A muscle worked in Mr. White’s jaw. He, too, had not expected such a thinly veiled dig. “Nevertheless, Mrs. Treadles, I had expected you to announce that you would recuse yourself from Cousins.”
She placed a hand on the notebook she had brought with her. Mrs. Watson had counseled having one or two props to give her hands something to do. “Why, pray tell?”
“Because your husband has been arrested on suspicion of murdering two of our finest!”
She wanted to shout, too. Instead, she made her reply softer, more unhurried. “And that makes Cousins Manufacturing a lesser concern for me? Or does it somehow make the firm less mine?”
Mr. White’s face flushed with anger. “Have you no sense of propriety, Mrs. Treadles, to be abroad at such a time?”
Her hand moved to the fountain pen that lay beside the notebook. The notebook was from a stock in her office, but the pen had been given to her by Robert, the day before he had left to the “Kentish” countryside.
They had yet to speak openly of their estrangement. She knew she dared not disturb the fragile sweetness of their recent reconciliation by dredging up the pain and mistrust of the only slightly less recent past. Perhaps he feared the same. Which had made his gift of the pen, engraved with the Cousins crest and her initials, an even more poignant gesture.
I have an engraved service revolver, he’d told her, you should have something similar.
And it had not escaped her that by saying so, he’d equated her work with his.
She rubbed a thumb over the engraving. “My sense of propriety is dictated by my sense of duty, Mr. White. Wherever I have duty, there my presence is appropriate. Given that I am ultimately responsible for its well-being, I have every duty to Cousins.”
“It is an insult to Mr. Sullivan’s memory, to have the wife of his murderer here.”
A bead of perspiration rolled down her back. She made her voice cold. “Mr. White, kindly remember that you are speaking to the late Mr. Sullivan’s employer. Your employer, too, I’ll remind you.”
With a loud scraping of chair legs, Mr. White rose to his feet. “That is a travesty! Mr. Sullivan did more for this company than anyone except its founders. And he was a kinsman of Mr. Longstead’s. It is an injustice that the company did not belong to him.”
Another bead of perspiration rolled down her back. Inside her boots, her toes clenched hard. And her heart pounded as if she were Philippides, sprinting from Marathon to Athens.
She smoothed a finger along the edges of her notebook. “Mr. Longstead sold his stock in the company to my father when he left. He chose not to give it to his kinsman. It matters not at all what you think of that decision, Mr. White. Mr. Sullivan was not a stockholder but an employee. As such he was well compensated, and there was nothing noteworthy about his status as an employee while the company remained in my family’s hands.”
Mr. White gritted his teeth. “I hope what I say doesn’t surprise you, but you don’t deserve to be here.”
Despite everything—all that Mrs. Watson had told her, all of dear Mr. Longstead’s encouragement, and all she knew to be true—she almost agreed with him.
So much contempt in his face, so much dismissal.
“I remind you one last time, Mr. White, that you speak to your employer. You serve at my pleasure, sir, not the other way round.”
Mr. White laughed, the sound full of derision and impatience. “And what would you do without me? I am an indispensable member of this firm. You are but a woman who doesn’t know her place.”
For so long she had feared this, open enmity, open confrontation, an irreversible rupture. Yet now that it was at last here, she found that she didn’t fear it anymore. No, she wanted it. More than anyone else in the room, more than the belligerent Mr. White could even imagine. “You are wrong, Mr. White. I do know my place. My place is here, at the head of this table, whereas your place . . . is no longer at Cousins.”
Silence, then an eruption of startled speech, men turning to one another around the table to make sure their ears hadn’t deceived them.
Alice turned slightly. “Mrs. Watson, kindly have your men escort Mr. White out.”
She did not raise her voice, yet it carried, silencing the men.
Mr. White pounded a meaty fist on the table. “You can’t do this, you harpy!”
After what she had been through with Inspector Brighton, Mr. White’s insult barely registered. She regarded him coldly. “Let me repeat: You serve at my pleasure, Mr. White, and I have decided that for your insubordination and other derelictions of duty, including but not limited to the failure to conduct a company-wide audit in more than five years, you have proved that you have neither my nor Cousins’s best interest at heart. Your employment has been terminated. Mrs. Watson’s men will show you out.”
“If he goes, then I go, too!” roared a man by the name of Kingford as he rose. He was one of Cousins’s lead engineers—and an entrenched member of Mr. Sullivan’s clique.
“Mrs. Treadles, this is not how we do things here!” cried Mr. Pollard, the leader of the old guard.
Aha, the old fox was at last out of his hole, happy to let his rival be sacked before he piped up to garner some advantages for himself.
“Mr. Pollard, this is indeed not how we do things here. Since when did it become acceptable for a mere manager to be openly hostile and disparaging to the owner of the enterprise—and expect to keep his position? Since when did it become acceptable for a man not to do his work, offer a myriad of excuses, and hide evidence that might show that indeed his work has been shoddy? And since when did it become acceptable for those entrusted with the well-being of this company to condone such conduct, to speak up not at its proliferation, but only when one of its worst perpetrators has been shown the door—and then only to defend said perpetrator?”
Mr. Pollard, who had not expected such a direct offensive, flapped his lips a few times. “Mrs. Treadles, why, your father would not have acted this way!”
“And would anyone here have acted as he had to my father?”
“But—but that’s because your father wouldn’t have wanted you here,” said the wily old fox.
An insidious answer that pierced her straight through the heart. It would always hurt, at least a little, that her father had excluded her from Cousins and that it would never have come to her had Barnaby not died childless. But that was between a daughter and her father’s memory.
“I happen to believe that my father would have been greatly angered by the way I have been treated,” she said firmly. “My father, however, is not here to settle this dispute. And therefore, I am the arbiter of how things are done at this great enterprise.”