The Suffragette Scandal (Brothers Sinister #4)(34)

She didn’t feel very civilized. She turned away, before she lost her nerve and begged her friend to stay. She didn’t see Amanda off. There was too much to do, after all. She had a response to finish, a paper that needed to be out on the 4 a.m. train. There was no time to stop now.

“All right, everyone,” she said in a carrying voice. “We have paraffin to clean up.”

And while they were doing that, she had a story to uncover.

Mr. Clark had bound their captive at the wrists and feet and tied him to a chair. The man was stowed in the archive room. She needed to know who had sent him, what he’d been tasked with doing. And she needed to know it now—in time for her to write that story, before the constables came.

There was no time for anything but swift answers. And she had a scoundrel here, after all.

She took a deep breath and went to find Mr. Clark.

He was in the archive room. The space was small and dark. With an extra chair and the desk still in place, she and Mr. Clark were almost elbow-to-elbow, facing that bound man.

“What have you learned?” Her voice sounded shaky to her own ears. A bad sign, that. She struggled for control.

Mr. Clark turned to her. “His name: Edwin Bartlett. But unfortunately, he doesn’t know who hired him. There was at least one intermediary, and I would guess more.”

No. She refused to believe that. She had hoped that it would all be simple—that the arsonist would give up James Delacey at the first instant, that he’d be able to describe him perfectly.

It would have been some compensation for losing her home—to be able to place the blame publicly at his door.

Her voice shook when she spoke. “He’s lying. He has to know more.”

That was met with silence. She couldn’t see Mr. Clark’s face, and he didn’t turn to her.

“He has to be lying,” she said. She needed him to be lying. “Don’t you have…” Her stomach turned at the thought of asking for more. The very idea made her feel ill.

“Don’t I have what?”

“Some way.” Her hands were shaking. “To encourage him.”

“Encourage him.” He made a rough noise in his throat, almost a growl. “Miss Marshall, I don’t think you want me to say, ‘Here, now, Edwin, there’s a good chap.’ Maybe you need to clarify what you mean by encourage him.”

No.

They didn’t have time. The constable would likely be here in forty-five minutes, and in any event, with the deliveryman coming at half past two… She had little more than half an hour to get whatever else he knew, if she wanted to have this story in the next paper.

“He’s scared as it is,” Mr. Clark told her curtly. “Frankly, I doubt he’s got the strength of mind to tell lies at the moment.”

She breathed out. “Maybe we need to jostle his memory. Isn’t there something you can do?”

“I don’t know nothing,” the arsonist put in, his voice a whine. “I’ve said it all, told all the details. It was a man from London who hired me, a big man. Bald head.”

She felt sick.

She couldn’t see much of Mr. Clark. But his silhouette straightened and he turned toward her. “You don’t know what you’re suggesting,” he said. “You can’t even say the word aloud. You want me to torture him.”

Said out loud, that ugly word—torture—seemed to fill the room. She didn’t want it. Every part of her rebelled at it. But there was that small corner of her that wondered. He’d burned down her house. He might know more. Wouldn’t it be only fair if…?

Mr. Clark made a rude noise. “God. I forget, sometimes, how naïve you really are.”

It felt like a slap in the face.

“I’m not naïve. Just because I can’t say the word.”

“Oh, you’re naïve to even think of it.” She’d heard him angry before, had heard him amused. She didn’t know what this emotion he expressed now was. Something darker, something more real than she’d ever heard from him before. “You don’t torture a man to get the truth, Miss Marshall. Didn’t you read your history of the Spanish Inquisition?”

Free took a step back from that intensity. Her back met the wall of the room. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t understand. You’ve read a story, no doubt, where a man had information. Someone wielded a well-placed knife to make him divulge his secret in time. Good prevailed, and they all lived happily ever after.”

She felt sick.

“That was a tepid piece of fiction written by some man who sat at a comfortable fire, inventing a barely plausible tale for a gullible audience. You don’t torture a man to find out the truth, Miss Marshall, no matter how the stories sound. Any real scoundrel will tell you as much. You torture a man to make him into someone else. True pain is like black ink. Enough of it can blot out a man’s soul. If you’re willing to use it, you can write whatever you wish in its place. Want him to swear to Catholicism? Hand him off to the inquisitors. Want him to believe the sun sets in the east, and the moon is made of green cheese? Ready the hot knives. But once you spill that ink on his soul, you’ll never get it out. He’ll say anything, be anything, believe anything—just so that you’ll stop. You’ll ask him about Delacey, and he’ll invent any story you wish to hear, just to spare himself the pain. But it won’t hold up under observation, because it won’t be true.”