Fool Me Twice (25 page)

Of course, walking toward her. It did not even surprise him. He felt as though he had been walking toward her for months. Of course she had been in the garden.

As he’d looked at her in the fresh air, he had felt himself waking from a dream. As they had spoken, the difficulty of the first step had seemed to recede into old history, becoming half remembered, dim at the edges, like a memory twenty years old. What had kept him inside for so long? The outdoor air felt like an electric shock, sharp and wild like liquor in his nose, his throat, his chest.

This girl was beautiful. The garden was beautiful. He had kissed her once, and he could kiss her again. But he owed her better; he saw that, suddenly, for it was she who had drawn him out, her and only her whom he would have walked toward.

She left the garden first, hesitantly, looking back at him from the door to check if he would be all right. Her generosity, her kindness of spirit, came home to him all at once; she did not owe him that look, or anything else. God save her from herself.

“I’ll be all right,” he said, and she blushed and pretended not to know what he meant, and then walked on very quickly, soon swallowed by the dimness of the interior.

A minute later, he followed—intending to go upstairs, to finish the letter to his brother, to write, perhaps, to propose a meeting. But the house was so dark.
He wondered suddenly if the darkness might not grip him again. Where was she?

He was letting her go, for her sake. He must do this by himself.

And so, instead, he found himself in the entry hall, at the front door. The porter leapt up, goggling, but Alastair opened the door himself.

He walked down the front steps onto the pavement. How easily this world he’d abandoned now received him again. He laughed. The ground beneath him felt solid, and his feet, his calves and knees and thighs, so flexible, so ready for the challenge. He stood a minute at the bottom of his stairs, surveying the empty park, the shuttered houses across the street. His neighbors, of course, had gone away for the cold season. Scotland, Italy, Cannes. He could do that, too, if he liked.

It was too much. He would think only of this square block for now, everything within his view.

He walked across the street into the park. Here, beneath the shadow of the bare-branched elms, he sat and watched the wind play in the grass, which somehow was still green, though the leaves had all gone. The bird had not been dead. Nor was the garden, really. Other birds still inhabited the branches. Bugs crawled through the grass. A rabbit had slipped through the bushes near the wall as Mrs. Johnson had asked him if she was needed at the interview.

She deserved his respect. He would find her an excellent place, and remove her from his reach as soon as possible—today would not be too soon for her. For
her.
Not for him.

A flock of birds passed overhead, bound for warmer climes.

A superstitious man would have believed that
she
had brought the bird back to life. Ages past, she might have been called a witch.

He took a deep breath and forced his thoughts away from her. He focused on his own house rising before him, its somber, elegant face. It had looked just so since his boyhood. It had looked just so through all the havoc that had transpired within it during this last year. Here was the face shown to the world in his stead. Passersby, glancing at this house, would not have guessed the state of the man within it. He realized this with some surprise.

It had a good face, this house. Dark brick, shining windows, gargoyles in the eaves.

He felt her presence in it like a lodestone, a talisman against the dark. But she was not his to keep. She deserved a good life, a good man, an honorable arrangement, for such things still mattered to her. And if she stayed, ah, God, but he would ruin her; he would willingly, instantly, ferociously, joyously—

He rose. He thought about walking farther, but decided against it; it felt safer to keep the house in his sights. He looked up at it again, seeing it as himself, feeling its solidity as an extension of his own.

A hackney drew up. It disgorged a single passenger, a woman hunched by age, in mourning weeds. Not Mrs. Wright, alas. She had refused to resume her old position; had chosen instead to accept Marwick’s offer of a pension, and live out her retirement in Shropshire. But she had recommended an old friend, who had lost her home when her nephew had died. Mrs. Denton, this woman was called.

Mrs. Denton did not notice him as she climbed his
steps. She was shaped like a barrel, exactly as a housekeeper should be. He would offer her the post as a favor to Mrs. Wright, by way of atonement for that shoe he’d hurled at her.

But most of all, he would offer her the post because he didn’t want to. It was for Olivia Johnson’s sake that he would offer her the position.

*  *  *

Olivia began the search feeling calm, numb even. She did not wish to break the chest unless she had to, and the quantity of papers had multiplied in her absence, appearing on the nightstand, taking up a new shelf on the bookcase. But as she searched, heedless of what she knocked over, or pages she ripped in her haste, her actions began to summon a different mood. She tore through the papers as though she were in the grip of some silent, unfolding hysteria.

This was a nightmare. Betraying him, stealing from him. She must get through it as quickly as possible. There was no saying how long the interview would last. He might appear at any moment. Or Vickers, or Jones.

The collection on the nightstand proved useless. She moved to the bookcase, where new papers sat haphazardly stacked, or sandwiched between volumes by Melville and Aurelius, Plato and Cervantes. As she drew out the new bunch, she recoiled, recognizing the handwriting. It belonged to the late duchess.

She flipped through the letters quickly to confirm they were all of a kind. She tried to blind herself to the words, but she could not help but see that none of them were addressed to the duke.

How must it have felt for him to read this filth? In
her letters to Bertram, the duchess had boasted of how easily she coaxed Marwick to reveal his political secrets; how her single miscarriage had so frightened him that he never protested when she demanded to sleep alone; how he nursed not a single suspicion that she looked elsewhere for pleasure. She reviled him as a gullible, impotent fool.

Yet Olivia had never seen those faults in him. Other faults, certainly: too much pride, too little faith in himself, and perhaps, once upon a time, too much faith in his wife. But cruelty? No. An easy dupe? By no means; his eyes saw far too much. And as for impotence . . . Olivia had felt evidence to the contrary.

His wife had not seen him clearly. Her reasons for it, Olivia could not begin to guess. But the duchess’s most common jibe—that Marwick wholly misread her—was materially contradicted by these letters, the ink of which was blurred and smeared, the creases thinned. Each page had been handled repeatedly, folded and unfolded again and again.

She stared at the lot.
I should burn them.
Reading them would not aid his recovery.

But it was not her right to decide that for him.

She put them back, carefully replacing the book that had lain atop them—then paused, frowning, and gave the book a little shake.

It was hollow.

Holding her breath, she opened the cover—and discovered, nestled in the carved-out innards, his pistol.

A chill ghosted down her spine.
I am not that kind of thief. I have a specific purpose here.

But the purpose was self-defense. And a pistol would aid that cause immeasurably.

Undecided, she carried the pistol over to the foot of the bed, laying it on the carpet before turning to the matter of the locked chest.

As she had feared, the lock was not simple, and refused to yield to her hairpin. But Lilah, the thief turned typist, had contended with such locks. She had said once (as Amanda had gasped with shock, throwing Olivia pointed, censuring looks, looks that condemned her for encouraging such talk) that when a lock was complex, it was easier to leave it locked; to attack whatever it was attached to, instead.

Olivia had prepared for this. She had stolen a small hatchet from the garden shed. She was crafty like a thief; perhaps she was born to it, this state of evil her natural mode. How awful. She would not think of it.

There was a fractional gap between the brass plating of the lock and the wood of the chest. She fit the edge of the axe into this gap and pried. The plate loosened just enough to permit her to crack the trunk open. But the opening was not wide enough for her hand.

On a deep breath, she slammed the blade down into the gap. The clang was so loud that her heart stopped; she hunched there, daring not to breathe, waiting to be discovered.

But nobody came. She heard nothing save the deep silence of idle afternoon: the maids had completed their morning rounds, and the staff was now gathered for a late luncheon that Olivia herself had scheduled, on the pretext that they should all be together, should the housekeeper be offered the position and wish to meet them.

Her own absence would raise brows, no doubt. But everyone would think they understood it. Sour over
being replaced, surely she would not desire to meet the new housekeeper.

She laid down the axe. Now she could see the mechanism of the lock, the cylindrical shaft that pierced the body of the chest. She grasped the edges of the plate, braced her foot against the chest for ballast, and pulled. It required her to rock the lock from side to side, but she made a millimeter of progress, and then another. Her arm and shoulder began to burn; she allowed herself ten seconds’ rest, to recover her breath and let her muscles ease, before resuming. Another millimeter—now a quarter inch, all at once—

The lock came out in her hand.

She looked at what she had done, and she was shocked. Fear, true fear, was a cold ringing note, like the first note that opened a symphony, a single pure tone that built and built, until it shuddered out through the air, and the orchestra joined in, and became a maelstrom.

There would be no disguising what she had done to this trunk. At his first step into the bedroom, he would see it and know.

She threw up the lid. A sob burst from her. The chest held nothing. Nothing of interest. A wreath of dry roses. A wedding dress of antique gold lace, scented heavily with lavender. She pawed it aside and found hidden in one of its flounces a photograph: Marwick standing beside a small, fox-faced brunette, a woman with a face like a heart, with eyes that were long and exquisitely formed, a smile like a cat’s.

Olivia stared at the woman. Margaret de Grey, late Duchess of Marwick. She was as perfectly formed as a porcelain miniature. Dark and sultry, her cupid’s-bow
mouth naturally glamorous. She wore a collar of diamonds that a czarina might have envied. And she had had him, and she had discounted and abused him. Why? How could she have done it?

There was no time for this.

Olivia put down the photograph and groped under the dress—then gasped as her hands closed on smooth leather.

Gently, so as not to rip the dress (But why not? Why mustn’t she rip it? It should be ripped. It should be burned;
why
did he save these things?), she pulled out the portfolio.

He keeps a dossier . . .

Margaret de Grey had no doubt lied about many things—but she hadn’t lied about this. The papers inside were organized into neat, alphabetized sections, the names familiar to those who followed politics: Abernathy. Acton. Albemarle. Axelrod. Barclay. Balham.

Bertram
.

She slid out the papers, replaced the portfolio beneath the dress, and turned once more to the picture.

Marwick looked so young in the photograph. There was a hint of a smile on his lips—not sarcastic, not ironic. He looked full of life, hope, energy.

He had deserved so much better than the woman beside him.

He deserved so much better than to be thieved from by his housekeeper.

She sat paralyzed, gripped by numb horror. Her valise was already packed. Once below, nobody would stop her from slipping out the back passage to the street. Why was she about to weep? Why could she not look away from his face?

It is too late. You have done it. The lock is ruined. He will know. It is
done.

“Good-bye, Alastair,” she whispered. “Be better. Be well.”

“What,” came his cool reply from behind her, “are you doing?”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Fear was a chasm that opened beneath her, stealing her balance as Marwick stalked toward her. She stumbled backward until her shoulders hit the wall. “I—I wasn’t . . .”

His face was terrible, rigid with rage. He looked from her, to the trunk, and then back to her. The smile that corrupted his mouth seemed to carry fangs in it.

“You are stealing from me,” he said. “Mrs. Johnson.”

“No.” But she was. “You don’t understand . . .”

It was his expression that silenced her. The way his rage collapsed suddenly and completely into contempt. “Don’t I?” He studied her now as he might some peculiar specimen of trash, distasteful, tediously in the way. “What don’t I understand?”