with trees. It looked spacious enough to house fifty or sixty children, at the very least, and the appropriate number of staff to look after them.
He walked up to the front door, noticing the clean scrubbed step, and pulled the bell. It was answered within minutes by a girl of about seventeen. She was wearing a dark blue cotton dress, starched apron and cap.
“Yes sir?” she said helpfully.
Pitt explained who he was and asked if he might speak to whoever was in charge. He conveyed in his manner that refusal was not to be tolerated.
She conducted him to a very pleasant room facing the front entrance and invited him to sit in one of the threadbare but surprisingly comfortable seats while she went for Mr. Horsfall.
When he arrived, closing the door behind him with a snap, he was taller even than Pitt, very rotund around the middle, and with a genial face, as if he smiled often and easily.
“Yes sir,” he said agreeably. “What can we do for you? Dolly said something about the police. I hope none of our charges have been creating a nuisance? We do the best we can to see they are well behaved, and if I say so myself, I think we more than succeed, most times. But children will be children.”
“I have no reason to doubt it,” Pitt replied honestly. “I am from Bow Street, not Kew.” He ignored the surprise in Horsfall’s face. “And it is regarding financial matters I have come. The recent suicide of one of the committee of beneficiaries who donate a large amount to your establishment had raised some questions as to possible irregularities.”
Horsfall looked suitably saddened. “Oh, dear. How painful. Well, sir, of course you may examine our books, with pleasure. But I do assure you, if there has been anything amiss, it has not been after any funds have reached us. We are very careful.” He nodded. “We have to be. We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that we are dealing with other people’s money. If they cannot trust us, then there will be no more.” He looked at Pitt with wide eyes.
What he said was transparently true, and Pitt felt foolish for wasting both Horsfall’s time and his own. But he could hardly say so now.
“Thank you,” he replied. “It is merely to complete the matter. I would be negligent to overlook it.”
“Of course. Of course.” Horsfall nodded again, hooking his thumbs in his waistcoat. “Shall I bring them to you here, or would you prefer to come through to my office, where you can sit at a desk?”
“That would be very courteous of you,” Pitt accepted. He was aware that there was always the possibility of two sets of books, but he acknowledged to himself that he had never really expected anything from his visit beyond being able to tell Vespasia he had tried.
He spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, apart from a brief respite for luncheon at the local public house, going over endless receipts both for money and for goods, food, fuel, clothes, wages, and found everything in the most meticulous order. Had Horsfall not explained his need for exactness, he might have found the perfection suspicious. But there was not a farthing unaccounted for, and he did not doubt for a moment that if he went equally carefully through the Jessop Club’s donations, he would find a faultless match.
He was barely aware of the children who must fill the building. As Horsfall had said, they were remarkably well behaved. He did see two little girls, walking hand in hand, aged about five and six, respectively, and suddenly one of them began to run, pulling the other along. They were followed a moment later by a girl of ten or so, carrying a boy not more than two. Other movements caught the corner of his vision, and he heard voices.
He closed the books, thanked Horsfall and apologized for troubling him, then took his leave of the orphanage, feeling a trifle foolish. There seemed no reason whatever why Balantyne-or Cadell, for that matter-should have been concerned. Perhaps it was a matter of raising funds, rather than their use, which had worried him.
He could ask Balantyne, but it hardly seemed worth it.
The question of how Cadell had known of Slingsby’s death, and how he had moved the body, seemed far more important. And where was Albert Cole? If he was dead, they should know if it had been a result of natural causes, and if not, then what had happened to him? He would put Tellman onto that as soon as he returned to Bow Street … tomorrow. Tonight he would write to Vespasia and tell her that the orphanage books were immaculate.
Charlotte was grieved by the news of Leo Cadell’s death, largely for Aunt Vespasia, but her imagination extended to how his widow must feel. However, she was relieved of an immense weight of anxiety, even of fear, regarding both General Balantyne and Cornwallis. She liked Cornwallis profoundly, and she knew also how deep was Pitt’s affection for him.
She knew Balantyne must have read of Cadell’s death in the newspapers. He could hardly have missed it. It was sprawled across the front page, along with Lyndon Remus’s speculations as to what sort of long and tragic story might be behind Cadell’s fall from brilliant diplomat to blackmailer, extortionist and, ultimately, suicide.
Half of her mind could understand the necessity for freedom to question and investigate the lives of all public figures. Without such liberty, secrecy begot oppression and ended in tyranny. But with freedom came responsibility, and the immense power of the written word could so easily be abused. There was a sense in which Lyndon Remus was doing exactly the same thing as Cadell had attempted. The fact that Cadell and his family were now the victims did not leave her with any sense of satisfaction or poetic justice, just an awareness of the vulnerability of reputation and the thought of how Theodosia Cadell must feel.
An errand boy delivered a note from General Balantyne, and she gave him the answer that she would be happy to meet him, again in the Royal Botanical Gardens, at three o’clock in the afternoon.
The day was less oppressively hot, and a considerable crowd was taking the air for one sort of pleasure or another. She marveled at how many people seemed to have no other call upon their time and were free from the necessity of any form of work. Before she had met Pitt such a thought would never have crossed her mind. Young ladies of her social class then had far too much time and too little to fill it that gave anything but the most momentary satisfaction. Then she seemed always to have been looking forward to tomorrow for something that might happen.
She saw Balantyne as soon as she was through the gates. He was standing alone, facing the parade of soldiers in uniform, couples arm in arm, girls with parasols accompanied by their mothers, parasols swinging dangerously as they glanced at the young men and pretended they weren’t. He appeared to be watching them, but the stillness of his head betrayed that his thoughts were elsewhere.
Charlotte walked over to him and was almost beside him before he noticed her.
“Mrs. Pitt!” He looked at her gravely, searching her eyes. “How are you?” He paid not the slightest regard to her appearance; he was concerned entirely with her feelings.
“I am quite well,” she answered, equally concerned for him. Looking at his face, she could see little of the relief she would have expected, considering that the threat of ruin that had dogged him for weeks was now lifted. “And you?”
He smiled very slightly. “I had expected to feel better,” he admitted. “Perhaps I am still bemused. I liked Cadell.” He offered her his arm. “Isn’t that ridiculous? But I cannot rid myself of the emotion in a single day, in spite of knowing now what he was really planning. I suppose I am not the judge of men’s characters that I thought I was.” He gave a very slight, rueful shrug.
“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “I don’t think Great-Aunt Vespasia has ever been so fearfully mistaken either. Mrs. Cadell is her goddaughter, you know.”
“I didn’t.” He walked in silence a few yards. “Poor woman. I can imagine the devastation she must be feeling now, the confusion and loss.”
Charlotte thought of Christina. Perhaps he was remembering her when he spoke. Time might have blunted the edge of his own pain, but nothing could remove it. Looking sideways at him now, she would not intrude, it would be inexcusable, but she imagined him thinking of Theodosia Cadell with a pity that could only spring from his own knowledge. His mouth was tugged tight at the corners, the muscles in his neck tense.
“We are all relieved of our fears,” he said after a little while, moving between the banks of roses heavy with perfume in the sun. “We need no longer dread the delivery of mail. We can encounter our friends in the street and meet their eyes without wondering what they are thinking, what double meaning may lie behind the simplest remark. I feel guilty for the people I doubted. I hope to heaven they will never know it. Oddly, in all my suspicions, I never thought of Cadell.”
She wanted to answer with something intelligent, but she
He did not seem to be waiting for her to say anything, merely glad of her companionship and grateful for the
