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“That’s what your husband wanted to change before he died. To give her the business as well as the money.”
“Yes. But I hardly cared. The business is not truly mine. I will sell it, and I will appreciate the proceeds, but I do not need them. I have enough to live very comfortably.”
“You mean start your own business,” Sarah murmurs.
“Certainly not. I am going to retire to a house in the country, where I shall put on grand dinner parties and rarely rise from my very comfortable divan.”
Sarah looks at me. “That is a joke. She will start her own business. She would go mad otherwise.”
“If the police investigate, they’ll want to see the will and your investment portfolio,” I say.
“Investment portfolio? What a fancy name for it.” She waves a hand. “They shall have what they require. My papers are at the ready. Now, Isla? Are you going to provide your sister with a cup of tea? Or must I go begging for refuge elsewhere?”
“Come in. I’ll ask Mrs. Wallace to fix us something.”
THIRTY
I don’t go with Annis and Isla for tea. I am still the maid, and I can’t raise Annis’s suspicions higher. Also, I need time to think things through. I stay in the courtyard, leaning on the wrought-iron fence, staring into the poison garden. I barely have time to focus my thoughts before a soft voice says, “Miss Mitchell?”
I glance to see Sarah with the back door open. I think she’s inviting me in, but then she steps out and shuts the door behind her.
“May I speak to you?” she says.
I nod, and she comes to stand beside me.
“I can only imagine what you must think of Annis,” she says after a moment.
I make a noncommittal noise.
Sarah continues, “She would hate to hear me saying this, but she is not as terrible as she seems. Not as terrible as she wishes to be seen. Perhaps not even as terrible as she wishes tobe.”
Another noncommittal noise.
“Annis is many things, most of them making her difficult and even unlikable.”
“I do not think she wants to be likable.”
Sarah sighs. “That is the problem, Miss Mitchell. I do not merely tease when I call her a perverse creature. She delights in being difficult, in doing and saying the unexpected and the ill-advised, and I fear it will…”She swallows. “I fear it will take her to the gallows, and she will not see it coming until the noose is around her neck.”
“It’s easy to be difficult when one never has to suffer the consequences.”
Sarah lowers her gaze. “That is true. I did not grow up in the same circumstances as Annis. My family was respectable but poor, and it is quite a different thing. Annis never understood that. She would chide me for accepting a tutor’s harsh words, while I was only happy to have a tutor, which I only did by the grace of her dear mother. If Annis balked or skipped lessons, the tutor didn’t dare even tell her mother. If I had done the same, he’d have refused to teach me. There were so many things she could do that I could not, and she would grow very cross with me for not defying convention more…”
Sarah shakes it off. “That has nothing to do with the current situation.”
“Which is that you fear Lady Leslie will tie her own noose by doing things like telling me this used to be her garden when there was no need to do so.”
“Yes.”
“She was still correct that it would have looked suspicious if it came out later. Also, it was a secret she otherwise needed Mrs. Ballantyne and Dr. Gray to keep, as they knew it was her garden. That wouldn’t be fair, though I doubt that was her primary concern.”
“Do not be so certain. Annis would find it difficult to admit she is concerned for her siblings. For some women, sentimentality can feel like weakness.”
“Because we are told we are emotional creatures, sentimental and silly, and to be taken seriously we must disown those parts of ourselves. I am not certain how attachment to one’s family is sentimentality, though. Disengagement feels more like distancing, which is understandable if those family members have done something to deserve it. If they have not?” I shrug.
Sarah drops her gaze more and fidgets. “I spent my youth making apologies for Annis, to those who could not understand my attachment. I told myself that if I ever returned to her favor, I would no longer do that. But it is no less difficult now than it was before.”
I’m about to say something when the coach appears in the mews, Gray swinging out of it before it has fully stopped.
