had nothing to do with it, that has been proved.” And he refused to say anything further.
She poured a second cup of tea and drank it in silence.
Then she heard his suddenly indrawn breath and a gasp. The paper slid from his hands and fell in loose sheets in his lap and over his plate. His face was ashen.
“What is it?” she said with alarm, afraid he was having some kind of attack. “What’s happened? Have you pain? Reginald? Shall-“ She stopped. He was struggling to his feet.
“I. . I have to go out,” he mumbled. He thrashed at the newspaper, sending the sheets slithering to the floor, rattling together.
“But you have the Reverend Williams coming in half an hour!” she protested. “He’s come all the way from Brighton!”
“Tell him to wait.” He flapped a hand at her.
“Where are you going?” She was on her feet also. “Reginald! Where are you going?”
“Not far,” he said from the doorway. “Tell him to wait!”
There was no use asking anymore. He was not going to tell her. It had to be something in the newspaper which had created such a panic of emotion in him. She bent and picked it up, starting her search on the second page, roughly where she guessed he had been reading.
She saw it almost immediately. It was an announcement by the police on the Maude Lamont case. There had been three clients at her house on Southampton Row for the last seance she had given. Two of them were named in her diary of engagements, the third had been represented by a little drawing, a pictograph or cartouche. It was like a small
The police said that there was something in Maude Lamont’s papers which indicated that she had known who the third man was, and that he, like the other two, had been blackmailed by her. They were close to a breakthrough, and when they read her diaries again, with this new understanding, they would have the identity of Cartouche, and of her murderer.
The Bishop had gone to Southampton Row. She knew it as surely as if she had followed him there. He was the one who had gone to Maude Lamont’s seances, hoping to find some kind of proof that there was life after death, that his spirit would live on in a form he could recognize. It was not extinction that awaited him, but merely change. All the Christian teachings of his lifetime had built no sure faith in him. In his desperation he had turned to a spirit medium, with her table rappings, levitation, ectoplasm. Far worse than that, which held more horror, doubt and weakness, and which she could understand only too easily, he had known fear, loneliness soul-deep, even the hollow, consuming well of despair. But he had done it secretly, and even when Maude Lamont had been murdered, he had not come forward. He had allowed Francis Wray to be suspected of being the third person, and to have his reputation ruined, and now Pitt’s as well.
Her anger and her contempt for him burned in a pain that ran through her mind and body, consuming her. She sat down suddenly in his chair, the newspaper dropped onto the table, still open at the article. It had been proved that Francis Wray was not the third person, but too late to save his grief, or his sense that all his life’s meaning had been denied as far as those who had loved and cherished him could see. Too late, above all, to prevent him from committing the irretrievable act of taking his own life.
Could she ever forgive Reginald for his part in letting that happen, for his utter cowardice?
What was she going to do? Reginald was even now going to Southampton Row to see if he could find and destroy the evidence that implicated him. What loyalty did she owe him?
He was doing something she believed to be profoundly wrong. It was hypocritical and ugly, but it was largely his own destruction rather than anyone else’s. Worse, he had allowed Francis Wray to be blamed for long enough to destroy him, to be the last weight of misery on top of his grief, which had broken him, perhaps not only for this life but for the life to come. Although she could not accept that God would condemn forever any man, or woman, who had finally broken, perhaps only for one fatal instant, beneath something too great for them to bear.
It could not be undone. Wray was gone. The degree of sin in his death was beyond anyone to alter. If the church concealed it and gave him a decent burial that would redeem him to the world, but it altered none of the truth.
What was her deepest loyalty now? How far along the road of his cowardice did she have to go with her husband? Not all the way. You did not owe it to anyone to drown yourself along with him.
And yet she was perfectly sure that he would regard it as betrayal whenever she left him.
Did he know who had killed Maude Lamont? Was it even imaginable that he had done it himself? Surely not! No! He was shallow, self-important, condescending, totally absorbed in his own feelings and oblivious of the joy or the pain of anyone else. And he was a coward. But he would not have committed any of the open sins, the ones that even he could not deny because they were against the law of the land, and he would be forced to conceal them. Even he could not justify murdering Maude Lamont, no matter what she had blackmailed him for.
But he might know who had, and why. The police must know the truth. She had no idea how to contact Pitt at Special Branch, and the new commander of Bow Street was a stranger to her. She needed to speak to someone she knew. This was going to be agonizing enough without trying to explain to a stranger. She would go to Cornwallis. He would begin halfway towards understanding.
Now that she had made up her mind she did not hesitate. It hardly mattered what she wore, simply that she composed her mind to speak sensibly and to tell only the truth she knew and allow him to make all deductions. She must not permit her anger or her contempt to show through, or the bitterness that welled up inside her. There must be no manipulation of emotions. She must tell him as one person to another, no more, and with no reminder, however subtle, of what either of them might feel.
Cornwallis was in his office but occupied with someone. She asked if she might wait, and nearly half an hour later she was taken up by a constable and found Cornwallis standing in the middle of his room waiting for her.
The constable closed the door behind her and she remained standing.
Cornwallis opened his mouth to say something, the conventional greeting, to give himself time to adjust to her presence. And then before he could speak, he saw the pain in her eyes.
He took half a step forward. “What is it?”
She stood where she was, keeping the distance between them. This must be done carefully, and without ever losing her self-control.
“This morning something occurred which makes me believe that I know who the third person was who visited Maude Lamont on the night of her death,” she began. “He was indicated only by the little drawing which looks rather like a small
He looked at the chair as if to invite her to sit down, then changed his mind. “What was it that happened?” he asked.
“The police have issued a statement saying that they believe Maude Lamont knew the identity of that person,” she replied. “She was blackmailing him, and there are papers still in her house in Southampton Row, together with the information that Mr. Pitt gathered from the Reverend Francis Wray.” Her voice dropped at mention of Wray’s name, and for all her intentions not to allow it, her anger came through. “It will make his identity plain.”
“Yes,” he agreed, frowning. “Superintendent Wetron told the press.”
She took a deep breath. She wished she could control the lurching of her heart and the dizziness in her, the sheer physical reactions that were going to let her down. “When my husband read that at the breakfast table he went completely white,” she continued. “And then he rose and said that he was canceling his appointments this morning, and has left the house.” Put like that it sounded absurd, as if she wanted to believe it was Reginald. That was proof of nothing at all, except what was going on in her own mind. No wife who loved her husband would have leaped to such a conclusion. Cornwallis must see that-and despise her for it! Did he think she was trying to create some excuse to leave Reginald?
That was terrible! She must make him understand that she truly believed it, and that it had come to her only slowly, and reluctantly.
