, she isn’t around to receive it, is she?”

“Who’s to say what the plan might have been?” Mr. Burke was still busy with the ashes, a male Cinderella, industriously sorting lentils. “Perhaps it was meant to look like a robbery gone wrong. The bereaved widow could collect her fortune—and marry her lover.”

Janie was beginning to be sorry she had asked. “Mr. Pruyn.”

Mr. Burke didn’t leave off his work. “Or someone else.”

No. It made a convincing story, but he hadn’t known Annabelle and Bay. “That sounds like the plot of a play.”

“Speaking of plays…” Mr. Burke sat back on his knees, holding a charred piece of paper. “What’s this?”

Janie scooted closer, her skirts tangling around her knees. It looked like a theater program, or what was left of one. The legend ALI BABA THEATRE ran across the top of the page.

Below, in smaller letters, was the name of the manager, half-illegible with soot, and below that, larger again, EVERY EVENING, AT 8:25, THE NEW BURLESQUE, IN TWO ACTS, ENTITLED ELEVEN AND ONE NIGHTS.

Scrolling script read, THE ALI BABA THEATRE PRESENTS and then in bold TWELFTH NIGHT UP TO DATE.

Only the ragged ends of the dramatis personae remained below, starting with “Viola … Miss Geor—”

Janie reached for the scrap. “May I?”

Mr. Burke relinquished the paper. A bit more crumbled away from the bottom. “Why save a theater program? And why burn it?”

Janie gently turned the scrap over. Nothing remained on the back but a bit of a colored illustration, a pair of shapely legs in breeches.

“People save all sorts of absurd things.” A half-forgotten scrap of memory from that first summer at Newport, Bay being ribbed about his sudden marriage by Teddy, answering with his usual mix of humor and reserve. “Bay … Bay did say once that Twelfth Night had brought them together. I had thought he meant a drawing room discussion of the play. Perhaps they met at a performance?”