Carswell was still uncertain. He glanced at Byam, then at Vespasia, and ended by saying nothing.
“I hope, for the sake of the rest of us, that your view prevails,” Charlotte said clearly, looking at Vespasia. “If the police are blackened in public esteem any further, it will destroy confidence in them to a degree where their efficiency, perhaps even their existence, will be jeopardized.”
“I am sure your fears are unfounded, Mrs. Pitt,” Carswell said stiffly. “I beg you, do not disturb yourself.”
And from there the conversation became more general. The sweet course was served, and then the ices.
Finally after the fruit-pineapples, cherries, apricots and melons-the ladies excused themselves and retired to the withdrawing room to sit and discuss polite trivialities and exchange purely frivolous gossip. The men remained around the table to pass the port and smoke, and speak of the subjects that were too contentious or intellectual to be aired while the ladies were present.
When the gentlemen rejoined them again Charlotte found herself listening to Peter Valerius. They had begun to speak of usury, with Carswell still in their company. Charlotte had hoped it might produce some emotional response which she could judge, but Carswell had left them and the conversation had somehow turned to international finance.
“It is still usury,” Valerius said with an intensity that held her attention in spite of her lack of interest in the subject. “A powerful industry invests in a small, backward country, a part of the empire, for example in Africa.” He leaned towards her, his face sharp with the strength of his emotion. “The people begin to prosper, as there is work for many of them. They are able to sell their goods and in exchange buy imported luxuries, for which they soon develop not only a taste, but a dependence. Perhaps it even includes the raw materials or the machinery necessary for their new industry.”
She could see no connection to the wretchedness of personal usury, and he must have observed it in her face. He resumed with greater urgency, his voice demanding her attention.
“The parent company expands the business, promising even better trade. The small country accepts. Suddenly life is better than they have ever known it. They have luxuries undreamed of before.”
“Is that not good?” She sought to understand, but the cause of his anger eluded her.
“And the country is utterly dependent on the industry, and those who govern it,” he continued, now oblivious of the rest of the room. Even Odelia’s skirt brushing his elbow and thigh as she passed behind his back made no impression on him at all. She apologized and he did not hear her. He leaned closer to Charlotte. “Suddenly the price is altered. They pay less for the goods the country produces, they charge more for the materials they supply. The rate of interest on the money borrowed is increased. The small country is in difficulties. Profits disappear. They need more money to service their needs and keep the industry surviving. The loans are increasingly expensive. Perhaps they cease altogether, and then they have to turn to venture capital.”
He must have seen from Charlotte’s expression that she had no idea what that was.
“Instead of simply lending money at a rate of twenty percent, or so,” he explained, his voice hard-edged, his face pale, “the rate of interest is higher, much higher, and the lender also demands one-third ownership in the business itself-forever.”
“But that’s monstrous,” she protested. “It’s… usury!”
A bitter smile lit his face.
“Of course it is!” he agreed. “Not man to man, but industry to nation. A few score profit, and tens of thousands suffer.”
She nearly asked why people allowed such a thing to happen, but the answer was already in what he had told her. She sat for several minutes digesting in her mind what he had said, and he sat in front of her, watching her face, knowing he had no need to add anything further.
While Charlotte was absorbed with Peter Valerius, Micah Drummond was standing apart, next to the enormous curtains that hung swathed across the windows at the entrance to the balcony and the steps down to the garden. He found the chatter almost impossible to concentrate on and the small snatches of gossip and opinion were insufferable when so much clamored in his mind: doubts so ugly they stifled everything else that entered his thoughts; doubts about himself, his actions and judgments of the past, his motives of the present; his own honesty; and dark, crowding fear for the future.
The room was full of lights. The chandeliers glittered pendant from the ceiling, their crystal facets winking in the barest movement of air. Lights burned from all the gas brackets on the walls. Diamonds sparkled around throats, on arms and in hair, even on slender wrists, waved to emphasize a remark. Reflected light glanced from polished tables and on silver and in glass.
The soft buzz of voices was interrupted by laughter, the chink of goblets. It all looked so gay and unshadowed. But he longed to go outside to the solitude and the concealing darkness of the summer garden, where his face would not be read, no one else saw or remembered who spoke to whom, and where at least for a while he could be alone.
He stood undecided, and perhaps it would be more honest to say unable to make the decision to escape, in case he was observed. It was an entirely new experience for him to feel so racked by guilt, so uncertain of his own judgments. Of course he had made mistakes, but he had understood them, and they had not corroded his underlying belief in himself.
But this was entirely different. Why had he joined the secret brotherhood of the Inner Circle? He could remember Pitt’s face as exactly as if he had only just left him, standing in his office looking tired, deep lines of strain around his mouth, and his eyes unhappy. Drummond had realized immediately that Pitt’s distress was more than merely professional, but he had still been totally unprepared for what had followed. Pitt had not merely told him of corruption on the force, officers who were members of the Inner Circle and had been pressed by that secret brotherhood to use their professional power in the interests of members, but he had quietly but relentlessly asked him of his own concern with the brotherhood, and if he had been aware what hostage he was to their commands, and the penalties for disobedience. He had been civil, even gentle, but the train of doubt he had started in Drummond’s mind was beyond evasion, as he had known it must be.
He could answer Pitt with innocence. No, he had never made any decision of even the slightest degree to comply with the brotherhood’s wishes. But would that always be so? Was it so now? He had answered Byam’s summons because Byam was a brother. He had interfered with the course of investigation in Clerkenwell, and put Pitt onto the case of William Weems’s death, to suit the brotherhood. What else might he have done, unrealizing from whence the request originated? He racked his brain, and could not remember or decide.
And what might he yet do, if he discovered evidence that Byam was guilty, if not of Weems’s murder, then of complicity in it, or of sheltering whoever had done it, or merely of concealing evidence? What would the brotherhood do if he did not comply? He remembered with a bitter chill the secret initiation, which he had simply thought colorful and a trifle absurd at the time. But looking back now, it had contained some very dark threats to those who betrayed a brother or revealed any of the group’s secrets. He had thought them in a rather adolescent way romantic until now, insomuch as he had thought of them at all: the sorts of things boys got up to in the long holidays out of school when there was little to occupy the imagination but summer days and stories of adventure.
Now it seemed from Pitt as if the Inner Circle exercised a very real discipline on its errant members, and punishment was swift and extremely unpleasant. Would it be visited on him? Of course. Why not, if he failed in his duty to his oaths?
Even more unpleasant to him would be if he were asked to administer punishment upon another. Would he do it?
No!
Regina Cars well passed close to him, hesitated in her step as if to speak, then saw his face more closely and continued on her way. A sensitive woman.
But why would he not carry out such a punishment? He knew the answer before he was prepared to admit it.
Because a man must be free to follow his own conscience. No society of any sort, whatever its aims, however noble, must be allowed to dictate what a man believes to be right or wrong.
But that is not what the oath had said. And now that he saw it in plainer light, that was where he had made the mistake upon which all the others depended. He had sworn allegiance to people, not to an ideal, to something unknown which might change from what he believed to what he did not-and he had allowed himself no avenue of redress. That was what Pitt had pointed out to him.
He could see Byam and Lord Anstiss talking together, Anstiss standing square, a glass in his hand, his stocky
