Chapter 5: Who Are You

He came to my room after midnight, and he did not knock.

I was sitting up in bed in a borrowed nightgown, doing sums on the back of a menu by candlelight.

Hadrian shut the door and turned the key.

"Tell me who you are," he said.

"I'm Rosamund Hallowell, I'm twenty-four, and I need my beauty sleep."

"You've said you are afraid of a rope nobody mentioned."

"You counted a garden, and you made a Prince pay a debt in public."

"The woman I knew couldn't add two and two."

"Maybe she could and she hid it."

"She couldn't."

"The Crown pays me to read everything, and I have read her letters for seven years."

"She could not add a column of figures."

I put the menu down.

He stood at the foot of the bed with his coat open and his gloves in one fist.

He didn't look like a man who would hang a woman.

He looked like a man who hadn't slept either.

"If I tell you, you'll think I've gone mad," I said.

"I am the Lord Marshal," he said.

"I have heard every kind of madness."

So I told him.

I told him I was from a place with no horses, where I worked in an office and slept at my desk.

I told him there was a book, and that I had read it, and that this was inside it.

I told him that in thirty-eight days a girl in white would be poisoned and I would be blamed.

I told him he would sign the order.

I did not tell him the part where Rosamund asked to see him.

When I stopped, the candle had burned down a finger's width.

Hadrian had not moved.

"That is a very elaborate lie," he said at last.

"Yes."

"I need a proof."

"Tonight," I said, "before dawn, the north grain store at Harrow burns."

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