“If I say I have no idea, Emily, then I have no idea. I don’t watch clocks. I don’t care for them. When one gets to my age, one doesn’t. It was dark, if that is of any help.”
“A great help, thank you.” Pitt calculated quickly. It must have been after ten, at this time of the year. And Jessamyn Nash had sent the footman for the police at a little before quarter to eleven. “What did she come for, ma’am?” he asked.
“To get away from an excessively boring dinner guest,” Vespasia replied immediately. “Eliza Pomeroy. Knew her as a child, and she was a bore even then. Talks about other people’s ailments. Who cares? One’s own are tedious enough!”
Pitt hid a smile with difficulty. He dared not look at Emily.
“She told you that?” he inquired.
Vespasia considered whether to be patient with him- because he was foolish-and decided against it. The thought was plain in her face.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she said smartly. “She was a child of quite moderate breeding, neither good enough nor bad enough to be frank. She said she was returning some book or other.”
“You have the book?” He did not know what made him ask, except habit to check every detail. It was almost certainly immaterial.
“I should imagine so,” she replied with slight surprize. “But I never lend books I expect to require again, so I couldn’t say. She was an honest child. She hadn’t the imagination to lie successfully, and she was one of those comfortable people who know their own limitations. She would have done quite nicely, had she lived. No pretensions and no spite, poor little creature.”
The humor and the pleasantness vanished as suddenly as winter sun, leaving a chill in the room behind it.
Pitt felt obliged to speak, but his voice was remote, and it sounded trivial, meaningless.
“Did she make any remark about calling upon anyone else?”
Vespasia seemed to have been touched by the same coldness.
“No,” she said solemnly. “She had stayed here long enough to serve her purpose. If Eliza Pomeroy had chanced still to be at the Nashes, she could quite easily have excused herself and gone straight up to bed without discourtesy. From her conversation before leaving here, I gathered she intended to go straight home.”
“She took her leave of you some time after ten?” Pitt confirmed. “How long do you judge she was here?”
“A little above a half an hour. She came in the early dusk and left when it was fully dark.”
That would be roughly quarter to ten until about quarter past, he thought. She must have been attacked somewhere in the short journey down Paragon Walk. They were large houses with broad frontages, carriageways, and shrubbery deep enough to hide a figure, but even so there were only three between Emily’s and the Nashes’. She could not have been on the street for more than minutes-unless she had called somewhere else after all?
“She was engaged to marry Algernon Burnon?” His mind searched for possibilities.
“Very suitable,” Vespasia agreed. “A pleasant enough young man of quite adequate means. His habits are sober and his manners good, if a trifle boring, so far as I know. Altogether a suitable choice.”
Pitt wondered inwardly how much good sense appealed to seventeen-year-old Fanny.
“Do you know, ma’am,” he said aloud, “if there was anyone else who especially admired her?” He hoped his meaning was plain under such genteel disguise.
She looked at him with a slight puckering of her eyebrows, and over her shoulder he could see Emily wince.
“I can imagine no one, Mr. Pitt, who held such feelings for her as to precipitate last night’s tragedy, which I presume is what you are trying to say?”
Emily shut her eyes and bit her lip to stop herself from laughing.
Pitt was aware he had fallen into precisely the strain of language he despised, and both women knew it. Now he must avoid overcompensating.
“Thank you, Lady Cumming-Gould.” He stood up, “I’m sure if anything comes to your mind that you believe could help us, you will let us know. Thank you, Lady Ashworth.”
Vespasia nodded slightly and permitted herself a faint smile, but Emily came around the table from the back of the sofa and held out both her hands.
“Please give my love to Charlotte. I shall be calling upon her directly, but not until the worst of this is over. But perhaps that won’t be long?”
“I hope not.” He touched her hand gently, but he had no belief that it would be so brief, or so easy. Investigations were not pleasant, and things were seldom the same afterward. There was always hurt.
He visited several of the other houses along the Walk and found at home Algernon Burnon, Lord and Lady Dilbridge, who had held the party, Mrs. Selena Montague, a very handsome widow, and the Misses Horbury. By half past five he left its quiet dignity and made his way back to the scruffy, heelworn utility of the police station. By seven he was at his own front door. The facade of the house was narrow, tidy, but there was no carriageway, no trees, only a scrubbed and whitened step and the wooden gateway through to the back yard.
He opened the door with his key, and at once the same little bubble of pleasure that rose inside him every time burst in warmth, and he found himself smiling. Violence and ugliness slipped away.
“Charlotte?”
There was a clatter in the kitchen, and his smile broadened. He went down the passage and stopped in the doorway. She was on her knees on the scrubbed floor, and two saucepan lids were still rolling just out of her reach under the table. She was in a plain dress with a white apron over it, and her shining, mahogany hair was coming out of its knot in long, trailing strands. She looked up and pulled a face, grabbing at the lids and missing. He bent and picked them up for her, holding out his other hand. She took it, and he pulled her up and toward him. As she relaxed in his arms, he dropped the lids on the table. It was good to feel her, the warmth of her body, of her answering mouth on his.
“Who have you been chasing today?” she asked after a moment.
He pushed the hair off her face.
“Murder,” he said quietly. “And rape.”
“Oh,” her face stiffened a little, perhaps memory. “I’m sorry.”
It would have been easy to have left it at that, not to have told her that it was someone Emily knew, living in Emily’s street, but she would have to know sometime. Emily would be bound to tell her. Perhaps they would solve it quickly after all-a drunken footman.
But she had already noticed his hesitation.
“Who was it?” she asked. Her first guess for his concern was wrong. “Was she someone with children?”
He thought of little Jemima, asleep upstairs now.
She saw the easing of his face, the shadow of relief.
“Who, Thomas?” she repeated.
“A young woman, a girl-”
She knew that was not all. “You mean a child?”
“No-no, she was seventeen. I’m sorry, love, she lived in Paragon Walk, just a few doors from Emily. I saw Emily this afternoon. She sent her love.”
Memories of Cater Street came back, of the fear that had ultimately reached into everything, touching and tainting everyone. She spoke the first fear that came to her mind.
“You don’t think George was-had anything to do with it?”
His face fell.
“Good heavens no! Of course not!”
She went back to the stove. She skewered the potatoes savagely to see if they were cooked, and two of them fell apart. She would like to have sworn at them, but she would not in front of him. If he still cherished her as a lady, let him keep his illusions. Her cooking was enough of a hurdle to overcome at one time. She was still enough in love with him to hunger for his admiration. Her mother had taught her how to govern a house most excellently and see that all the tasks were properly performed, but she had never foreseen that Charlotte would marry so far beneath her as to require that she actually do the cooking herself. It had been an experience not without its difficulties. It was to Pitt’s credit that he had laughed at her so little and only once lost his temper.
“Your dinner is nearly ready,” she said, carrying the pan to the sink. “Was Emily all right?”
