A dark flash in her eyes.
“Did he?” said Mrs. King.
“Yes. He couldn’t speak. I thought the nurse would come; he was making such a racket. But you know how it is upstairs. You can’t hear a thing when the doors are closed.”
The guests were helping themselves to cold cuts, to pieces of ham, to slices of tongue. They gave Miss de Vries sidelong looks, trying to identify Mrs. King. Lockwood smiled at them, his face glassy and pale, moving to obstruct their view. His mind was working furiously: Mrs. King knew the signs. He had the faintest sheen on the surface of his skin, looking around for his clerks, debating whether he needed witnesses.
Mrs. King turned to her sister. Miss de Vries was that, after all. Formed of the same materials. An equal, when all was said and done. “He didn’t say anything else to you?” she asked.
Miss de Vries smiled. “Not another word.”
She folded her hands. So neat, so tidy. The scrag ends of the matter chopped off and swept out of sight. Too clean, Mrs. King thought.
Then Miss de Vries added, voice low, “I should have got rid of you years ago. I should have taken better care.”
Mrs. King shrugged. She did it to hide her anger. “Perhaps I should have got rid of you.”
She saw Miss de Vries react. Pleasure, a vicious bite. The urge to fight.
“Me?”
“We could have done it. The girls and I.”
Miss de Vries paused. A tiny frown appeared on her forehead. She didn’t understand. “The girls?” she repeated.
“Any number of girls, from the sound of things,” said Mrs. King, voice low.
She felt Mr. Lockwood grow still beside them. And she saw Miss de Vries grow even stiller, her face shuttering up.
“Do you know about that, Madam?”
Something strange happened in that careful, watchful gaze.
“Don’t,” she said, voice taut.
Her eyes went sideways, a single rapid glance, to Mr. Lockwood—and then away again. But Mrs. King understood at once. It was fear. Miss de Vries had buried her father, and she wanted everything about him to stay hidden deep, deep in the ground.
Mr. Lockwood raised his hand to his mouth, touched his bruised lip. “I would take care, Mrs. King,” he said.
It made Mrs. King laugh in anger. “Of what?” she said, turning to look fully at him.
His mouth worked a little, choosing insults, jettisoning them. “Everything,” he said, voice heavy.
Miss de Vries took a tiny step backward, away from this. The crowd circling the supper tables had thickened, spiraling, growing closer. Lockwood didn’t seem calm. He was calculating everything, fingers fluttering, eyes going to the ballroom, signaling to his clerks. Mrs. King wondered something, in that moment. Perhaps Madam wasn’t the enemy here? Her fortune might be the greatest adversary of all. It was bigger than both of them, a hurricane all its own. It had been drawn in vast and sweeping lines, great mercantile interests spinning outward, wild, battering the world. But at the center, in the very middle of it all, there was always a calm eye, watching. The Lockwoods and the Shepherds of the world. When they moved, the storm moved with them.
“You should take care,” said Mrs. King to Mr. Lockwood.
Miss de Vries was silent, or silenced, face immobile. Lockwood ignored Mrs. King entirely.
Then a voice pierced the moment.
“Madam?”
One of the under-footmen had crossed the supper room, oblivious to the tension in the air around his mistress. “Your dress, Madam,” he said. “I’ve brought the sewing maid.”
Miss de Vries’s gaze shifted downward, remembering. She reached for her train, unfolded the pleats, revealed the rip in the fabric. “Yes,” she said, voice low. “Yes, fix it.”
Mrs. King felt the room slowing. A figure emerged from the crowd. Pale faced, strained looking.
Alice.
Mrs. King didn’t miss a beat. She controlled her face, looked sharply away. She could feel Alice staring back at her. Don’t, she thought, don’t look at me. This was the worst moment to be brought together. It was too dangerous.
Miss de Vries was shielded a little from the view of the crowd. “Here,” she murmured, snapping her fingers for Alice, pointing at the spoiled inches of her gown. “Down here.”
Mr. Lockwood was watching Alice. “Ah, yes,” he said. “The little sewing maid.”
He looked at Miss de Vries, and she looked back at him sharply.
Mrs. King spotted it. It made her skin burn.
“You have a rare talent, young lady,” said Mr. Lockwood as Alice bent, needle in hand, to study Miss de Vries’s gown. “You must come and tell me how you came by it.”
Alice’s eyes came up fast. She tried to smile, expression scattered, unraveling. She was panicking. It made her look entirely like Mother.
No, thought Mrs. King. Pain: right in her chest.
Miss de Vries kept her eyes fixed on the wall.
“Sir?”
The clerks circled them, still dressed as dominoes. Their costumes seemed ghastly, not fanciful. They had Mrs. King cornered.
“Escort this person outside,” said Mr. Lockwood, casting a quick, backward look at Mrs. King. “At once.”
Miss de Vries’s voice was tight. “But are we clear on our position?”
Lockwood took a moment to answer, but then he squared his shoulders. “This discussion has revealed nothing but circumstantial evidence and gossip.”
The clerks surrounded Mrs. King.
“Wait,” she said, reaching for Alice. But the crowd moved, swallowing her up, pinning Mrs. King to the spot.
In that split second when Alice disappeared from view, Mrs. King felt a weight dropping in her stomach. She had told her women they were equals in this, one and all.
And she’d just fed one of them to the wolves.
Miss de Vries stayed behind her protective wall, her cage of men. “I am going to fix my gown, and take care of my guests, Mrs. King,” she said, voice dangerous. “I don’t expect to see you again.”
32
One hour to go
Mrs. Bone sat in her bedroom, waiting for one of the women to come and get her out. How long could it take to clear the old nurseries? She strained her ears, studying the ceiling. She knew her men were leaving the attics, per their instructions. The heat was gathering, billowing up through the house, through the soles of her feet, racing to her scalp.
She wished she hadn’t been left alone. Her thoughts were preying on her. It was the tiredness, the anticipation—that was all. But the question kept needling her: what use was earning two-sevenths of anything when you could earn the whole lot? She remembered what Archie had said. There are ways of getting out of a contract…
“Could I?” she wondered out loud.
Emptying this house was one thing. Taking Danny’s whole beautiful kingdom was something else altogether. The mines in South Africa, the estates in North America, the holdings in shipping and brewing and steel and gold. They made the house on Park Lane look like nothing. There might be a way to do it. She’d need to take over this whole job. Make a firm negotiation with her niece, Miss de Vries. To carve up the empire between them, in suitable fashion. It deserved to stay on the right side of the family.
Every part of it.
She felt sickened.