He had been all goodwill and shining innocence. A man incapable of imagining that somedaymy wifewould signifymy error,my shame,my ineluctable punishment.
“My deepest condolences, my lord. It is a terrible misfortune.”
Slowly he turned his head. Lady Avery stood beside him, peering up.
“A terrible misfortune indeed,” he echoed woodenly, returning his attention to the woman in the ice well.
She looked... ungainly. After the birth of their second child, she had never moved as easily or gracefully as she had earlier. But even so, she would have been displeased, had she seen herself thus: her chin jutting out, her lips slack, her feet inelegantly splayed.
The urge rose to do something so that her posture would have met her own standard of acceptability.
Instead he tightened his fingers into a fist.
Her face, during the years of their marriage, had become squarer, harsher. Despite that, she would have remained lovely for at least another decade, before settling into middle-aged handsomeness, her erstwhile incandescent beauty something for others to reminisce about, and perhaps sigh over.
But death had robbed her of something essential. Her features were very much as he remembered, yet she looked a stranger, and not exactly an attractive one.
Dimly it occurred to him that he didn’t want his children to see her like this. Let them remember the mother they loved as living and beautiful. Let them never witness the corpse that had nothing of her left, bad or good.
“We didn’t know Lady Ingram had returned from Switzerland,” said Lady Avery, her voice an artillery boom in the silence.
He turned to her again, still in a fog of numbness. “Neither did I.”
“How do you suppose she came to be here?”
“I am as bewildered as you are, my lady.” The deep-seated cold of the icehouse enveloped him, seeping in from every pore. He willed himself not to shiver. “Ladies, you will be much more comfortable in the manor. I will wait here for the police.”
“We will wait with you,” said Lady Avery, without a moment’s hesitation. “We don’t mind a little cold.”
“And we are not bewildered,” added her sister. “Only outraged.”
Outraged.
He supposed he ought to be, too. But he couldn’t summon enough outrage, not when Lady Ingram’s choices had led to the deaths of three agents of the Crown. Not when he could have told her that her own untimely demise would be the most likely outcome, once she lost her place at his side and could no longer supply intelligence to Moriarty.
Those who betrayed Moriarty faced execution. And those who became useless—a slightly gentler riddance?
He couldn’t tell how she had died. She wore a promenade dress, which seemed stiff with newness. There were no visible wounds, no markings on the throat, or telltale streaks of blood on her clothes.
He stepped onto the lip of the ice well, intending to get inside and take a closer look.
Someone grabbed him by his coat. “I don’t believe you should touch anything, sir.”
He stared at Lady Somersby. This was his wife. His estranged wife, yes, but his wife nevertheless.
It occurred to him at the end of a very long moment, during which Lady Somersby’s eyes blazed like Lady Justice’s, with her blindfold ripped off, that she meant to prevent him from tampering with the site.
Him.
Fear snaked down his spine.
The gossip ladies believed thathewas responsible for his wife’s death.
That she had never been sent to Switzerland but had instead been murdered in cold blood.
Here in her own home.
7
