Page 97 of The English Wife

Some of the jurymen looked abashed; Janie had no doubt they had all been reading the threepenny papers and enjoying them, too.

“If you would answer the question, Mrs. Newland?”

Anne tilted her head delicately, setting her earrings glinting in the gaslight. “There was a question?”

The coroner measured his words out carefully. “Did you have a meeting planned with your cousin?”

“If I had an illicit tryst planned,” demanded Anne impatiently, “would I have brought my cousin’s sister with me as audience?”

The coroner was unruffled. “My apologies, Mrs. Newland, but we must, within the bounds of decency, explore every avenue. You sought the aid of Mr. Van Duyvil’s sister?”

“She wasn’t dancing,” said Anne with casual cruelty. Or perhaps she didn’t mean it to be cruel. It was a statement of fact; Janie hadn’t been dancing. But that wasn’t what Anne had said when she came to her, Janie was certain. Anne had told her that Mrs. Van Duyvil had sent her. Hadn’t she? “Janie—Miss Van Duyvil—thought my cousin and his wife might be overseeing preparations for the spectacle by the river. So we went out to find them.”

There, for the first time, Anne’s voice faltered.

In that pause, Janie could hear her cousin’s voice calling, over and over, Bay, Bay, Bay. The courtroom was humid with the press of bodies, but Janie felt cold suddenly, cold and alone.

Bay, Bay, Bay …

The coroner’s voice was calm and steady. “Can you tell me, in your own words, what happened after that, Mrs. Newland?”

“You know what happened.” Anne’s voice was brittle. “We found my cousin’s body on the ground in the folly.”

A shock went through the room. At the starkness of her words? Perhaps. Maybe it was just that they were used to innuendo and polite circumlocution. Maybe it was because they knew pain when they heard it.

“Can you describe what you saw?”

For a moment, Anne looked like she would object. But she closed her mouth again and began speaking flatly, methodically. “My cousin went first. I heard her say her brother’s name. I saw her kneel beside him.”

No. That wasn’t how it had happened. Had it? The night was a blur of ice and snow, but Janie could swear, would swear, that it was the other way around. This was Janie’s story Anne was telling, not her own.

Was Anne lying? She had lied before, but Janie couldn’t tell, couldn’t read anything into that closed face, that flat, unemotional voice. Or perhaps it was her own memory that lied.

She had never realized before just quite how much Anne looked like her mother, like the Bayard side of the family. It was there in the lines of her face, the angles of her shoulders, the uncompromising sound of her voice.

“Can you identify this shoe?” The coroner was directing Anne’s attention to the exhibits that had been presented and numbered earlier, the sad collection of items discovered by the river.

“It was Annabelle’s.” Anne’s voice was very flat.

“And this brooch?” A flash of light, a large diamond at the center, surrounded by smaller diamonds radiating out.

“Also Annabelle’s.”

But it wasn’t. Janie looked sharply at Anne. Had it been Anne’s? She wished she had more of an eye for costume. She could remember the necklace in the shape of a B Anne had worn, with its dangling pearls, copied for the occasion from a painting of Anne Boleyn. But had there been a brooch as well? Or had it been Annabelle’s?

No. Annabelle’s costume hadn’t boasted large jewels, much less a diamond the size of a small sun. That, Janie remembered, had annoyed her mother. Which might have been the point of it.

She hadn’t been sure at the time whether her mother was annoyed because Annabelle wasn’t putting on a good showing or because Annabelle’s own restraint had made every other woman look blowsy and overdressed in comparison.

No, the diamond brooch was never Annabelle’s.

But that she had seen it somewhere, Janie knew. It teased at the back of her memory, a glimmer of diamond set against brocade. Just like half the costumes in the ballroom.

“Thank you, Mrs. Newland,” the coroner was saying, and Janie realized she had missed the rest of Anne’s testimony, whatever it might have been. “We shall have an hour’s recess.”

There was the rustle of people stretching stiff limbs, the hushed murmur of voices that gradually grew louder as the coroner rose from his chair, the jurymen abandoned their box, and the aura of solemnity fell away. The room was a room again.

The reporters were jostling each other to get to the telephone in the hallway, to phone their stories in to their editors. Some clever souls bypassed the rush, running to the post office to use the wire. At the back of the room, away from the press bench, Janie thought she caught a glimpse of a familiar brow beneath a battered black hat, but the crowd was shifting and pushing through the doors, and he was lost again.