Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~10 min read
Chapter 5: The investigation
SEBASTIAN
He asked Davies the next morning.
He had been asking Davies things for two years — carefully, because Davies was a man who answered what was asked and volunteered nothing, and because Sebastian had learned early that the right question was more useful than a general inquiry. Davies had been his valet since before the war, which meant Davies had known him for fifteen years and had chosen to continue knowing him after the amnesia, which Sebastian considered an act of faith that deserved a corresponding respect.
“Did you witness the marriage?” he said.
They were in the dressing room. Davies was holding his coat. He went still in the way that meant he was deciding something.
“Yes, my lord,” he said.
“Tell me.”
What Davies told him took twelve minutes. He listened without interrupting. The night of the eighth of April, 1808. The girl in the garden who had come looking for a solution. The elderly vicar at St. Clement’s, woken from sleep. The vestry, cold, with two witnesses and a brief ceremony. The certificate. The carriage to Bath.
“You approved,” Sebastian said. It was not a question — he could hear it in the way Davies spoke of it, the slight warmth under the precision.
“It was not my place to approve or disapprove, my lord.”
“Davies.”
A pause. “Yes. I approved.”
“Because it was the right thing to do.”
“You did not need my opinion at the time,” Davies said. “You had already decided.”
Sebastian looked at his own reflection in the glass — the scar along the jaw that he had stopped noticing except in certain lights, the face of a man who had apparently once made a decision in a garden at midnight that had given a frightened young woman safety and then walked away from it for eight years. He tried to find the person who had made that decision in himself and found, as usual, the blankness. But the decision itself — the shape of it, the three-second calculation that a woman in a difficult situation should be helped rather than left in it — that shape felt, obscurely, like his.
“What was she like?” he said.
Davies considered. “Frightened,” he said. “But not showing it. Very precise. She knew exactly what she was asking and exactly what she was offering in exchange.” He paused. “I thought at the time she was the most sensible person in the garden.”
“Yourself included?”
“I was not the one offering to marry a stranger in order to help her,” Davies said. “So perhaps not.”
Sebastian put on his coat. “Thank you,” he said.
Davies inclined his head and said nothing more.
He spent the morning with his solicitor, which was a more complicated three hours than he had anticipated.
The solicitor — Mr. Finch, a small precise man who had the professional quality of someone who had witnessed the full breadth of human error and declined to be surprised by any of it — laid out the situation with the thoroughness Sebastian had come to appreciate. The marriage was entirely legal. The certificate was witnessed and registered. Arabella Shaw was Viscountess Blackwood in the eyes of the law, had been for eight years, and had made no claims and sought no dissolution in that time.
“She could have,” Sebastian said. “With me missing, presumed dead.”
“She did not apply for dissolution,” Finch said. “She could have pursued a legal presumption of death after seven years. She chose not to.”
Sebastian thought about this. A woman who could have freed herself legally and had not. A woman managing alone on a modest stipend and his name, not pressing any of the claims that were available to her, not appearing in the papers or causing complications or doing any of the things that someone in her position might reasonably have done.
“The stipend,” he said. “Was it her request?”
“No, my lord. It was in your instructions before you sailed. You were specific about it.”
He looked at the window. He had apparently been a man who made decisions on dark paths in October and saw them through with something close to precision, even the decisions he didn’t remember making.
“What is her situation now?” he said. “Practically.”
“She is your wife,” Finch said. “With the full legal standing of Viscountess Blackwood. If you wished to formally acknowledge the marriage publicly, she would have access to the full estate income and the townhouse. As things stand, she is — I will be direct, my lord — managing adequately in her aunt’s house on a stipend designed for a woman who did not need to support herself.”
“Is she comfortable?”
“She is not in difficulty. She is not comfortable in the way that your title allows for.”
He thought about her in the small parlour the night before — the adequate fire, the modest furniture, the careful composure of a woman who had learned to need very little. He thought about eight years in a situation that was neither here nor there, neither wife nor widow, managing itself on small resources and smaller claims.
He thought about what she had said when he asked what she wanted: *I don’t know yet.*
He had believed her. He believed it still. She was not calculating. She was — he was finding, in the twenty-four hours since their conversation, that she was someone he kept thinking about in a way that was distinct from the general turning-over of social encounters he did to assemble his picture of the world. She stayed in the mind. The precision of her, the composure, the thing she’d said at the end — *the rest of it is not your business yet* — with no edge to it and absolute certainty.
“I won’t rush her,” he said.
Finch looked mildly surprised, which was the most expression Sebastian had seen on him. “My lord?”
“We have been legally married for eight years without meeting as husband and wife,” Sebastian said. “I don’t think a fortnight more on either side will cause irreparable harm.” He stood. “I’ll be in touch, Finch. Thank you.”
He did not intend to go back to Marylebone.
He intended to give her time — to let the first conversation settle, to resist the urgency he felt, which he was aware was partly the general urgency of a man who had been constructing his own life from the outside for two years and found in her, for reasons he couldn’t entirely account for, a possible fixed point.
He intended this until Thursday afternoon, when he found himself walking past the British Museum on his way back from his club and saw, through the window of the reading rooms, a dark-haired woman at a table with a stack of periodicals.
He stopped.
He went inside.
She was absorbed. She was reading with the posture of someone who was not aware of being observed — slightly forward, one hand flat on the table, the other holding the page as though preventing it from escaping. There was a small frown between her brows that had nothing to do with displeasure; it was the frown of engagement, of a mind working on something and not pleased with the working.
He sat down across from her.
She looked up.
He had been braced — for the alarm, the composure-gathering, the careful managing that he had seen her do twice already. What he got was, for a half-second before the managing engaged, the naked expression underneath it: startled, and something else, something he couldn’t read.
Then: “Lord Blackwood.”
“Miss Shaw.” He looked at the periodicals. “What are you reading?”
She looked at him for a moment as though determining whether this was the conversation they were having. Then she turned the periodical to face him. An article on trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean. She had underlined three sentences.
He read the underlined sentences. “The second one is wrong,” he said.
She looked at him with the expression he had first produced in her at the Hartley dinner eight years ago, which he did not remember but which felt, in this moment, oddly familiar. The expression of a woman who had been told she was incorrect and was deciding how to respond to it.
“It is not wrong,” she said. “The author’s methodology is sound. You may disagree with the conclusion but the logic that produces it is—”
“The logic is fine,” he said. “The premise is outdated. The eastern routes shifted after the Napoleonic disruption. This piece was written before the disruption is accounted for.” He looked at her. “I spent two years on the Continent, not all of it in a military hospital. Some of the time I was watching the trade patterns from a distance.”
She looked at the article. She looked at him. She looked at the article again.
“You may be right,” she said. The acknowledgment came without ceremony, which he found immediately and disproportionately satisfying.
“I’m right frequently,” he said. “I’m also wrong frequently. I have found it more efficient to state my position and see which it turns out to be.”
Something moved in her face. Not quite the smile, but the precursor to it — the thing that happened to a face before it admitted to amusement.
He thought: there it is. There is something.
“You came to the reading room,” she said.
“I walked past the window.”
“You walked past the window and then came inside and sat down.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He looked at her. He could give her the casual answer — the convenient explanation about curiosity, about the investigation he had told himself he was conducting. He had learned, in two years of building himself from the outside, that the convenient answer was always available and that it was usually not the complete one.
“Because you were here,” he said. “And I wanted to know what you were reading.”
She looked at him steadily with the expression that was not quite readable — the careful one, the one she wore when she was deciding how much of the interior to allow outward.
“I come on Tuesdays and Thursdays,” she said.
He thought about what his mother had said. *Not the sort you would have paid attention to.* He thought about the rake in the portrait gallery who had apparently attended every gathering in London and paid attention to nothing that mattered.
“I’ll remember that,” he said.
She picked up her periodical. He took one from the stack she hadn’t reached yet.
They read in silence for an hour, and twice he pointed out an error and once she did the same to him, and the fire in the reading room grate was warm and the afternoon light was long and flat across the tables, and neither of them mentioned 1808 or the marriage or what came next.
It was the most comfortable hour he had spent since returning to London.
He thought, walking back to Grosvenor Square afterward, that this was possibly the point. That she had found the reading room before she found him, and he had found her there instead of anywhere else, and something in the specific quality of that — the books, the work, the thing they had both been doing before the other arrived — was closer to a true thing than anything else in the elaborate reconstruction of his social life.
He thought: I do not remember her.
He thought: I think I would very much like to know her.
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