Page 43 of The English Wife

“Neither.” Both contained a certainty that Janie lacked, that good would triumph, that everything would be tied up tidily in the end. “Have you reported on other murders, Mr. Burke?”

“Some.” He was silent for a moment, and Janie wondered what it was that he was seeing as he stared out the window. “Most tend to be fairly simple affairs, crimes of passion of one sort or another. Every now and then, you happen on something more complex, like the Guldensuppe case two years ago.”

Janie vaguely remembered the furor. It wasn’t the sort of happening reported in the papers her mother read, but it had been hard to avoid hearing of it. A woman, with the help of a new lover, had dismembered her former lover, hacked him into pieces, and dumped the pieces in parcels about the city.

“They found a headless torso in the river, didn’t they?”

“And other pieces elsewhere,” said Mr. Burke grimly. “Bread crumbs to give you nightmares. Even there, the only confusion was in the execution of it. The actual motives were simple enough. They always are.”

“That’s very cynical, Mr. Burke.”

“I prefer to think of it as being realistic. It’s only in serial stories that murder is committed for fantastical causes. In real life, it always boils down to love or money—more often the latter than the former.”

The train swayed beneath them; the heavy ceramic cups rocked on their saucers. The tea things seemed incongruously domestic, out of place among this talk of murder. Simple, Mr. Burke had called it, and perhaps it was, the age-old passion for gain, never quite quelled by any of society’s pious teachings. Love or money, Mr. Burke said. And more often the latter.

It would, Janie thought, be reassuring to imagine Mr. Lacey as a murderer. If Mr. Lacey had killed both Bay and Annabelle for Annabelle’s inheritance, then Bay was innocent. Honor was restored.

But Mr. Lacey, if the port officer was to be believed, had been somewhere on the Atlantic on Twelfth Night.

A hired killer, perhaps? But that was fantastical, something out of a penny dreadful, or the serials in papers her mother didn’t care to acknowledge.

As fantastical as imagining that Annabelle might not have been Annabelle?

Janie shifted uneasily in her seat. “There was something else. Something I didn’t care to include in my letter.”

“Yes?” Mr. Burke held up the teapot, cocking his head in invitation.

Janie nodded, and Mr. Burke tipped the spout over her cup. She was glad for the distraction. It made it easier to say what she had to say. “When he called, Mr. Lacey took great pains to inform us that his cousin—Annabelle’s father—had a ward, who was raised as a sister to Annabelle.” Janie almost mentioned the bar sinister, but thought better of it. The waters were muddy enough already. She pinched the leather of the gloves that lay in her lap. “He claims that the woman we knew as Annabelle was really Georgiana Smith.”

“If money is at stake, then it would be rather convenient for Mr. Lacey if Annabelle Lacey could be proved not to have been alive and well in New York.” Mr. Burke’s eyes refocused on Janie. “What do you think? You’re the one who actually knew her.”

“Not well,” said Janie honestly. “Annabelle was Annabelle … I can’t think of her as anyone but Annabelle. But I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now.”

Mr. Burke smiled without humor. “Radical doubt isn’t a pleasant exercise, is it? It might be true. Or Mr. Lacey might have invented Georgiana Smith out of whole cloth, or merely borrowed her. Georgiana Smith might be seventy years old with sixteen grandchildren. Or she might have been living in your house, wearing your jewels.”

The words sent a shiver down Janie’s spine. She felt like a child, alone in a dark house, glancing over her shoulder for someone who wasn’t there. “Do you think … is it worth making inquiries?”

“Do you mean, will I track her down for you? I can’t promise I’ll be able to help you—I’ve already cost The World a small fortune in telegrams—but I’ll do my best.” Mr. Burke leaned back in his seat. “It’s hard to prove a negative, you know. If what he says were true, there might be no records of this woman.”

“What a very odd thing,” said Janie, “to live and leave no mark.”

Unbidden, the image of her father’s books came to mind, some sold, some consigned to boxes, but all bearing his distinctive bookplate, with his name on the flyleaf. Someday someone somewhere would open Racine’s Berenice or Molière’s Malade Imaginaire and know that her father had lived.

Mr. Burke’s lip curled. “I don’t want to disillusion you, Miss Van Duyvil, but that’s the fate of most in our great city. Children die every day without a trace. Men and women disappear. Life is cheap and fleeting.”

Janie sat up straighter in her seat. “That’s a horrible thing to say. Most people have families, communities, even if they aren’t in the headlines of the evening news. In our Girls’ Club—”

“Yes?”

That one syllable was enough to make Janie feel like a fool, like a spoiled debutante on a jewel-studded soapbox. “We do our best to make a place for people who might not otherwise have one.”

“Sewing piecework?”

“It’s not just piecework. We have lectures and classes—” Janie felt herself foundering under Mr. Burke’s cynical gaze. Her mother looked the same way when she talked about her work. “But it’s more than that. It’s the friendships. For girls on their own, that matters. To have someone who cares.”

Very softly, Mr. Burke said, “There but for the grace of God?”

Stiffly, Janie said, “I am not unaware that I was born with more than most, Mr. Burke. But that circumstance was as much out of my control as … as the color of your eyes.”