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“The work you interrupted was work on the case. I would very much like to get your opinion on my theories and conclusions… unless offering to leave me alone was your polite way of sayingyouwould like to be alone.”
“If I wanted that, I’d say so.”
“Good.” He rises from the desk. “Whisky or brandy?”
“Unless you have beer, it’s always going to be whisky.”
TWENTY-ONE
As we go through Gray’s notes, I realize how different his brain is from mine. I’ve been called methodical, which always implies “plodding.” I much prefer “organized.” I’m very structured and meticulously organized. That extends to my life, too. I am single-minded in my goals, sometimes to the exclusion of everything else, like losing track of my social life in my pursuit of a spot on the major-crimes squad.
Once I realized I wasn’t going home soon, my first step was to rearrange Catriona’s bedroom. I’ve had people tease me about being OCD, which pisses me off, but only because it’s joking about a serious condition. I like organization. That’s how my brain functions best. Seeing a mess makes me wonder how anyone can relax in that room.
As Gray said, I keep case notes. I’m not obsessive about it, but I do like to organize my thoughts. I write everything down, and when I’m considering a theory, I start a new page and rewrite the clues as they support or fail to support that theory.
This is not how Gray’s brain operates. I should have realized that. I’ve watched him madly scribbling. Or it looks like mad scribbling, but when I’ve seen his handwriting, it’s enviably perfect. That, as I’ve come to realize, is less a personal trait than the product of a Victorian education. In a world without computers, your handwriting must be legible. Mine is average for the twenty-first century, but to him, it’s atrocious.
Despite perfect penmanship, his notes are… Well, they take a whileto decipher, and when I do, I’m both bemused and a little envious. It reminds me of my one and only university math course. The prof would scrawl across an old-fashioned blackboard, all these numbers and equations that my brain struggled to process because it looked more like modern art than mathematics.
Gray has covered the pages in notes, written horizontal, vertical, and diagonal, all of them connected by arrows with more writing on the arrows, some of those lines slashed out. Once I start to read, I see what he’s doing. Taking data and making connections between the pieces and speculating on other connections and ruling out some of them as implausible. It’s messy but brilliant, and the envy comes from that part of me that stings at being called methodical, the part that feels as if my intelligence is a very ordinary sort, where getting an A means working my ass off, while people like Gray would need to work tonotget an A.
We discuss his findings, and that makes me feel a little better, because he obviously values my opinion and, in the end, he hasn’t found anything that I don’t have in my much more mundane notes.
There’s no obvious connection between the victims, beyond the fact that they all seem to have been shitty husbands. This, unfortunately, puts us where we don’t want to be: with the wives poisoning their husbands, having obtained that poison from the same third party.
Embedded in the concept of a “poisoning ring” is the idea that the women find out about the poisoner from a mutual friend. Like lamenting that your hairdresser is retiring, and a friend tells you about hers.
That would imply that Lady Annis Leslie knew either Mrs. Young or Mrs. Burns. A countess knowing the wife of a gravedigger or the wife of a shady salesman. In the modern world, this wouldn’t be implausible, though it would be most likely a service relationship—one of the younger women being Annis’s manicurist or cleaning lady. While that concept still works here, there would be a buffer between them. Not a manicurist or a cleaning lady, but a laundress or a seamstress… whom Annis would only access through a staff member. Also, from what McCreadie could glean, both Mrs. Young and Mrs. Burns worked at home. Yes, we know Mrs. Young had another occupation, but “nude model” seems unlikely to have brought her into contact with Annis.
We spend two hours—and two glasses of whisky—going over Gray’s notes and then theorizing. Soon, under the influence of booze and a lackof sleep, we’re no longer in our chairs. I’m not quite sure how it happened, only that by the time we’re spitballing theories, we’re both on the floor.
On the floor in a perfectly decorous manner, I might add. Decorous by twenty-first-century standards, that is. Gray sits with his back propped against the bookcase, one long leg stretched, the other bent with his whisky glass held on his knee. I’m cross-legged in the other corner.
I’m listening to Gray talk, and watching him talk, his hands gesturing in a way I don’t ever see unless he’s enrapt in his subject. It’s more than just the hands. He’s taken off his jacket and loosened his cravat, and his hair tumbles over his forehead, and with his beard shadow, he doesn’t look like a Victorian at all. He looks… Well, he just looks like a guy. Like a guy who has joined me in escaping a formal event, maybe a family wedding, and we’re holed up, drinking and talking.
Gray is less than a year older than me, which can be hard to remember, and not only because I’m in a much younger body. Heseemsso much older. Maybe that’s the Victorian in him. But it’s also the responsibility of being thrown into the role of patriarch before his thirtieth birthday.
His brother abdicated, and while Mrs. Gray is clearly the matriarch in a family that places her authority above Gray’s, to the world, Gray is the guy in charge. In charge of his mother, of Isla, maybe even of Annis, now that her husband is dead. That means he can’t afford to be young, but he is here, in this moment, gesticulating and explaining some scientific concept that makes my tipsy brain swim.
When he says, “What’s it like?,” I have to replay the last few sentences, certain I missed something.
“What is… what like?”
“Being…” He gestures at me.
“A woman?”
“No, no. Being in another body. I keep thinking about that. It is not your body, and that must be very disorienting.”
“Disorienting.” I consider. “That is the perfect word for it.”
“Because it is not simply seeing another face in the mirror, but moving in a body that is not your own, that would not feel like your own.” He pulls his legs in to sit cross-legged as he leans forward. “Is it not exactly like your own, I presume?”
“Not atalllike my own.”
“How is it different?”
“Hmm. Well, I’m a few inches taller, for one thing.”
