Veronica rested her head on his shoulder and allowed the tears to come. She wanted to exorcise the spirits, to leave them here in this graveyard so she didn’t have to carry them with her any longer when they left.
They stayed like that for a few moments, the rain pattering down against their shoulders. Then, without looking back, she allowed Newbury to lead her away to the waiting carriage. She climbed in, and Newbury stepped up and took a seat beside her, shaking out his hat and running a hand through his hair.
“Lead on, Driver,” he called, and she heard the snap of the whip. The carriage rocked and the horses crashed into motion, dragging the carriage out of its muddy trench and away into the torrential downpour.
Veronica turned to Newbury, dripping all over the seats. “Thank you,” she said, and then realised how horribly inadequate those words seemed for what she really wanted to say to this man. “You… I…” She didn’t know how to go on.
Newbury laughed and cupped her left cheek with his hand, wiping away a tear with his thumb. He didn’t have to say anything: His silence, and the look in his eyes, spoke volumes.
She leaned over and kissed him, pulling him close, the rainwater running down her face as she wrapped her arms around his neck. She wanted nothing more than to be with him, this man who had given everything for her. To be held in his arms, safe from the world and all its terrible tribulations. “What are we going to do, Maurice?” she said when they had parted.
Newbury met her gaze levelly. “I’ll get well, Veronica. I promise you that.”
She shook her head. “Not that. About the Queen; about Amelia and what happened.”
Newbury’s eyes drifted away from her face, gazing instead out of the window at the driving rain. “We can’t resign our commissions. She’d never allow it.” He sighed. It was clear he’d been considering this carefully. Veronica was relieved that he didn’t seem likely to back out, to try to justify their position and argue that they’d made a mistake. Until now, that had been her biggest fear. “I can’t see we have a great deal of choice. We have to carry on for now, at least. Until…” He trailed off.
Until she’s dead, Veronica finished, although she didn’t say the words aloud. They both knew the consequences of Fabian’s death. And she knew he was right: They really didn’t have a choice. The Queen was ruthless, and they would be branded traitors and hunted down if they so much as gave her the impression they doubted her motives.
“But can we ever trust her again?” she asked, genuinely unsure what she expected his response to be.
He shook his head. There was sadness and fear in his eyes. “No. I don’t believe we can.”
Veronica put her hand on his sleeve. “Then we’ll just have to trust each other,” she said, and she laid her head upon his chest, listening to the thumping of his heart as the carriage careened through the wet, cobbled streets towards Chelsea.
CHAPTER
28
“So the intruder at the palace was nothing but a diversion, a red herring? A means of making us look in the other direction?” Bainbridge shook his head in disbelief. “It seems Graves was more conniving than even I gave him credit for.” He tugged at his moustache thoughtfully. “But how did the Queen know about the attack? That’s what puzzles me. And why was she so sure it was going to be the palace?”
Newbury shrugged. “I suppose we’ll never know.”
They were sitting in a quiet booth at the Whitefriars Club, Newbury’s regular haunt, a place typically frequented by literati, poets, artists, and other associated vagabonds. The type, Bainbridge considered, who were loose with other people’s money and even looser with their own morals. Or at least, that was how he saw it. Newbury seemed blind to the fact, and-as far as Bainbridge could see-actually seemed to like being surrounded by these people. In deference to his friend, he went along with it. And besides, the food was really rather good-and as Newbury had stated on more than one occasion-they did keep a shockingly good brandy.
Tonight, however, the place was relatively quiet, with only a few others milling about, drinking, smoking, and talking to one another in hushed tones. The general atmosphere was subdued, and Bainbridge wondered if it had something to do with the news of what had occurred in recent days. Sensationalist stories had appeared in many of the newspapers, holding forth with all manner of fabrications and lies. They were claiming that the Bastion Society had been a terrorist organisation opposed to medical progress and that they had laid siege to the Grayling Institute in protest against the new methods being pioneered there by Dr. Lucien Fabian. He supposed there was some measure of truth in that, judging by what Newbury had uncovered, but their motives had been somewhat inaccurately portrayed.
Still, he mused, at least the stories helped obscure the truth, which-to him, at least-was infinitely more distressing. That the Bastion Society had wanted to destroy the Queen, all the while claiming they were doing it for the good of the Empire, made little sense to him. The monarch was the glue that bound the Empire together. To destroy her would be to remove the very heart of the Empire itself, all that was great about England. He rather thought the whole affair had more to do with Enoch Graves and his delusions of grandeur than any sense of assumed duty or righteousness he may have laid claim to. He was as power mad as the rest of them, all the other madmen and criminals he and Newbury had come up against in their time. The difference was, he’d had money and influence. That was all.
Bainbridge took a long pull on his brandy and winced as his shoulder flared with pain. It was still strapped beneath his jacket, and he’d been grateful these last few days for the use of his cane, which he’d recovered from the police morgue after it was pulled from the belly of the dead man who’d attacked him. He still hadn’t discovered the man’s name, but he knew it was likely to be buried in one of the files on his desk, associated somehow with the Bastion Society.
He’d spent the last two days poring over those files again, looking for any details that might aid him in his investigation. Not that there was much left to do. The former members of the Bastion Society were all dead, to a man, hounded, caught, and executed by the Queen’s agents, rooted out as terrorists and smote down. All but one: a man named Warrander, who had been found dead in his apartment, having slashed his own wrists in the bathtub. The whole thing had evidently proved too much for him.
Graves himself had been found dead at the scene, knifed in the chest, his neck broken. Bainbridge hadn’t known what to make of that, but had settled on the notion that one of his own men must have turned on him in the chaos of the siege, or else one of Fabian’s people had finished him off before being killed himself. He’d decided not to devote too much effort to finding out; the very fact that Graves was dead was enough for him. Whether the man’s wild claims about rebirth and resurrection were true or not, he wouldn’t be troubling anyone else in Bainbridge’s lifetime.
Now, the chief inspector was engaged in weeding out all the Bastion Society’s connections, trying to discover who had supported them in their quest to destroy the monarchy. But he was finding their organisation had been built on smoke: every trail led to a dead end or a dead man, every address to a place that had never existed. He didn’t know what to make of it all, but he knew the threat had dissipated, for now at least. There would be more like them in time. His lot, he had learned from experience, was a never-ending battle against the enemies of the Crown.