“Oh!” She smiled back. “No. I didn’t know. I shall tell him. He’ll be very pleased. Are they well?”
“Very. Brandy is posted in Madrid now. We don’t see them very often.”
“You must miss them.”
“Yes.” There was a moment of deep loneliness in his eyes. He looked away, staring out of the window into the quiet summer garden, roses lush and heavy in the morning sun, the dew already evaporated from them.
The clock ticked on the mantelshelf.
“My mother remarried,” Charlotte said awkwardly.
He dragged himself to the present and turned back to face her.
“Oh? I … hope she is happy.” It was not a question; one did not ask about such things, it was far too personal and intrusive. One did not even speak about happiness or unhappiness; it would be indelicate.
She smiled at him, meeting his eyes. “Oh, yes. She married an actor.”
He looked mystified. “I beg your pardon?”
Had she gone too far? She had meant to lighten the tension, and perhaps he had taken it for levity. She could not go back, so she plunged on. “She married an actor, rather younger than she is.” Would he be scandalized? She felt the heat burn up her cheeks. “He has a great deal of courage … and charm. Moral courage, I mean … to remain loyal to friends in difficulty and to fight for what he believes to be right.”
His expression eased, the lines around his mouth softening. “I am glad.” For an instant, almost too short to be certain she saw it, there was passionate regret in his eyes. Then he took a breath. “I gather that you like him?”
“Yes, I do, and Mama is very happy, although she has changed a good deal. She has the acquaintance now of people she would never have imagined knowing a few years ago. And I am afraid some of her earlier friends no longer call, and even turn the other way if they encounter her in the street.”
A flicker of amusement touched his mouth. “I can imagine it.”
The door opened and Lady Augusta Balantyne stood in the entrance. She looked magnificent, her dark hair piled in a great swirl on her head, the silver streaks making it look even more dramatic. She was dressed in lilac and gray in the height of fashion and wore a very fine amethyst necklace and earrings. She regarded Charlotte with cold distaste.
“Good morning, Mrs. Pitt. I assume I am addressing you correctly?” This was a sarcastic reminder that when Charlotte had first entered their house it had been ostensibly to assist the General with some clerical work on his memoirs, and she had used her maiden name to disguise her connection with Pitt and the police.
Again Charlotte felt the blush warm her cheeks. “Good morning, Lady Augusta. How are you?”
“I am perfectly well, thank you,” Augusta replied, coming farther into the room. “I presume it is not mere civility which brings you here to enquire after our well-being?”
This was an icy impasse. There was nothing to do but brazen it out. There was little room to make it any worse.
Charlotte smiled brightly. “Yes, it is.” Everyone would know that was a lie, but no one could call it so. “It was only yesterday I realized that we were near neighbors.”
“Ah … the newspapers,” Augusta said with immeasurable contempt. Ladies of breeding or gentility did not read the newspapers except for the society pages and the advertisements. And Charlotte might once have had an element of breeding, but she had married a policeman, and that had disposed of any pretensions to gentility now.
Charlotte raised her eyebrows very high. “Was your address in the newspapers?” she said innocently.
“Of course it was!” Augusta said. “As you know perfectly well, some unfortunate wretch was murdered on our doorstep. Don’t be disingenuous, Mrs. Pitt. It ill becomes you.”
Balantyne flushed hotly. Like most men, he loathed emotional confrontations, and those between women most of all. But he had never flinched from his duty.
“Augusta! Mrs. Pitt came to express her sympathy for our misfortune in that issue,” he said critically. “I assume she knew of it from Superintendent Pitt, not from the newspapers.”
“Do you!” Augusta retorted with equal chill towards him. “Then you are very naive, Brandon. But that is your own affair. I am going to call upon Lady Evesham.” She turned to Charlotte. “I am sure you will be gone when I return, so I shall wish you good day, Mrs. Pitt.” And she turned with a swirl of skirts and went out of the door, leaving it open behind her.
Balantyne went over and closed it with a sharp snap, to the obvious surprise of the footman standing in the foyer and holding Augusta’s cape.
“I’m sorry,” Balantyne said with profound embarrassment. He did not offer any explanation or attempt to make better of it. Any candor between them would be shattered by such a denial of the truth. “It was …”
“Probably well deserved,” she finished for him ruefully. “It was rather clumsy of me to have come at all, and I had no idea what I was going to say, except that I feel for you, and I hope you will consider me as your friend, regardless of what should transpire.”
He looked thoroughly taken aback by such frankness, and acutely pleased. “Thank you … of course I shall.” He seemed about to add something more, then changed his mind. He was still deeply troubled, and there was another emotion more powerful beneath the surface anger or shame for Augusta’s behavior or for his own discomfort in the face of candor.
“Actually, I did read the newspaper,” she admitted.
“I assumed you did,” he said with the ghost of a smile.
“It was a shameful piece! Completely irresponsible. That was what prompted me to come-outrage … and to let you know I am on your side.”
He looked away from her. “You speak blindly, Mrs. Pitt. You cannot have any idea what may transpire.”
He was not uttering some platitude. She was quite sure-from the stiffness in his body, the unhappiness in his face and the way he glanced away from her-that he feared something specific, and the anxiety of it underlay everything else he was able to think of.
It frightened her for him, and her response was to defend him, instantly and without thought.
“Of course not!” she agreed. “What kind of friend makes their support conditional upon knowing everything that will happen, and that there will be no unpleasant surprises and absolutely no inconvenience, embarrassment or cost?”
“A great many friends,” he said quietly. “But none of the best. But this loyalty must run both ways. One does not allow friends to walk unknowingly into danger or unpleasantness, nor require of them a pledge, even unspoken, whose costs you know and they do not.” He realized he had overstated what she had offered, and looked deeply uncomfortable. “I mean …”
She walked to the door, then turned and met his eyes. “There is no need to explain. Time has passed since we last met, but not so much as all that. We do not misunderstand one another. My friendship is yours, for what that may be worth. Good day.”
“Good day … Mrs. Pitt.”
Charlotte went straight home, walking so briskly she passed by two people she knew without even noticing them. She went in her own front door and straight through to the kitchen without bothering to take off her hat.
The ironing was finished, and Archie was asleep in the empty basket.
Gracie looked up from the potatoes she was peeling, the knife still in her hand, her face full of anxiety.
“Put on the kettle,” Charlotte requested, sitting down in the nearest chair. She would have done it herself, but one did not go near even the cleanest stove when wearing a yellow gown.
Gracie obeyed instantly, then got out the teapot and the cups and saucers. She fetched milk from the larder. She set the blue-and-white jug on the table and removed the muslin cover, weighted down all around with glass beads to keep it from blowing off.
“’Ow was the General?” she asked, getting the tin of biscuits off the dresser. She still had to stretch to do it, standing on tiptoe, but she refused to put them on a lower shelf. That would be acknowledging defeat.
“Very distressed,” Charlotte answered.
“Did ’e know the man wot was killed?” Gracie asked, putting the biscuits on the kitchen table.
“I didn’t ask him.” Charlotte sighed. “But I am afraid that he might. He was extremely worried about something.”
“But ’e din’t say, I suppose.”
