The English Wife Read online

  Mr. Burke might not even be here. He might, at this very moment, be in her own kitchen. Perhaps, thought Janie wryly, she ought to have stayed there and waited for him to come to her.

  A man sat at a raised desk by the elevators. From the fact that he bellowed more loudly and more frequently than the others, Janie presumed that he must occupy some position of authority.

  She moved quickly to intercept the balding man in the gold-rimmed glasses. “Pardon me, sir—”

  “Do any of you layabouts have any copy?” he shouted, before looking impatiently at Janie. “If you’re looking for the residences, you’re on the wrong floor.”

  “I’ve come to see Mr. Burke,” said Janie, keeping her voice low. “About … a confidential matter.”

  In stentorian tones, the editor bellowed, “Jimmy! Lady to see you!” and the entire newsroom paused in their efforts to inspect this new diversion.

  “Eh, boys, Jimmy’s got a girl!” someone shouted.

  Another head popped up, shiny with hair cream. “Lady, if you’d like to do better…”

  Janie took a half step back. “If he’s not here, I can always come back another time.”

  “Burke!” shouted the editor again, and from somewhere in the middle of the scrum, a tall form unfolded himself and began weaving his way through the aisles, replying easily to the banter that accompanied his progress.

  “Chief. Miss—” His eyes narrowed as he recognized her through the flimsy stuff of her veil. He recovered with practiced ease, feigning ignorance with such skill that Janie might have believed him herself if she hadn’t known better. “May I help you, miss?”

  What was it the man downstairs had said? “I’ve come about the reward,” said Janie hastily.

  It was the wrong thing to have said. A dozen ears pricked up. Even the shrilling of the phones didn’t seem to distract the reporters, who had all turned to her like sharks scenting blood.

  “What did you see?”

  “Was it intact?”

  “Have you got pictures?”

  Mr. Burke cupped Janie’s elbow with exaggerated gentility, but Janie could feel the warning pinch of his fingers as he steered her towards the elevator. “Now, now, gentlemen. You know the rules. This is my story.” Mr. Burke paused only to snatch up a coat and hat, talking all the while. “And it’s probably nothing more than an old boot. What was it last time? Two sticks and a head of cabbage?”

  The elevator doors jerked closed on the sound of laughter and retorts.

  Mr. Burke shrugged into his coat, wrapping a muffler around his neck. “If we want to speak in private, we’ll have to go outside.” Dropping his voice, he added, “Don’t tell me you’re really here for the reward?”

  The contempt in his voice was bracing. Janie straightened. Her height might be a disadvantage in a ballroom, but she was grateful for every inch of it here. “I might be if I knew what it was,” she said coolly.

  Mr. Burke gave a bark of laughter. “That’s rich. But then I suppose your sort never miss the chance of adding to your coffers, do you?”

  “My sort?” Janie had to keep her voice to a whisper, for the sake of the elevator man. “You mean human beings? Your paper wouldn’t offer rewards if they didn’t believe them an incentive.”

  “Touché, Miss … er, miss,” drawled Mr. Burke, but Janie didn’t feel as though she had won anything. The elevator decanted them into the crowded lobby. “If not the chance of lucre, what brings you to my humble place of business?”

  “The pursuit of truth.” The words came out sounding impossibly priggish. Janie ducked her head as they exited the building into the full force of the wind. Breathlessly, she said, “That is what you claim to seek, isn’t it?”

  “You sound as though you doubt it.”

  Janie gestured helplessly towards the newsies marching up and down the street. WIFE’S AFFAIR TURNS TO DOUBLE MURDER! VAN DUYVIL DRIVEN TO IT, SAY FRIENDS.

  “Can you blame me?”

  Mr. Burke’s hand tightened on her elbow as a streetcar went clanging past. “That’s The Journal, not The World.”

  “Is there any difference?”

  “Yes. Their circulation is higher.” His dry tone almost surprised Janie into a laugh. “If you think so poorly of my profession, why are you here?”

  Now was the time for her pretty speech, the one she had practiced before her mirror last night. Instead, Janie heard herself saying, “Because I need information, and you claim to purvey it.”

  “There it is again. That word claim.” Mr. Burke waved to the policeman regulating traffic. It was rather miraculous, the way the traffic parted at his call. Mr. Burke took her elbow and led her past the pawing horses and impatient drivers, nodding his thanks to the policeman. “Is it our inability to know the world that you doubt, or simply my morals?”

  She hadn’t expected this sort of resistance, or, if she were being honest, that he would be so well spoken. “You can’t expect me to think highly of a man who obtains entry into my kitchen under false pretenses,” she said apologetically.

  “Would you have admitted me under my real ones?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Isn’t it just? If you want the fruits of my labor, you can’t be squeamish about the means.”

  “That depends on the ends, doesn’t it?” At Mr. Burke’s raised brow, Janie hurried on, “I don’t mean to sound Machiavellian about it—but if there were an injustice being committed and one might use one’s skills to stop it…”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Burke, his steps slowing as they reached the plaza in front of the pale bulk of City Hall. “So if it’s for the purpose of selling papers, it’s immoral, but if it’s to prevent injustice, all’s fair.”

  He’d twisted her words, pushed them out of all meaning. But … “In essence, yes,” said Janie.

  They slowed to a stop by the entrance to City Hall Park. Mr. Burke’s voice dropped, his eyes fastened intimately on hers. “Do you know something that makes you believe an injustice is being committed, Miss Van Duyvil?”

  For a moment, Janie teetered on the edge of telling him what she knew. But what was it, really? A name, half-heard, that might not even be a name.

  George …

  Janie tucked her gloved hands into her sleeves and walked briskly towards the fountain at the center of the park. “My knowledge of my brother’s character.”

  The branches above them were sere and bare. In the summer, it would be a leafy profusion, a bit of green in the heart of the city, but now the park seemed small and scraggy, the fountain in the middle weathered, the basin cracked and dry.

  “Character,” repeated Mr. Burke. “If that’s the only reason you’ve dragged me into the elements, you might have stayed by your warm hearth.”

  “Do you doubt my knowledge of my brother?”

  “If I had a penny for every time someone told me, ‘Little Johnny’s a good boy. He would never do that’…” Janie winced at Mr. Burke’s falsetto, deliberately grating. Dropping his voice, he said flatly, “Character isn’t written on a man’s face, Miss Van Duyvil. Or a woman’s.”

  Without its usual sprays of water, the fountain seemed plain and bare. Even the gilded finials on the lampposts had lost their luster. “You think me deluded.”

  Mr. Burke tucked his hands in his pockets and looked down at her. “You’re grieving,” he said gruffly. “It takes people different ways.”

  If he had been flippant, if he had twisted words into knots, Janie might have taken her defeat and gone about her business. But his reluctant kindness, the condescension of his kindness, infuriated her. “That,” she said tartly, “is precisely what the constable in Cold Spring said when I told him I had seen Annabelle in the water.” She waited a moment for that to sink in before turning on her heel. “I know perfectly well what I saw and what my brother was. It’s only on the stage, Mr. Burke, that mourning makes men mad.”

  She’d expected him to follow her, but he didn’t. Instead, she heard the hollow sou
nd of gloved hands clapping. Slowly, she turned and found Mr. Burke planted where he was, applauding her as he might an act at the circus. “Well played, Miss Van Duyvil. May I say that you’ve missed your calling? You would have been a great success on the stage.”

  It wasn’t, Janie suspected, meant as a compliment, but she couldn’t help but be tickled all the same. It was rather refreshing to be treated as a woman of parts, a woman with secrets and mysteries, not just poor Janie, who couldn’t catch or keep.

  “It’s not an act, Mr. Burke. I don’t believe my brother killed his wife. If I were to sit back and allow verdict to be passed by the laziness of the police and the rapaciousness of the press, I would be doing him a gross injustice.”

  Mr. Burke folded his arms across his chest, but his expression was serious now, his attention caught. “Isn’t this a conversation you should be having with the police?”

  “Why? So they can offer me brandy and send me home? They didn’t believe me when … we both know the police follow the press, not the other way around.”

  “That’s a great compliment, Miss Van Duyvil.”

  “It wasn’t meant as one.” With nothing to lose, it was easy to speak her mind. “With great power comes—”

  “—great responsibility,” Mr. Burke finished for her. “You do me too much credit, Miss Van Duyvil. I’m just a hack with ink-stained fingers.”

  Sensing weakness, Janie pressed forward. “If The World were to raise doubt as to the commission of the crime, the police would be forced to follow suit.”

  “Is that what you want? A goad for the police?”

  “Yes,” Janie lied, although she wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted. To know that something was being done, that Bay wasn’t being tried solely in the court of rumor. “If there is anything you might have discovered in the course of your investigation that might lead to doubt, that might raise other avenues of inquiry … I’ll pay you.”

  Mr. Burke’s expressive features hardened, like ice over stone. “To publish misinformation?”

  “No!” Janie was appalled by his misapprehension. “To learn the truth. To discover what really happened. I wouldn’t want to spread a lie.”

  Mr. Burke eyed her skeptically, as though she were a piece of dodgy fish at the seaport. “What if the truth is just as unpalatable as the rumor?”

  The papers were saying that her brother had killed his wife and himself. “Nothing could be as unpalatable as the rumor,” said Janie firmly.

  “Don’t tempt fate, Miss Van Duyvil,” said Mr. Burke grimly. “You might not like what it throws at you.”

  Something in his tone made the skin on Janie’s neck prickle. “What is it? What do you know?”

  The sun had come out behind a cloud, with the pitiless brightness of January, creating a nimbus around Mr. Burke’s head and throwing his face into darkness. “What would you say if I told you that Annabelle Lacey died in 1891?”

  Janie could feel the cold creeping through the wool of her coat. “Are you mocking me, Mr. Burke? Annabelle couldn’t—she wasn’t. I saw her last week.”

  The blinding light made rainbows around Mr. Burke’s face. Janie had to squint to see him. “I misspoke. Let me rephrase that. Annabelle Lacey was presumed to have died in 1891.”

  Janie shook her head. “You must be mistaken. Or misinformed. Annabelle married my brother in 1894. She held a ball”—her voice caught, but she soldiered on—“she held a ball last week.”

  “Dead women hold no balls?” Mr. Burke looked at her with something like smugness. Janie didn’t like it. “Annabelle Lacey disappeared from her home in Lincolnshire in the spring of 1891. It’s a matter of record. The housekeeper found a shoe beside the bank of the river and a hair ribbon caught on a twig.”

  A shoe, lying on its side, melting snow creating a dark stain on the pale satin. A scarf, spangled with jewels, floating on the water.

  Janie blinked again, banishing the images. “No. That was last week, not eight years ago.”

  “Would you like to read the telegram from my colleague at The Lincolnshire Standard? Miss Lacey’s cousin, Mr. Lacey, went to some effort to have her declared dead. The local coroner, apparently, refused to sanction an inquest on the ground of insufficient evidence.” Mr. Burke folded his arms across his chest, his eyes on Janie’s face. “Do you still want to know the truth whatever the costs, Miss Van Duyvil?”

  Janie eyed him warily. “How did you learn all this?”

  Mr. Burke bent and picked up a fallen twig from the rim of the fountain, snapping off the branches, one by one. “The telegraph is a remarkable thing, isn’t it? It stretches clear across the Atlantic.”

  It was strange to think of those wires clicking and clicking, noon and night, carrying secrets from one end of the world to the other, turning the Atlantic into a fishpond, the globe into something one could fit inside one’s pocket. She had known Annabelle for five years, and yet Mr. Burke, if he was indeed speaking the truth, knew more of Annabelle’s past in one exchange of the telegraph than Janie had learned in five years.

  Mr. Burke might be lying. He might have fabricated it all out of thin air, in an attempt to scare her back to the serenity of the drawing room.

  Serenity? Ha. Janie lifted her chin. “Was there anything else?”

  Mr. Burke looked at her sideways, a long, appraising look. After a moment, he said, “It takes seven years in England for a missing person to be deemed deceased. In 1898, Mr. Lacey applied again to have his cousin’s death made official. Something about an inheritance, I gather.” His voice was carefully bland. “One can only imagine his surprise when he was told that she was alive, married, and living in America.”

  They paused in front of the statue of Nathan Hale. Someone had left a wreath on the pedestal; the garland was wilted, the ribbon frayed. Janie stared at the frostbitten flowers. “Annabelle never spoke about her life in England.”

  Not even at the beginning, that first summer in Newport, when all the clucking matrons and disappointed debutantes had tried to draw her out, making pointed comments about her aristocratic connections. Annabelle had merely smiled and changed the subject, quietly regal in a way that put the petty jealousies of others to scorn.

  Janie had taken it as a sign of good breeding. But what if it was something more?

  Mr. Burke clasped his hands behind his back, seeming to scrutinize Mr. Hale. “So you have two possibilities. Either Annabelle Lacey died and the woman you knew as Annabelle Lacey was an imposter—or Annabelle Lacey, for reasons best known to herself, found it expedient to disappear. Until she married your brother.”

  Janie looked away from Nathan Hale’s incorruptible face, into that of the man beside her. It was, she thought, an interesting face, all long, lean lines and unexpected angles. Secrets were written in the hollows of those cheeks, in the long, flexible line of his lips—his own and those of others. And Janie realized, for the first time, the magnitude of what she was taking on, the cost that might come of bearing the secrets of others.

  “Well?” said Mr. Burke. “Have you heard enough?”

  Above her, Nathan Hale gazed off into the clouds, scorning her weakness. Here was a man who hadn’t folded in the face of danger. He had been executed here, on this spot, just a little more than a century before, giving his life so that a principle might stand.

  “No,” said Janie crisply. “My offer stands.”

  Mr. Burke raised a brow. “Money for information?”

  Janie nodded.

  “What if,” said Mr. Burke, his eyes fixed on Janie’s, “money isn’t what I want?”

  He was trying to scare her. She knew that. But she couldn’t quite keep her voice as steady as she would have liked as she asked, “What do you want, Mr. Burke?”

  Mr. Burke straightened. “Information,” he said crisply. “You might call it … a window into your world.”

  Janie could have kicked him. “Isn’t the kitchen door enough for you?”

  Mr. Burke smiled dangerously. “Don�
��t worry. I don’t intend to sully the premises. One can only learn so much below stairs. It’s not every day one has access to the daughter of the house.” He was trying to provoke her. Again. “Well, Miss Van Duyvil? Do you accept my terms?”

  Janie wondered if this was how Faust had felt when he’d summoned Mephistopheles. Somehow, these pacts ceased to seem like such a good idea once the devil was driving the bargain. “Yes. On one condition.”

  “Only one?” said Mr. Burke. “You surprise me.”

  Janie refused to be goaded. “If we are to work together, I will need your pledge of honesty. No lies, no omissions, no half truths.”

  Mr. Burke gave a short bark of a laugh. “You don’t ask for much, do you? Only the moon.” When Janie didn’t budge, he said softly, “What of you, Miss Van Duyvil? Will you give the same to me?”

  The golden dome of the World loomed behind them, a reminder that any careless word might be printed tens of thousands times over, projected to everyone with the three cents to buy the evening edition.

  “I will deal fairly with you, if you deal fairly with me,” said Janie. And then, before she could think better of it, “Is Katie your cousin?”

  A look of reluctant admiration crossed Mr. Burke’s face. “No.”

  There was something reassuring about that blunt admission. Or it might just be, Janie admitted to herself, that she wanted to be reassured.

  The wind had risen, shaking the bare branches above their heads, making Janie’s veil flutter wildly. The same wind made Mr. Burke’s coat flap around his legs, but he stood solid all the same, providing a wind block of sorts.

  Janie looked up at him. “Well, then,” she said.

  “Well, then.” Mr. Burke held out a gloved hand. “Let the games begin.”

  Janie surrendered her hand into his grasp, expecting a crushing clasp. Instead, he bowed over her hand with exaggerated care. His fingers on hers were delicate, but firm. Janie could feel the tingle of his touch through the leather of her gloves. Nerves, that was all. Nerves at the impropriety of what she was undertaking.

  “One more question,” Janie said at random, seizing on the first thing to come to mind.