“How do they do the tricks?” Tellman asked. “I searched that room from floor to ceiling and I didn’t find anything, no levers or pedals or wires, anything. And the maid swears she had nothing to do with it. . but then I suppose she would!” Tellman paused. “How do you make people think you are rising up into the air, for heaven’s sake? Or stretching out and getting longer and longer?”
Pitt chewed his lip. “More important to us, how do you know what they want to hear, so you can tell it to them?”
Tellman stared at him, wonder in his face, then slowly comprehension. “You find out about them,” he breathed. “The maid told us that this morning. Said she was very choosy about her clients. You only accept those you can learn about. You pick someone you know, then you listen, you ask questions, you add up what you hear, maybe you have someone go through their pockets or their bags.” He warmed to the subject and his eyes glittered with anger. “Maybe you have someone talk to their servants. Maybe you burgle their houses and read letters, papers, look at their clothes! Ask around the tradespeople, see what they spend, who they owe.”
Pitt sighed. “And when you have enough about one or two, perhaps try a little carefully chosen blackmail,” he added. “We might have a very ugly case here, Tellman, very ugly indeed.”
A flicker of pity softened Tellman’s mouth and deliberately he pulled his lips tight to hide it. “Which of those three people did she push too far?” he said quietly. “And over what? I hope it isn’t your Mrs. Serracold. . ” He lifted his chin a trifle, as if his collar were too tight. “But if it is, I’m not looking the other way to please Special Branch!”
“It wouldn’t make any difference if you did,” Pitt replied. “Because I won’t.”
Very slowly Tellman relaxed. He nodded fractionally, and for the first time he smiled.
CHAPTER FOUR
Isadora Underhill sat at the opulently laid out dinner table and toyed with her food, pushing it around her plate with practiced elegance, occasionally eating a mouthful. It was not that it was unpleasant, simply bland, and almost exactly what she had eaten the last time she had been here in this magnificent, mirrored chamber with its Louis Quinze sideboards and enormous gilded chandeliers. Indeed, as far as she could recall it was also the same people, as nearly as made no difference. At the head of the table was her husband, the Bishop. He looked slightly dyspeptic, she thought, a little puffy around the eyes, pale, as if he had slept badly and eaten too much. And yet she saw his plate was still largely untouched. Perhaps he was convinced he was unwell again, or more likely he was, as usual, too busy talking.
He and the archdeacon were extolling the virtues of some long-dead saint she had never heard of. How could anyone speak of true goodness, even holiness, the conquering of fear, and of excuses for the petty vanities and deceits of daily life, the generosity of spirit to forgive the offenses of spite and judgment, kindly laughter and the love of all things living, and yet still manage to make it sound so dull? It should have been wonderful!
“Did she ever laugh?” she said suddenly.
There was silence around the table. Everyone, all fifteen of them, turned and stared at her as if she had knocked over her wineglass or made a rude noise.
“Did she?” she repeated.
“She was a saint,” the archdeacon’s wife said patiently.
“How can you possibly manage to be a saint with no sense of humor?” Isadora asked.
“Sanctity is a very serious matter,” the archdeacon tried to explain, staring at her earnestly. He was a large man with a very pink face. “She was a woman close to God.”
“One cannot be close to God without loving one’s fellow men,” Isadora said stubbornly, her eyes wide. “And how could one possibly love other people without an acute sense of the absurd?”
The archdeacon blinked. “I don’t know what you mean.”
She looked at his small brown eyes and careful mouth. “No,” she agreed, quite sure that he knew very little. But then she was far from holy, by her own estimation. She could not imagine how anyone, even a saint, could love the archdeacon. She wondered, absently, what his wife really felt. Why had she married him? Had he been different then? Or was it a matter of convenience, or even desperation?
Poor woman.
Isadora looked at the Bishop. She tried to remember why she had married him and if they had both really been so different thirty years ago. She had wanted children, and it had not happened. He had been an honest young man with a good future ahead of him. He treated her with courtesy and respect. But what was it she had imagined she saw in him, his face, his hands that she should let him touch her, his speech that she was prepared to listen to him for the rest of her life? What were his dreams that she had wanted to share them?
If she had ever known, she had forgotten.
They were talking about politics now, rambling on and on, the strengths of this one, the weaknesses of that, how Home Rule for Ireland would be the beginning of the rot which would finally split the Empire, and with that stop the missionary effort to bring the light of Christian virtue to the rest of the world.
She looked around at them and wondered how many of the women were actually listening to the words. They were all dressed in full dinner gowns: puff-shouldered, tight-waisted, high-necked, as was the fashion. Surely at least some of them were staring at the white linen tablecloth, the plates, the cruet sets, the orderly bunches of glasshouse flowers, and seeing moonlight on breaking surf, tumultuous seas with white water racing in and curling under with a ceaseless roar, or the pale sands of some burning desert where horsemen moved black against the horizon, their robes billowing in the wind.
The plates were removed and a fresh course brought. She did not even look to see what it was.
How much of her life had she spent dreaming of somewhere else, even wishing she were there?
The Bishop had declined the course. He must have indigestion again, but it did not stop him from declaiming on the weaknesses, specifically the lack of religious faith, in the Liberal Party’s parliamentary candidate for Lambeth South. It seemed the unfortunate man’s wife met with his particular disfavor, although he admitted freely that so far as he was aware, he had never met her. But reports had it that she admired a most regrettable kind of person, some of those extraordinary Socialists who called themselves the Bloomsbury set, and had radical and absurd notions of reform.
“Isn’t Sidney Webb one of that group?” the archdeacon enquired with a twitch of distaste.
“Indeed he is, if not the leading member,” another man replied, hunching his shoulders a little. “He was the man who encouraged those wretched women to go on strike!”
“And the candidate for Lambeth South admires this?” the archdeacon’s wife asked incredulously. “But it is the beginning of civil disorder and complete chaos! He is inviting disaster.”
“Actually, I believe it was Mrs. Serracold who expressed the opinion,” the Bishop corrected. “But of course were he a man of substance and judgment he would not have permitted it.”
“Quite. Absolutely.” The archdeacon nodded with vigor.
Listening to them, seeing their faces, Isadora warmed to Mrs. Serracold instinctively, although she had never met her, either. If she had had a vote, she would have cast it for the woman’s husband, who apparently was standing for Lambeth South. It was no sillier reason than most men had for voting as they did. It was usually based upon whatever their fathers had done before them.
Now the Bishop was talking about the sanctity of women’s role as protectors of the home, keepers of a special place of peace and innocence where the men who fought the world’s battles could retreat to heal their souls and restore their minds, ready to rejoin the fray the following morning.
“You make us sound like a cross between a hot bath and a glass of warm milk,” she said into a moment’s silence while the archdeacon drew in his breath to answer.
The Bishop stared at her. “Excellently put, my dear,” he said. “Both cleansing and refreshing, a balm to the inner man and to the outer.”
How could he so misunderstand her? He had known her for more than a quarter of a century, and he thought she was agreeing with him! Did he not recognize sarcasm when he heard it? Or was he clever enough to turn it against her, disarm her by seeming to take it at face value?
She met his eyes across the table, almost hoping that he was mocking her. It would at least be a
