Page 96 of The English Wife

If she had any friends. The totality of her dependence on Bay weighed on her as it never had before. He wasn’t just her husband; he was her sole companion, her only friend. Vi and Bast were lovely, but they were only babies.

Slowly, Bay rose to his feet, stroking the hair back from her face, looking at her with such love and concern and guilt that Georgie nearly forgot her resolve not to blubber. “I do love you, you know.”

“I know,” Georgie croaked, standing a little unsteadily. “You’d be mad not to, paragon that I am.”

Bay didn’t answer. He only wrapped her in his arms, holding her as though he could fold her into him, and Georgie clutched him back, grateful that he couldn’t see her face, grateful for the scratch of wool against her cheek, breathing in his scent like a sot downing his last bottle of gin.

It was all right. It would all be all right. This was the sensible thing. And familiarity bred contempt after all, didn’t it? Bay could have his little intrigue and she would have her house and their children would grow and play and Mr. Pruyn would go away in time and she would still be here and it would all be as it was.

As it was. Had anything ever been as she thought it was?

But Georgie wouldn’t let herself think that, not now. She could only hold on to her husband with both hands and promise herself that the best way to keep someone was to let him go.

For a time. Only for a time.

Carmel, 1899

February 9

“Do you recall the time?”

“It was just about midnight.” Janie could see the artists on the press bench sketching as rapidly as they could, trying to capture Anne in the act of answering. Anne was chic in deep purple banded with black, the appropriate level of mourning from a married woman to a first cousin.

The coroner consulted his notes. “What made you notice Mr. Van Duyvil’s absence?”

“As I said”—Anne spoke with exaggerated patience—“it was nearly midnight. My cousin and his wife were meant to be opening the German. The German,” she added graciously, “is a customary dance.”

“I trust the members of the jury shall take note of that,” said the coroner, his voice as dry as the papers in front of him.

The coroner was a slight, thin man in a rusty suit with an equally rusty set of whiskers, a seller of patent nostrums by trade. Janie knew that her mother had dismissed him on sight. But there was a shrewdness about him that belied the rustic air of his outdated suit and whiskers.

It was only just past noon, and she had watched the coroner deal efficiently with the parade of official witnesses: the medical examiner, who testified that Bay had been killed by a single blow with a narrow-bladed knife; the police constable who had first been called to the scene; the detective who had been assigned to the case. Watching them, Janie realized that the sense she had had of being marooned, helpless, had been a mirage. While she had slipped away to The World’s offices, the police had been doing their work, interviewing servants, cataloguing evidence, dredging the river.

There was little that was sensational in any of it. The press had begun to grow restless. The reporters from The World, The Journal, The Sun, and The Times fidgeted and checked their pocket watches and the train timetables, craning their necks to try to catch sight of more entertaining witnesses.

But then Anne had been called, and it was as though the courtroom sat up again and took notice. Here was life! Here was color! No dull, droning lists of waiters interviewed or acres of ground searched, but the notorious Mrs. Newland herself, as beautiful in person as on the page.

“Don’t she look like something out of the theater?” Janie heard one woman say loudly to another.

Next to her, her mother’s lips grew a little more pinched. It couldn’t, Janie knew, be easy to see Bay exhumed, again and again, the fatal moment taken to pieces, polished, put back together. Again and again. Like Caesar being stabbed and stabbed and stabbed. Her mother hadn’t only lost a son, she had to relive his passing with each witness, men and women who had never known Bay, for whom this was just another death.

Janie would have taken her mother’s hand, but for the fact that she knew any such gesture would arouse more ire than gratitude. To offer sympathy would be a sign that sympathy was needed and that her mother could not endure.

“Had anyone else remarked on their absence?” inquired the coroner, making a note to himself.

“No,” said Anne. Janie looked up sharply, at the familiar face beneath the purple hat with its short veil. Anne examined her own gloved fingers. “It was a lively event. Everyone was much occupied.”

“And you?” the coroner prompted with remarkable patience. “Why were you not much occupied?”

Anne looked at him over the luxurious fur stole that she had slung about her neck to keep out the drafts of the courtroom. “I had come to Illyria to help my cousin and his wife with the preparations for the ball. My cousin’s wife had been raised in the country; she wasn’t used to entertainments on such a scale.”

She lied so smoothly. Janie’s eyes flicked to the press bench, where the reporters were scribbling down Anne’s words with no appearance of doubt. If Janie hadn’t known better, she would have believed it herself. One of the members of the jury was nodding knowingly, as if in agreement. Of course she had come to help with the entertainment, what else?

Only the coroner seemed unimpressed, although whether it was because he doubted Anne’s testimony or because he was generally unimpressed, Janie couldn’t tell. “Mrs. Newland, there have been”—he gave a delicate cough—“representations made that you might have been pursuing a private meeting with Mr. Van Duyvil.”

Everyone in the courtroom sat up a little straighter. Janie’s mother stared straight ahead, her profile as wooden as the masthead on the prow of a ship.

“Representations?” Anne repeated with scorn. “By the press, you mean? I should have thought that officers of the court would know better than to allow themselves to be led by the fancies of threepenny papers.”