and came to a natural end.
“Right, sir! Yes, I’ll do that. Might try some of the other houses, too. Like you say, never know what they’ve seen, till you try, like?”
When the footman returned, he conducted Pitt into the morning room and left him. It was five minutes before Jessamyn Nash appeared. Pitt knew her immediately; she was the woman from the portrait in the hall, with those wide, direct eyes, that mouth, that radiant hair, thick and soft as summer fields. She was dressed in black now, but it did nothing to dim her brilliance. She stood very straight, her chin high.
“Good morning, Mr. Pitt. What is it you wish to ask me?”
“Good morning, ma’am. I’m sorry to have to disturb you in such tragic circumstances-”
“I appreciate the necessity. You do not need to explain.” She walked across the room with exquisite grace. She did not sit, nor did she invite him to do so. “Naturally you must discover what happened to Fanny, poor child.” Her face froze for just an instant, stiff. “She was only a child, you know, very innocent, very-young.”
It was the same impression he had had, extreme youth.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“Thank you.” He had no idea from her voice whether she knew he meant it, or if she took it as a simple courtesy, the automatic thing to say. He would like to have assured her, but then she would not care about the feelings of a policeman.
“Tell me what happened.” He looked at her back as she stood at the window. She was slender, shoulders delicately soft under the silk. Her voice, when it came, was expressionless, as though she were repeating something rehearsed.
“I was at home yesterday evening. Fanny lived here with my husband and myself. She was my husband’s half sister, but I presume you know that. She was only seventeen. She was engaged to marry Algernon Burnon, but that was not to be for three years at least, when she became twenty.”
Pitt did not interrupt. He seldom interrupted; the slightest remarks that seemed irrelevant at the time could turn out to mean something, betraying a feeling if nothing else. And he wanted to know all he could about Fanny Nash. He wanted to know how other people had seen her, what she had meant to them.
“-that may seem a long engagement,” Jessamyn was saying, “but Fanny was very young. She grew up alone, you see. My father-in-law married a second time. Fanny is-was-twenty years younger than my husband. She seemed forever a child. Not that she was simple.” She hesitated, and he noticed that her long fingers were fiddling with a china figurine from the table, twisting it around and around. “Just-” She fumbled for the word. “-ingenuous- innocent.”
“And she was living here with you and your husband, until her marriage?”
“Yes.”
“Why was that?”
She looked round at him in surprize. Her blue eyes were very cool, and there were no tears in them.
“Her mother is dead. Naturally we offered her a home.” She gave a tiny, icy smile. “Young girls of good family do not live alone, Mr.-I’m sorry-I forget your name.”
“Pitt, ma’am,” he said with equal chill. He was ruffled, surprised that he was still capable of feeling slighted after all these years. He refused to show it. He smiled within himself. Charlotte would have been furious; her tongue would have spoken as quickly as the words came to her mind. “I thought she might have remained with her father.”
Something of his humor must have softened his face. She mistook it for a smirk. The color rose in her exquisite cheeks.
“She preferred to live with us,” she said tartly. “Naturally. A girl does not wish to enter the Season without a suitable lady, preferably of her own family, to advise and accompany her. I was happy to do so. Are you sure this is relevant, Mr.-Pitt? Are you not merely indulging your curiosity? I appreciate our way of life is probably quite unknown to you.”
An acid reply came to his mind, but anger was irrevocable, and he could not yet afford to commit himself to her enmity.
He pulled a face. “Perhaps it has nothing to do with it. Please continue with your account of yesterday evening.”
She took a breath to speak, then apparently changed her mind. She crossed over to the mantel shelf, piled with photographs, and began again in the same flat voice.
“She had spent a perfectly usual day. She had no household affairs to attend to, of course-I do all that. She wrote letters in the morning, consulted her diary, and kept an appointment with her dressmaker. She lunched here at home, and then in the afternoon she took the carriage and went calling. She did tell me upon whom, but I forget. It is always the same sort of people, and as long as one remembers oneself, it really hardly matters. I dare say you can find out from the coachman, if you wish. We dined at home. Lady Pomeroy called, a most tiresome person, but a family obligation-you wouldn’t understand.”
Pitt controlled his face and regarded her with continued polite interest.
“Fanny left early,” she went on. “She has very little social ability, as yet. Sometimes I think she is too young for a Season! I have tried to teach her, but she is very artless. She seems to lack any natural ability to invent. Even the simplest prevarication is a trial to her. She went on some small errand, a book for Lady Cumming-Gould. At least, that is what she said.”
“And you do not think it was so?” he inquired.
A slight flicker crossed her face, but Pitt did not understand it. Charlotte might have interpreted it for him, but she was not here to ask.
“I should think it was precisely so,” Jessamyn replied. “As I have tried to explain to you, Mr.-er-” She waved her hand irritably. “Poor Fanny had no art to deceive. She was a guileless as a child.”
Pitt had seldom found children guileless; tactless perhaps-but most he could remember were possessed of the natural cunning of a stoat and the toughness in a bargain of a moneylender, although certainly some were blessed with the blandest of countenances. It was the third time Jessamyn had referred to Fanny’s immaturity.
“Well, I can ask Lady Cumming-Gould,” he replied with what he hoped was a smile as guileless as Fanny’s.
She turned away from him sharply, lifting one slender shoulder, as if his face had somehow reminded her who he was and that he must be recalled to his proper position.
“Lady Pomeroy had gone and I was alone when-” her voice wavered, and for the first time she seemed to lose her composure, “-when Fanny came back.” She made an effort not to gulp, and failed. She was obliged to fumble for a handkerchief, and the clumsiness of it brought her back. “Fanny came in and collapsed in my arms. I don’t know how the poor child had had the strength to come so far. It was amazing. She died but a moment afterward.”
“I am sorry.”
She looked at him, her face devoid of expression, almost as if she were asleep. Then she moved one hand to brush at her heavy taffeta skirt, perhaps in memory of the blood on her the night before.
“Did she speak at all?” he asked quietly. “Anything?”
“No, Mr. Pitt. She was nearly dead by the time she got so far.”
He turned slightly to look at the French doors. “She came in through there?” It was the only possible way without having passed the footman, and yet it seemed natural to ask.
She shivered minutely.
“Yes.”
He walked over toward them and looked out. The lawn was small, a mere patch, surrounded by laurel bushes and a herbaceous walk beyond. There was a wall between this garden and the next. No doubt, by the time he had closed this case, he would know every view and corner of all these houses-unless there was some pathetic, easy answer, but none presented itself yet. He turned back to her.
“Is there any way your garden connects with the others along the Walk, a gate or door in that wall?”
Her face looked blank. “Yes, but it is hardly the way she would choose to come. She was at Lady Cumming- Gould’s.”
He must send Forbes to all the gardens to see if there was any sign of blood. A wound such as that must
