The fern in the morning room took the first dose without complaint.
It stood in a jardinière by the south window, dark and patient, with leaves like fingers that did not register a half-tumbler of stewed-tea-colored liquid poured into its soil at the angle that hid the gesture from the doorway. Halsey rang the bell. Halsey always turned to the bell, two steps from where she had been standing, and in those two steps a person paying attention could put away half a glass of medicine and adjust her face. Nell timed it on Friday. Nell timed it on Saturday. By Sunday the fern was beginning to look a little tired.
The smaller of Halsey's spaniels was the slowest and the most willing, and on Saturday morning Nell crouched by the chaise while Halsey arranged a letter, and Hetty — the one with the lazy left ear — lapped the tonic out of her cupped palm because a spaniel will lap anything if a hand is the shape of food. The spaniel began to look uncertain at about eleven. By twelve it had been sick on the rug beside Halsey's writing slope, and Halsey was making the soft, worried noises one makes over a small animal and ringing for cloths.
"The damp," Halsey said. "I have said since November the damp would catch one of them. Poor Hetty."
Her eyes stayed on the letter. They moved once, to the empty tumbler on the side table.
Nell logged the not-looking.
Beatrice was at the window seat the whole time, a finger in her book, the other thumb keeping a second page. She did not look at the dog. She did not look at Nell. When Halsey told her to go and ask cook for hot water, she went without lifting her eyes from her page.
By Sunday Nell was considering a third method. The third method was a flask sewn into the pocket of a dressing gown, and the flask was a problem because the dressing gown would go to Mary, and Mary turned out pockets. Mary was a third method by herself.
Halford was in the house and not in the house.
Halsey had given him a room off the gun room, chosen for him with the air of a hostess who had arranged a slight insult and disguised it as a courtesy, and he used the room for sleeping. His coat hung in the back hall. The rest of his time he occupied the public passages: breakfast at the sideboard, never sitting; the library after breakfast with a folder of yellow paper; the gun room with Caldwell after eleven; the avenue between two and three; tea wherever offered, drunk by no one. He stood at thresholds when she entered. He let her name him into rooms. He asked Marlow about the carriage horses, Mrs. Caldwell about her son. He said Lady Ashford when introduced and ma'am when handed to a chair and yes once each time he was offered something he did not want.
He did not ask her anything.
This was the worst of it. Anything would have been easier.
By the third afternoon her mouth ached from holding it the way Victoria's mouth was held, a fraction off center, lips a little tucked, and she went up the back stair to her dressing room and started to whistle.
It came out before she had decided to. Sixteen bars of the opening theme to her own podcast, an arrangement of four notes that no one in this house had ever heard and no one in this house would ever hear, written for her by a friend in Brooklyn for thirty dollars and a cup of cold-brew coffee. The friend was named Devon. Devon would be making a smoothie right now in another century, and she was whistling his bridge in a corridor with mahogany wainscoting in a house full of people who did not know what a smoothie was.
Mary was at the linen press at the end of the corridor.
Mary did not drop the cloth. Mary stopped folding it. Her hands stopped where they were, and her head did not turn, and Nell got to the fourth bar and stopped.
Quiet, then.
Mary's hands began to fold again.
Nell stood in the middle of the corridor in Victoria's slippers, and she watched the back of Mary's neck for any sign of motion, and Mary did not turn, and Nell went back into her room and shut the door and put her hand over her mouth as if she could put the four notes back inside.
Two minutes later Mary scratched at the door.
"My lady. Mr. Pegg has come up. The inspector asks if you'd join him in the library at six."
Six was an hour.
"Did Mr. Pegg say what for."
"For the staff arrangements, my lady, was what was said." Mary's voice was even. Her eyes, when Nell met them in the mirror, were not.
"Thank you, Mary."
"My lady."
The door closed.
She used the hour to wash her face in cold water, twice. She started on her hair the way Victoria's hands knew to start on it, and she stopped halfway through and held the brush at the third pin because she had understood, in a clean unhurried way, that staff arrangements was a coat thrown over the back of a chair.
She went down at six.
The library was on the long side of the south hall, double doors, a brass plate at the lower panel that took a thumbprint when one pressed it open. Halford was already inside.
She had walked through this room before.
Not in the body. Not in 1882. In her own kitchen in Brooklyn, at one in the morning, with a slice of cold pizza in her hand and a microphone in front of her, narrating chapter twenty-three of The Ashford Affair to an audience of one hundred and eighty thousand strangers: the library is on the south side, a deep bay with leaded glass at the writing end, the late Lord Ashford in oil above the desk, and the desk is turned to face the bay so that whoever wrote in this room wrote into the morning sun. She had walked through this room every Tuesday for eight months, and her voice was somewhere in it ahead of her, like a coat she had left.
She turned toward the portrait before she saw it.
Halford watched her turn.
He stood where he was, silent. He had his notebook in his left hand, closed, and his right hand was loose at his side, and he had been wearing his coat in the avenue at three and was not wearing it now, and the gas bracket at the south wall had been turned up to two-thirds and the desk lamp was lit and the bay was full of late-November dark.
"Please sit, Lady Ashford."
"Inspector."
She sat in the writing chair facing the bay. The cushion gave at the right angle. The wood at the small of her back had a worn place at the lumbar that fit her, and she understood, distantly and without surprise, that Victoria had spent a great deal of time in this chair.
Halford closed the doors and came to the desk.
He set the notebook between them. Opened it. Did not look at it.
"I have made a list," he said. "I would like to read you the first seven items. After that I would like you to speak."
"Yes."
"One. Lady Ashford writes with her left hand. You sign with your right."
He paused for a beat the length of a thought, then read on, voice as level as a man reading out a tide table.
"Two. Lady Ashford does not take wine after six in the evening, by her own standing instruction in the cellar book. You drank a glass at nine on Thursday.
"Three. Lady Ashford has known the housekeeper of this house by name for eleven years. You addressed her as ma'am on Friday morning.
"Four. Lady Ashford was educated for two years in Lausanne. You could not tell Mrs. Morton on Thursday evening how one walks from Lausanne to Geneva, which is a question every child asks first and which Lady Ashford answered at every dinner she sat at for six years.
"Five. Lady Ashford holds a particular dislike for the novels of Sir Walter Scott, a position she has stated in correspondence and at table for as long as I have been able to verify. You quoted Marmion at breakfast on Friday.
"Six. Lady Ashford rides every morning that the ground will bear it. On Saturday you asked the groom whether the horse was safe.
"Seven. The library key has hung on Lady Ashford's chatelaine since her marriage. On three separate occasions between Thursday and this afternoon you have asked a servant to fetch it for you."
The notebook closed under his hand. He kept the hand there.
"I have thirty-four points in this book. I can collect more without trying. I do not intend to file my report before tomorrow morning. Between now and then I would like to hear one of two stories from you. What you have done to Lady Ashford, or what has happened to you. I will know if you lie. You have eight hours."
He took out his pocket watch. Opened it. Looked at it. Closed it. Returned it to the waistcoat pocket.
"It is twenty minutes past six."
He went to the door. He did not turn there.
"Ring if you would like tea."
The handle moved. The doors opened. He went through them. They closed.
Nell sat in Victoria's chair in front of Victoria's desk under Victoria's husband's portrait, and the room she had described for eight months on a podcast in another century held her in it as though it had been waiting.
Twenty past six.
Eight hours.
The candle on the desk had four hours of wax in it. She would need to ring for another.