“Really—” Gerald tried again.
Joseph cut across him. “Sebastian knew I was his friend,” he said very clearly. “But I was not as good a friend to him as I would have been had I tried more honestly to see his faults as well as his virtues. I would have served him better had I tried to curb his hubris instead of being blind to it.”
“Hubris?” she said icily.
“His pride in his own charm, his feeling of invulnerability,” he started to explain.
“I know what the word means, Mr. Reavley!” she snapped. “I was questioning your use of it with reference to my son! I find it intolerable that—”
“You find any criticism of him intolerable.” Gerald managed to make himself heard at last. “But somebody killed him!”
“Envy!” she said with absolute conviction. “Some small person who could not endure being eclipsed.” She looked at Joseph as she finished.
“Mrs. Allard,” Connie said, “we all sympathize with your grief, but that does not excuse you for being both cruel and unjust to another guest in my house, a man who has also lost his closest family almost as recently as you have. I think perhaps in your own loss you had temporarily forgotten that.” It was said calmly, even gravely, but it was a bitter rebuke.
Aidan Thyer, who had entered the room during the exchange, looked startled, but he did not intervene, and his expression as he glanced at Connie was unreadable, as if stemming from emotions profound and conflicting. In that instant Joseph wondered if he knew that Beecher was in love with his wife, and if it hurt him or made him fear he could lose what he must surely value intensely. Or did he? What was there, really, behind the habitual courtesy? Joseph glimpsed with pain the possibility of a world of loneliness and pretense.
But the present hauled him back. Mary Allard was furious, but she was too clearly in the wrong to defend herself. She adopted Connie’s offer of escape.
“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I had forgotten. I daresay your own loss has . . .” She had obviously been going to say something like “cramped your judgment,” but realized it made things no better. She left the sentence hanging in the air.
Normally Joseph would have accepted any apology, but not this time. “Made me think more deeply about reality,” he finished for her. “And see that no matter how much we love someone or regret lost opportunities to have given them more than we did, lies do not help, even when we would find them more comfortable.”
The color drained out of Mary’s face, and she looked at him with loathing. Even if she understood anything he said, she was not going to concede it now. “I have no idea what things you may regret,” she said coldly. “I do not know you well enough. I have heard no one speak ill of your parents, but if they have, then you should do all within your power to silence them. If you have not loyalty, above all to your own family, then you have nothing! I promise you I will do anything in my power to protect the name and reputation of my dead son from the envy and spite of anyone cowardly enough to attack him in death when they would not have dared to in life.”
“There are many loyalties, Mrs. Allard,” he answered, his voice grating with the intensity of his feelings: the misery and loneliness of too many losses of his own, the anger at God for hurting him so profoundly and at the dead for leaving him with such a weight to bear, the crush of responsibilities he was not ready for, and above all the fear of disillusion, of the disintegration of the love and beliefs dearest to him. “It is a matter of choosing which to place first. Loving someone does not make them right, and your family is no more important than mine or anyone else’s. Your first loyalty ought to be to honor, kindness, and some degree of truth.”
The hatred in her face was answer enough without words. She turned to Connie, her skin white, her eyes burning. “I am sure you will understand if I do not choose to remain for dinner. Perhaps you will be good enough to have a tray sent to my room.” And with that she swept out through the door in a rustle of black silk taffeta and the faintest perfume of roses.
Connie sighed. “I am sorry, Dr. Reavley. She is finding this investigation very hard indeed. Everyone’s nerves are a little raw.”
“She idealized him,” Gerald said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “It isn’t fair. No one could live up to that, nor can the rest of us protect her forever from the truth.” He glanced at Joseph, perhaps expecting him to read some apology in it, although Joseph had the feeling he was looking more for acceptance of his own silence. He was sorry for Gerald, a man floundering around in a hopeless task, but he felt far greater pity for Elwyn, trying to defend a brother whose flaws he knew while protecting his mother from truths she could not face and his father from looking impotent and sinking into self-loathing. It was more than anyone should have to do, let alone a young man who was himself bereaved and who should have been supported by his parents, not made to support them in their self-absorbed grief.
He glanced at Connie and saw a reflection of the same pity and anger in her face. But it was Joseph she was looking at, not her husband. Aidan Thyer was averting his gaze, perhaps in order to hide his distaste at Gerald’s excuses.
Joseph filled the silence. “Everyone’s nerves are a little raw,” he agreed. “We suspect each other of things that in our better moments would not even enter our thoughts. Once we know what happened, we will be able to forget them again.”
“Do you think so?” Aidan Thyer asked suddenly. “We’ve pulled off too many masks and seen what is underneath. I don’t think we’ll forget.” He looked momentarily at Connie, then back at Joseph, his pale eyes challenging.
“Perhaps not forget,” Joseph amended. “But isn’t the art of friendship very much the selecting of what is important and allowing some of the mistakes to drift away until we lose sight of them? We don’t forget so much as let the outlines blur, accept that a thing happened, and be sorry. This is how we are today, but it does not have to be tomorrow as well.”
“You forgive very easily, Reavley,” Thyer said coolly. “I wonder sometimes if you’ve ever had anything very much to forgive. Or are you too Christian to feel real anger?”
“You mean too anemic to feel anything with real passion,” Joseph corrected for him.
Thyer blushed. “I’m sorry. That was irredeemably rude. I do beg your pardon.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t weigh things so much before I speak,” Joseph said thoughtfully. “It makes me sound pompous, even a little cold. But I am too afraid of what I might say if I don’t.”
Thyer smiled, an expression of startling warmth.
Connie looked taken by surprise, and she turned away. “Please come in to dinner, Mr. Allard,” she invited Gerald, who was moving from one foot to the other and plainly at a total loss. “We will help no one by not eating. We shall need our strength, if only to support each other.”
Joseph spent a miserable night, twisting himself round and round in his bed, his thoughts preventing him from sleeping. Small recollections came back to his mind: Connie and Beecher laughing together over some trivial thing, but the sound of it so rich, so full of joy; Connie’s face as she had listened to him talking about some esoteric discovery in the Middle East; Beecher’s concern when she had a summer cold, his fear that it might be flu or even turn to pneumonia; other, more shadowy incidents that now seemed out of proportion to the casual friendship they claimed.
What had Sebastian known? Had he threatened Beecher openly, or simply allowed fear and guilt to play their part? Was it possible he had been innocent of anything more than a keener observation than others?
But Beecher had been with Connie and Thyer when the Reavleys had been killed—not that Joseph had ever suspected him of that. And Perth said he had been along the Backs when Sebastian was shot, so he could not be guilty.
What about Connie? He could not imagine Connie shooting Sebastian. She was generous, charming, quick to laugh, just as quick to see another’s need or loneliness, and to do all she could to answer it. But she was a woman of passion. She might love Beecher profoundly and be trapped by circumstance. If she was discovered in an affair with him and it were made public, he would lose his position, but she would lose everything. A woman divorced for adultery ceased to exist even to her friends, let alone to the rest of society.
Would Sebastian really have done that to her?
The young man Joseph knew would have found it a repulsive thought, cruel, dishonorable, destructive to the soul. But did that man exist outside Joseph’s imagination?
He fell asleep not sure of what was certain about anyone, even himself. He woke in the morning with his
