The carriage labored up the rutted track toward the house on the moor, its wheels spinning in the frozen mud, its springs groaning with every jolt. Elena sat inside, her hands folded in her lap, the letter from Camille tucked into her reticule like a talisman, or perhaps a warrant. She had not decided which. The landscape outside the window was a study in desolation: the heather brown and brittle, the gorse blackened by frost, the sky a low, oppressive ceiling of unbroken gray. It was the kind of day, she thought, that made a mockery of hope, that reduced all human endeavor to the futile scrabbling of ants on a frozen hill.
The maid met her at the door, the same thin, pale girl with the red-rimmed eyes, and led her inside without a word. The house was colder than it had been on her first visit, and darker, as though the death that had occurred within its walls had leached something vital from the air itself. The dust sheets had been removed from the furniture, but the rooms still had the feel of a place that was being slowly abandoned, a place where the human presence was dwindling to a single, flickering flame.
Camille was in the parlor at the back of the house, a small, cramped room that looked out onto a garden gone wild. She was sitting in a chair by the window, her hands empty, her eyes fixed on something in the middle distance that only she could see. She was wearing a black dress of cheap, serviceable wool, the kind of dress that could be bought ready-made from the draper's shop on High Street, and her hair had been pulled back into a severe knot that made her look older, harder, stripped of the careless beauty that had once been her most striking feature.
"Elena," she said, and her voice was flat, drained of all emotion. "You came."
"Of course I came." Elena crossed the room and knelt beside the chair, taking Camille's cold hands in her own. The gesture was becoming familiar, a ritual of comfort that she had performed so many times now that it felt almost natural. "I came as soon as I received your letter. I am so sorry about your mother."
Camille looked at her, and her eyes were dry, but there was a depth of exhaustion in them that was more terrible than tears. "She died at dawn," she said. "I was holding her hand. She opened her eyes, just for a moment, and she looked at me, and she said my name. And then she was gone. Just like that. Gone."
Elena squeezed her hands, a gentle, reassuring pressure. "She knew you were there. She knew she was loved."
"Did she?" Camille's voice cracked, and for the first time, a flicker of emotion broke through the flat, exhausted surface. "I have been sitting here all morning, trying to remember the last real conversation we had. The last time I really listened to her, instead of just nodding and thinking about something else. And I cannot remember. I cannot remember anything."
"That is the grief talking," Elena said. "It clouds everything. It makes you forget what you know to be true."
Camille was silent for a moment. Then she withdrew her hands from Elena's and rose from the chair, crossing to the window. She stood with her back to the room, her arms wrapped around herself, looking out at the frozen garden.
"I have been thinking," she said, "about your husband."
Elena felt the familiar chill, the tightening in her chest that always accompanied the mention of Marcus. "What about him?"
"About what he did. About Lise. About the other women, the ones I did not know about. I have been thinking about all of it, and I have been thinking about you." Camille turned to face her, and her eyes, which had been so flat and empty, were suddenly sharp, focused, burning with a cold, intense light. "You knew, did you not? You knew what he was."
Elena rose from her kneeling position, her knees aching, her heart beginning to beat faster. "I knew he was not a good man," she said carefully. "I knew he was cold, and distant, and often cruel. But I did not know about the women. Not until after he died."
"You did not know about Lise Markham?"
"No. I told you, I learned about her from the inspector, at the funeral."
"But you knew about me." Camille's voice was steady now, unnervingly steady. "You knew about me before I came to your kitchen that night. Before I told you anything."
The words hung in the air between them, sharp and glittering as icicles. Elena felt the ground shift beneath her, the careful scaffolding of her story beginning to tremble.
"What do you mean?" she asked, though she knew, already, what Camille meant.
"I have been thinking about it for weeks," Camille said. "Ever since the funeral, ever since I learned how your husband died. A progressive paralysis. A slow, mysterious decline. The doctors baffled. No diagnosis, no explanation. And I remembered something. Something that did not make sense at the time, but that makes sense now."
"Camille—"
"I remembered the way you looked at me, that first day in my studio. I remembered thinking that there was something behind your eyes, something watchful, something calculating. I told myself I was imagining it. I told myself that you were just a nervous woman, a shy woman, a woman who was not accustomed to being looked at. But I was not imagining it, was I?"
Elena did not answer. She stood very still, her hands folded before her, her face composed, but inside, she was reeling. Camille was not supposed to know. Camille was not supposed to suspect. The plan had been so careful, so meticulous, every detail accounted for. And yet, here was Camille, looking at her with those sharp, burning eyes, putting together pieces that Elena had believed were safely scattered.
"When did you know?" Camille asked. "When did you find out about me?"
Elena took a breath. The truth, she thought. As much of the truth as possible. It had worked with the inspector. It might work here. "I received a letter," she said. "An anonymous letter, with a photograph. A photograph of you and my husband, together. It was sent to me at Ashwick Hall, some weeks before the dinner party. I do not know who sent it."
Camille's expression flickered, a brief, unreadable spasm of something that might have been shock or guilt or both. "A photograph," she repeated. "Someone sent you a photograph."
"Yes. And a letter, asking me to release my husband, to let him go so that he could be with you. It was signed with your name."
The silence that followed was absolute. Camille stared at her, her face very pale, her hands trembling at her sides. "I never sent you a letter," she said. "I never sent you a photograph. I would never have done that. It was not—" She broke off, and her eyes widened. "It was him. It must have been him."
"Him?"
"Marcus. Your husband. He must have arranged it. He must have wanted you to find out, to be the one to end the marriage, so that he could—" She stopped, her voice catching. "So that he could be free of you without being the villain. So that he could blame you for the dissolution, play the wronged husband, preserve his reputation."
Elena felt the world tilt around her. She had assumed, all these weeks, that Camille had sent the letter and the photograph. She had assumed that the cruelty had been Camille's, the arrogance, the casual, careless destruction. But if Camille was telling the truth, if Marcus had been the one—Marcus, who had manipulated them both, who had played them against each other, who had used Camille as a weapon and Elena as a target—
"Why would he do that?" she asked, though she already knew the answer.
"Because he was a coward," Camille said, and her voice was bitter, acid, stripped of all its earlier exhaustion. "Because he wanted what he wanted, and he did not care who he hurt to get it. Because he was a man who had spent his entire life manipulating the law to serve his own ends, and he saw no reason not to manipulate the people in his life as well." She paused, and then she added, very quietly, "And because he underestimated you. He thought you would be destroyed by the revelation. He thought you would crumble, retreat, disappear into your shame. He did not know what you were capable of."
Elena looked at her, and she felt the two Elenas warring within her for what felt like the hundredth time. The cold, detached Elena knew that this was a dangerous moment, that Camille was too close to the truth, that the hellebore was still in the drawer and could still be used. But the other Elena, the Elena who had been manipulated and betrayed by the same man, who had been a pawn in a game she did not even know she was playing—that Elena looked at Camille and saw something she had not expected to see.
She saw an ally.
"Neither of us knew what I was capable of," Elena said quietly. "Not even me."
Camille looked at her for a long moment. And then, very slowly, she nodded. "The inspector came to see me," she said. "Yesterday, before my mother died. She asked me questions about Marcus, about his illness, about the circumstances of his death. She asked me about you."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her the truth. That I had been painting your portrait. That I had come to know you, in the weeks before his death. That you were a woman of extraordinary composure, of remarkable self-control." She paused, and a faint, almost imperceptible smile touched the corners of her lips. "I did not tell her anything else. I did not tell her what I suspected."
"And what do you suspect?"
Camille met her eyes, and her gaze was steady, unblinking. "I suspect that your husband did not die of natural causes. I suspect that someone helped him along. And I suspect that someone was you."
The words fell into the silence like stones into still water. Elena felt the shock of them reverberate through her body, a cold, electric jolt that seemed to stop her heart for a single, suspended beat. And then, slowly, deliberately, she made her choice.
"Yes," she said. "It was."
The admission hung between them, vast and irrevocable. Camille did not recoil. She did not gasp, or cry out, or back away in horror. She simply stood there, her dark eyes fixed on Elena's face, her expression unreadable.
"How?" she asked.
"Monkshood. A tincture, administered in his brandy, drop by drop, over the course of weeks. The symptoms mimic heart failure. The doctors suspected nothing."
"And the night I came to your kitchen? The night you held my hand and told me I was not alone?"
"I was planning to do the same to you," Elena said, and her voice was steady, almost conversational. "I had the hellebore ready. I was going to cloud your mind, destroy your memory, reduce you to a shadow of yourself. I was going to take from you everything you had taken from me."
Camille's face was very pale, but her voice, when she spoke, was calm. "Why did you not do it?"
Elena considered the question. "Because you were kind to me," she said. "Because you looked at me and saw a human being, not a piece of furniture. Because you offered me friendship when you had every reason to offer me nothing. Because—" She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was softer. "Because I have already killed one person, and it has hollowed me out. I did not want to kill another."
The silence that followed was long and deep. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the seconds, and the wind moaned in the chimney, and the two women stood facing each other in the cold, dim parlor, the weight of their shared history pressing down on them like a physical force.
"What happens now?" Camille asked at last.
"I do not know," Elena said. "I have told you the truth. You could go to the inspector. You could tell her everything I have said. She would believe you. She is already suspicious. Your testimony would be enough, or nearly enough, to see me hanged."
"I know," Camille said.
"But you are not going to do that, are you?"
Camille was silent for a long moment. She turned away and walked back to the window, looking out at the frozen garden, the tangled rosebushes, the gray, indifferent sky. "My mother used to say that there were two kinds of justice," she said. "The justice of men, which is written in laws and enforced by courts. And the justice of women, which is written in blood and enforced by silence. The justice of men failed Lise Markham. It failed you, in your marriage, a hundred times over. It failed me, when I tried to speak, tried to warn, tried to do something about what I knew." She turned back to face Elena, and her eyes were bright with tears, but her voice was steady. "I do not believe in the justice of men anymore. I believe in the justice of women."
Elena felt something shift inside her, something that had been locked and frozen for as long as she could remember. It was not relief, exactly, and it was not gratitude. It was something stranger, something she had not felt in years. It was, she realized, the faint, tentative stirring of hope.
"Then we are allies," she said.
"We are allies," Camille agreed. "Whatever comes. Whatever the inspector finds. Whatever happens next. We are allies."
Elena stepped forward and took Camille's hands in her own. They stood there for a long moment, the two women, the widow and the artist, the poisoner and the witness, bound together by secrets and blood and the strange, unexpected bond that had grown between them in the shadow of death.
Outside, the wind continued to blow, and the snow began to fall again, soft and silent, covering the moor in a fresh layer of white.
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