When Olivia woke the next morning, it was to a creeping feeling of doom. She could not even trace it back to Bertram, for it descended from above, from the room where the Duke of Marwick stewed in his villainous lair.
She breakfasted in the privacy of the sitting room attached to her sleeping quarters. Through the walls came the muffled conversation of the staff taking their meal at the long table in the gallery. To her ears, the gabble seemed muted, bereft of its typical boisterousness. Perhaps somebody—probably Vickers—had spread word about last night.
When she stepped out to give the maids their duties, her suspicion was confirmed. Polly, Muriel, and Doris greeted her very meekly, and as they filed out, Muriel whispered, “You’re very brave,” before dashing off.
Brave? Vickers must have gotten a garbled tale from Jones. Olivia did not feel brave at all. She felt, all at once, oppressed. The duke was not her concern. He could live or die as he wished.
Indeed, as long as he lived until she had a chance to search his house, she would be content.
That is awful, she thought, scowling. She did not really mean it. She was not wicked. She did wish the best for him—even if he did not deserve it.
Snapping out of her reverie, she found herself paused on the stairs. The tumult within her had drawn her to a stop—exactly the kind of inaction she could not afford.
Today, she resolved, she would begin her search. For tomorrow, no doubt, the maids would rediscover their contempt for her, and begin to flirt with the footmen again, luring them into dark rooms where Olivia had rather not be discovered, nose-deep in the duke’s belongings.
All summer, the garden had hummed. From the darkness of his bedroom overlooking the flowers, Alastair had listened to the cacophony. Bees knocking into the window. The rattle of squirrels playing along the ledge. In the early morning, the birdsong leaking through the panes had woken him in a fury, his head pounding.
He’d wanted nothing of summer. This house would be his grave. Drunk, enraged, he’d cursed the life in the garden.
Now, on a late October morning, he woke to silence. The garden was dead. He could feel its sterility. Its silence pressed against the curtained windows like a fist ready to explode through the glass.
The silence, so loud, bore a message for him: he had missed something crucial, let it pass by. Now it would never return for him.
He rose. (Why? What point?) The long mirror atop his dressing table showed a lean face and sunken eyes, the face of a starving wolf. “Damn you,” he said to the mirror. His eyes burned; his lip curled, exposing teeth.
Once, he wielded this sneer in Parliament, a handy tool to silence his opponents. Now it functioned only to silence himself.
He resisted it. “Will you not go outside?” he snapped.
Outside: a crush of eyes to watch him. Countless mouths poised to spread news of him. Look at what he has become. England’s hope, they once called him. Thoughts of that world, the eyes, the mouths, swarmed over him, nested in his chest, and grew heavy like stone. It crushed the breath from his lungs to think of the world outside.
In the world’s memory, he was a statesman. Not a fool or a cuckold, not a man whose hubris had blinded him to his own idiocy.
Let the world remember that other man, then—even if, in retrospect, he had always been a lie, after all.
Kneeling, Alastair commenced his calisthenics. Twelve years ago, drunk at a pub in Oxford, his friends had paid an old soldier to show them his mettle. He had led them through his army routine, and none of them—save the soldier—had gotten through it without puking.
That might have been owed to the alcohol. But the routine was punishing. As Alastair pushed himself off the ground, there seemed to be nothing but bile in him. He welcomed the sensation. He had followed this routine for four weeks now, needing the exhaustion that followed. Exhaustion was the only cure for this acid in his veins, the restlessness that built like ground glass, the rage.
Once finished, his labored breath searing his throat, he laid his forehead atop his drawn-up knees and let the sweat cool on his skin. Here, now, only now, once a day, was the game he would allow himself to play, having earned it with physical exertion:
This silence might be any silence. This time, any time.
It is four years ago, or five. The beginning of it all. His wife is dressing in the adjoining apartment. If her mood is happy, then she sings to herself as she tries on jewels. She is dressing for a party. Every night brings parties: a politician requires friends, resources to use and abuse.
Perhaps the party is here. Margaret is an excellent hostess, as celebrated for it as her husband is for his good deeds, his noble causes, his leadership. You chose very wisely, someone has told him. She will make a fine wife for a prime minister one day. How the compliment gratifies him. How well Margaret looks on his arm, and how cleverly she converses.
But it cannot be four years ago. It must be five. Four years ago, Fellowes returned to town. And there it began. Fellowes, Nelson, Barclay, Bertram . . .
Alastair lifted his head. He was done with this mantra, these names of the men with whom she betrayed him. He had read her letters so many times now that he might have recited them like soliloquies, speeches from some lewd and puerile script.
My husband is a fool; he has no inkling of who I am, what I do.
He believes the bill will pass, I tell you. But he worried last night that Dawkins would waver, if only somebody knew to push him. So go find Dawkins, and promise him a few coins, and the bill will die on the floor.
I lie next to my husband at night and burn for you . . . I imagine his hands are yours, and then I open my eyes and want to wretch . . .
He stared at the broken shards of glass along the baseboard. Why were they there? After a moment, it came to him: these were the remnants of the bottle he’d thrown . . . when?
He had thrown it at the girl who had said, I am no girl. When had that been? In his memory, her voice seemed strangely clear, cutting through the murky sewage of his rotted brain. He recalled the vividness of her red hair, and her unusual height; but her face, in his memory, was blank, a pale and featureless oval. What he recalled instead was his own reflection in her spectacles. The reflection of a beast.
Looking at himself, he had wondered how she did not recoil. How she dared to face him so boldly.
He ran his thumbs now over his scraped knuckles. He had hit a low point, no doubt. Bullying women; that was what he did now, it seemed.
But she had not yielded her ground even then. She had challenged him again. She must be deranged. Not as deranged as he, though.
He remembered touching her, meaning to teach her a lesson in obedience. But now all he remembered was the feel of her lip. Soft. For a moment only, sensation had sparked along his skin, and it had not felt like pain.
But how predictable. His father had molested the servants. Any number of maids. Four years ago, five, Alastair had known he would never be like his father—that leering, raging, lecherous bull. Even a year ago, he had known it.
Known it. Ha. A fool knew many things, very few of them true.
But when had the girl come in here? Yesterday? Two days ago? Twenty?
Time passes without him now. He is trapped in this moment, which never changes. And he dares not leave it, for if he does, everything will change. The world will cease to remember how it once saw him. Instead, it will see his new face: violent, broken, shattered, murderous.
These shards on the floor, he sees, are his ambitions, his ideals, his foolish presumptions: I will be nothing like my father when I am a man. I will not repeat his mistakes.
The silence from the garden reverberates.
Olivia started her search in the library, but the very promising cabinets turned out to be filled with maps—so many, and some so ancient, that it appeared some duke had nursed an obsession for them.
She went next to the study, which she had instructed the maids to clean first today. As she turned on the lights, she saw proof of their shoddy job in the dust lining the edge of the carpet.
She gritted her teeth. This was not her concern. She was not really a housekeeper.
She turned the dead bolt behind her. Most studies were humbly furnished, the better to receive tradesmen. But this chamber, with its thick Turkish carpet and oak wainscoting, spoke of loftier pastimes: the business and politicking of great men. To think that Marwick had once been known as a master statesman! A Cato for modern times, incorruptible, the champion of the poor. Ha!
Yet amid this silent grandeur, the vacant desk and its bare blotter disturbed her. They seemed proof of tragedy, something gone horribly wrong.
She forced herself to shrug away the thought. Yes, something had gone wrong: Marwick had married a wicked woman. What of it? He’d probably given the duchess ample reason to despise him. Perhaps, for instance, he’d thrown things at her.
She tugged at the top drawer of the desk. Finding it locked, she plucked a hairpin from her chignon. It took a single prod to coax the latch to yield. This talent was courtesy of the typing school, where she’d sat to the left of a future viscountess, and to the right of a former pickpocket, Lilah, who had firmly believed no girl should ever be baffled by a lock. Secretaries were a very interesting bunch.
The drawer contained several ledgers. She removed her spectacles, which did tend to blur things, and discovered that these were records of income from the duke’s estates. The notes grew illegible in August 1884; by September of that year, they ceased.
As the significance dawned on her, she recoiled. In August, Marwick’s wife had died. And shortly thereafter, he had discovered how she’d betrayed him.
She brought the ledger closer. Like the photographs of crime scenes printed in the newspaper, Marwick’s handwriting exerted a morbid fascination. Here, grief had made his hand shake. And here, his grief had darkened and twisted, becoming something so awful that it had finally silenced his pen completely.
Bah. So he was human. What of it? He was a terrible human. She would not pity him.
She moved on to the next drawer, which yielded a set of twine-bound folders. Within, she found drafts of speeches, records of parliamentary proceedings, notes on debates in the Commons and Lords.
As she looked through them for Bertram’s name, she felt increasingly, unwillingly curious. Was this how politics got conducted? Documented here was a history of frustrated negotiations, of visions dashed by corruption and the recalcitrance of supposed allies. These papers did not tell of a puppet master, but of a man who struggled for compromises, and who employed elegant, impassioned rhetoric (here was a draft of one of Marwick’s most famous speeches, on the importance of primary education) to persuade others of the justness of his cause.
These records belonged to an idealist.
She shoved them away as if they burned.
The final drawer yielded a slim stack of personal correspondence—very promising. Her heart leapt when she saw Bertram’s signature, but the next moment, she cast it down in disgust—it was only a note of thanks for a dinner party. The next sheet was a draft, much scribbled upon, concerning . . .
A gasp escaped her. This was a love letter!
I have wracked my brain for a way to heal this breach between us. I promise you, Margaret, that you are wrong to think I don’t care for you. When I envision my life, you are at the center of it. Without you, I see only an Eden after the fall: empty, imperfect, broken . . .
Her own curiosity suddenly revolted her. She cast down the letter. It had nothing to do with Bertram. She was not the kind of low woman who pried into other people’s business for pleasure.
Or was she? Sometimes, lately, it seemed she was losing pieces of herself, all her most cherished convictions: I am innocent; I am wronged; I did not deserve any of this. Instead, she was discovering new things about herself, terrible things. Just look what she had done to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Chudderley led a fast life, treated her staff too familiarly, and offered no Christian example of temperance and virtue. But despite her life as a flibbertigibbet, she was also generous, thoughtful, and kind. She could have used the duchess’s letters to blackmail Marwick into endorsing her marriage to his brother. Instead, she had decided to do the honorable thing and hand them over to him.
And so Olivia had stolen some and fled.
But what choice had she had? For so long, Olivia’s only ambition had been to hide—first at the typing school, and then as a secretary to an elderly widow in Brighton, and finally, most happily, in Elizabeth’s employ.
But at Elizabeth’s house party this summer, a guest had pulled Olivia aside to mention her resemblance to a portrait he had glimpsed in the private study of his friend Lord Bertram. Olivia had realized then that it was time to run again. For the first time, the thought had made her angry.
She made herself retrieve the papers. But now she scanned them mechanically, her mind elsewhere.
As a rash eighteen-year-old, she had assumed Bertram, being in his forties and somewhat wrinkled, would die soon enough. Seven years later, she knew differently. He might live for four more decades. And his mania was not fading. Her very existence was evidently an intolerable offense to him.
Must she spend the next forty years in flight? Would she never be allowed to truly live? For the first time, this summer, she had wondered if she might not try to fight instead of flee.
Her opponent was far above her. Bertram was an aristocrat, with the resources to match his barony. But he had made a mistake. He had connived with the Duchess of Marwick, and she had passed his letters onward. Olivia had stolen several of them—and one of particular interest, in which he had written to the duchess:
Concerning these “dossiers,” as you call them, I can do nothing but express my disgusted astonishment. The notion that Marwick would compile secret information on those who consider him a friend—well, it fills me with such profound distaste that I cannot express the half of it.
I cannot imagine what information he might think to hold over me. But for the sake of opposing his espionage, I will gladly support your efforts to undo him.
Olivia did not believe for an instant that the dossier would substantiate Bertram’s virtues. He was a man too viciously devoted to his own authority. Why, when an eighteen-year-old girl had chosen to make her own way rather than live under his thumb, he had sent an assassin to crush her. Would such a man prove more virtuous in his other dealings? Whatever this dossier contained, it was likely the key to disarming him for good. She must find it.
But it was not in this pile. As she put her glasses back on, her stomach felt twisted into knots. Thomas Moore would be combing the city for her. Meanwhile, servants talked, and she knew how they would describe their new housekeeper. A redhead who stood as tall as a man? The moment Moore caught wind of that gossip . . .
The bookcase to her right held nothing but folders. She stared at them, debating with herself. It would take hours to comb through so many files.
But her time, even now, was running out.
She rose and took two folders, all she could safely conceal in her skirts. And then, steeling herself, she started for the door. Yes, she was a thief. Yes, it was wretched. But if Moore caught her, she would be dead.