He shrugged. “I like the sound of it.” A pause. “As long as he’s not the murderer.”
“He is not. He is…” Violet hesitated as memories of the embrace flooded in.
“You look well, Vi—Your Grace."
“I am well.” She tried to suppress her smile but failed. “One o’clock, Kit. The area door.”
At one o’clock Violet stood at the morning room window holding a letter she’d been reading. Through the gap in the drapes, she watched her maid come up the area steps. Sarah was wearing a good grey cloak and her good black bonnet and set off toward Oxford Street. Thirty seconds later a man in a brown coat detached himself from the railings opposite and was gone the same direction.
Violet put down the letter and went to find her husband.
He was waiting at the foot of the east stairs with a ring of keys in his hand and no footman anywhere in sight.
“She has gone. Kit is following.”
“Good. We shall proceed as planned.”
The room Henry unlocked was the largest on the corridor, two doors from his mother’s. It was a bedchamber by its bones, though no bed stood in it now. He went in first and folded back the shutters, and the grey afternoon came down on what the room held. Violet stood on the threshold and understood she had been wrong to think herself prepared.
It held three women.
Their things stood in three provinces, distinct as parishes: furniture and trunks and bandboxes, each province arranged with care around its own dressing table, its own chairs, as though three small rooms had been lifted whole and set down side by side. Against the inner wall, three tall shapes stood sheeted.
Violet looked at the nearest province and saw that scarcely a film of dust was on Margaret’s trunks, where Catherine’s wore five years of grey film. The province by the window, the oldest, she did not need to ask whose that was. Three women’s lives, waiting to claim her as their own. Violet stood at the threshold and was not prepared for the magnitude of how she felt.
Henry had gone to the sheeted shapes. He stood before them a moment, and then he drew the sheets, one after another.
“Elizabeth,” he announced, revealing several paintings including one large portrait of a young woman with blonde hair, holding wildflowers in her hands.
“She looks kind,” Violet said quietly.
“She was,” he said.
The second sheet came away: a woman painted very nearly laughing, against every convention of portraiture, her head half-turned as if the painter had given up making her be still and painted the failure instead. “Catherine,” he said. Violet tried not to think about the openness with which Catherine must have laughed with the duke. How could he not have loved her when she laughed like that?
“And Margaret.” She was composed with her hands folded. There was guardedness about the eyes.
Violet said nothing and went to work. Elizabeth’s province came first. The poppy-coloured shawl lay over the back of her own chair as though she had that moment gone down to dinner; the fan was on her dressing table, its guard-stick snapped and mended with silk thread, and then snapped again lower down and mended again, lovingly and badly.
Violet glanced at her husband and studied his expression. His face gave away nothing which might have been telling. She chose not to dwell on it. They had a mission to accomplish.
Catherine’s came next.
The medicine case was at the bottom of the second bandbox, a neat mahogany thing with its key in its lock. Henry held the lamp toward the failing window light and said nothing while Violet went through it bottle by bottle.
Rosewater. A liniment gone to wax. Paregoric, half-gone. Hartshorn. All of it orderly, all of it innocent. Violet was about to close it when she saw what she had been looking past. One socket, second row, standing empty. One bottle was missing.
She lowered her face to the empty socket and breathed in, and at the very bottom of the velvet, something fetid turned over in its sleep. “One bottle is missing. I cannot discern what it was.”
Violet left the pharmacy and went through the rest of her belongings. The reticule. The glovebox. And in the pocket of thedressing gown, folded over its own trunk-tray, her fingers found a handkerchief, wadded small, gone stiff at its centre with an old brown stain.
She breathed it warm in her cupped hands, and there it was. Fetid. Heavy. Green-sweet underneath, like a mouse dead in a wall where flowers had been. Once smelled, never mistaken; her mother had made her smell it repeatedly at twelve or thirteen precisely so she would never forget it.
“Henbane,” she said. “Cousin of belladonna. She was wiping it off the glass, or off her own lips, night after night, and carrying this in her pocket.” She folded that handkerchief with great care. “Henbane unsteadies, before it does anything else. The limbs go heavy, the head swims.” She looked up at him, and then up at the portrait of the woman painted nearly laughing. “A strong dose will make a woman seem drunk.”
Henry looked at the stained square of linen in his wife’s hands for a long moment.
“She took her composing drops the night she died,” he said. “Sarah gave evidence of it at the inquest. That she’d been restless for weeks, and took her drops, and went out before anyone woke.”