"I did speak in heat. That doesn't make what he said any less a lie."
"Is it a lie?" Kit asked very quietly. Then he saw Edmund's face. "I don't mean — God, I don't mean that. I mean that she *was* here. That night in April. Mrs. Dacey saw her leave. Half the Inn knows a lady came down those stairs at one in the morning."
"She came with Mrs. Mercer's letters," Edmund said. "Mrs. Mercer's daughter was with her the whole hour. And she left by the door like an honest woman, because she is one." He took his coat from the back of the chair. "The truth of a thing and the look of a thing are two different animals, Kit. I've lived in my father's house long enough to know that. Stannard trades in the look of things. I won't let him trade in hers."
Kit said nothing. He picked up the pistol case and held the door. As Edmund passed him, Kit put a hand on his shoulder for exactly one second, about the length of a heartbeat, and took it away again.
II
Fog lay along the fields below Primrose Hill like milk left standing in a saucer. The hackney's lamps made two smeared yellow moons in it that went ahead of them up the lane and lit nothing. Somewhere around Camden Town the driver had finally stopped whistling, and now there was only the horse's breathing, the crunch of the wheels, and once, far off, a cock crowing at a dawn that had not yet bothered to arrive.
He thought, because he could not help it, of Lady Sophia. Not of her face, though he knew it better than he had any right to: the straight dark brows, the mouth that seemed always on the edge of an argument. He thought of her hands. In February he had watched her spread Mrs. Mercer's papers on the clerk's counter at the Victualling Office, smoothing each one flat as if it were something that had been hurt. She had a small ink stain on the second finger of her right hand that never quite washed out. He had noticed it the first day and had been noticing it ever since. He was ashamed of how much he knew about that ink stain.
"There," said Kit.
The hackney stopped by the gate of the Chalk Farm tavern. The tavern was shuttered, with one light burning in an upper window, where the landlord probably lay awake listening and working out what to say to the coroner if it came to that. Past the gate the meadow sloped up into grey, with a line of elms dark along the hedge. Three figures stood on the grass. Even at that distance Edmund knew the tallest by the way he held himself, easy and a little bored, like a man waiting for a coach he did not much care to catch.
"Stannard," said Kit. "And Darnell. Who's the third?"
The third man carried a bag. As they came up through the wet grass Edmund saw a round, ruddy, prosperous face under a low-crowned hat.
"Ogilvie," Kit muttered. "The surgeon from Great Marlborough Street. Stannard's brought his own surgeon. That's generous of him."