Jane Steele(97)

“I know that your cousin, Edwin, attacked you, and the nature of that attack.”

I waited; I continued to wait. When he said nothing further, I heaved a breath as if I had been drowning. Inspector Quillfeather nodded, squeezing my limp fingers. He continued to say nothing of murder, and I continued to gape at him, utterly speechless.

“There, I knew that would be difficult. Shall I go on?”

Shaking my head in disbelief, I managed to husk, “Yes,” after which contradictory signals Sam Quillfeather smiled paternally.

“I cannot help but feel that I have done you an . . . injustice? There was evidence, so much evidence, but how can one conscience putting a mere child through such trials? Had I to do it over, I think that I should have acted differently? I can only claim misplaced propriety, though I hope you lived the better for my choice, I truly do.”

“Evidence,” I echoed.

“Oh, evidence in spades!” he cried. “The torn button upon your cousin’s clothing might have been explained as you suggested, by the idea that you were playing. However! Though I do not claim to be the world’s finest policeman, I can assure you that I aspire to be, and the tear in your dress sleeve combined with the bruising beneath? Shaped, even what little I could see of it, like a handprint?” Inspector Quillfeather’s already clifflike brows surged into bolder protrusions. “Miss Steele, you never got that injury playing a game, that was as plain as the nose on my face!”

“Very plain indeed, then,” I accidentally said aloud.

“Ha!” exclaimed the policeman. “Oh, may I state how gratified am I that even after such unspeakable liberties being visited upon your person, you retain your sense of humour?”

Pressing my hands a final time, he released them and sat back, though between the hair and the brows and the nose and the chin, this did nothing to diminish the impression that he was a train hurtling towards me. “If you could know the nights I’ve kept vigil over this affair, would you wish to? No, don’t answer that; I think not. But your very attitude that day, Miss Steele—your ramrod posture, your obvious terror, your inexplicable distress which, like a puzzle piece which is the right colour but the wrong shape, did not match grief over the death of your cousin . . . The truth was obvious. I asked myself so often, What can I do? Such cases of unspeakable violence, particularly against the young, are impossible to prosecute.”

“I see.” I pressed my still-shaking hands into my skirts.

“Yours would have been, I assure you. And with the perpetrator of the assault, who was likewise the second principle witness, dead by tragic accident? Imagine! A nine-year-old girl dragged through the assizes, pointed at, questioned, shamed, her reputation forever soiled, her heart broken, her mind subjected to not merely a single gross indignity but multiple others? No, I said—not when the guilty party could not be punished by a mortal court.”

“I didn’t scream,” I blurted out.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Steele?”

“I didn’t scream.” Suddenly the tears were an ugly waterfall, hot and gushing, and someone has to know after all this time, I had to tell someone. “He . . . Edwin made a mistake, you see, because I was so shocked that I stayed quiet, which misled him, so it was entirely my fault, you understand, that he . . . that he . . . because I didn’t scream.”

If a man can look simultaneously exquisitely gentle and boiling with rage, that man is Sam Quillfeather. He pursed his lips and curved towards me.

“You listen to me, Miss Steele, and you listen ardently,” he grated. “That a lady’s succumbing to shock at exposure to such villainy could ever be considered a black mark against her—put the thought from your mind this very instant, do you hear?”

Opening my mouth, I was prevented by a sharply upraised hand.

“Mark me now!” Inspector Quillfeather ordered. “It is a gentleman’s greatest privilege to protect the fair sex, and when he abandons that privilege, when he casts it aside in favour of lechery, why then he is no longer a gentleman, and therefore the lady in question owes him nothing, because he is a coward and a blackguard, and for a lady to doubt her own behaviour in the presence of a coward and a blackguard is lunacy, I tell you, from stone silence to violent caterwauling, because she owes him no interaction whatsoever from the instant he discards his honour, and I won’t have it. Promise me something?”

“Um,” I said. He was handing me his pocket handkerchief, I realised, and I took it, though the flow of tears had dried under the blast of his vehemence. “If I can.”

“Promise me,” he urged, eyes shining, “that you will put this aborted scream from your mind forever?”

“I . . . well . . .”

“You owe your attacker no debt, Miss Steele. It is, as I have proven, a logical impossibility? Promise to try?

“Yes,” I whispered. For the second time in as many hours, I felt as if I had been blown apart and put back together again. “I promise to try.”

“I can ask no more of you than that.” He stood to his full scarecrow’s height, setting his hands against his scrawny hips as if satisfied that a hard task had been seen to. “Well, I think we can both agree I have taxed you enough, yes, Miss Steele? Please forgive me for any harm I may have caused you inadvertently. Now I must return to work, for there are several urgent matters which require my attention, and I have neglected them in favour of finding you. You have eased my mind, Miss Steele.”