“So I gathered!” Caroline said dryly.
“Neither can you.”
“No, but I manage to keep it under considerably better control!”
Charlotte gave her a look that was unreadable, and stepped off the pavement to cross the road.
Then, suddenly, she noticed the lean, elegant figure of a man coming out of a gateway on the far side of the street. Even before he turned she knew him, knew the straight back, the grace of his head, the way his coat sat upon his shoulders. It was Paul Alaric, the Frenchman from Paragon Walk about whom everyone thought so much and actually knew so little.
He walked over to them easily, a half smile on his face, and raised his hat. His eyes met Charlotte’s with a widening of surprise, and then a flash that might have been pleasure or amusement—or even only the courtesy of remembering a most agreeable acquaintance with whom one had shared profound emotions of danger and pity. But naturally he spoke to Caroline first, since she was the elder woman.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Ellison.” His voice was exactly as Charlotte had remembered: soft, the pronunciation exquisitely correct, more beautiful than that of most men for whom English was their mother tongue.
Caroline stood in the middle of the road, her skirt still held in her hand. She swallowed before she spoke, and her voice was rather high.
“Good afternoon, Monsieur Alaric. A very pleasant day. I don’t think you have met my daughter Mrs. Pitt.”
For an instant he hesitated, his eyes meeting Charlotte’s very directly while a host of memories flashed through her mind—memories of fear and conflicting passions. Then he bowed very slightly, the decision made.
“How do you do, Mrs. Pitt.”
“I am quite well, thank you, Monsieur,” she replied levelly. “Although I was distressed at the tragedy that has so recently happened.”
“Mrs. Spencer-Brown.” His face wiped clean of polite trivia and his voice dropped. “Yes. I’m afraid I can think of no answer which is not tragic. I have been struggling within myself to find any reason for such an ugly and useless thing to have happened, and I cannot.”
Compulsion drove Charlotte to pursue it, even though good taste might have demanded that she say something sympathetic and change the subject.
“Then you do not think it could have been an accident?” she asked. Caroline was beside her now, and she was acutely conscious of her, of the tight muscles of her body, of her eyes fixed on Alaric’s face.
There was gentleness in him, and something like a light of bitter humor, as if for a second her candor had aroused some other emotion in him.
“No, Mrs. Pitt,” he said. “I wish I could. But one does not take a dose of medicine that has not been prescribed for one, nor drink from an unlabeled bottle, unless one is very foolish, and Mrs. Spencer-Brown was not foolish in the least. She was an extremely practical woman. Do you not think so, Mrs. Ellison?” He turned toward Caroline and his face softened into a smile.
The color rose up Caroline’s cheeks. “Yes, yes, indeed I do. In fact, I cannot recall ever knowing of Mina doing anything—ill-considered.”
Charlotte was surprised; she had not received the impression that Mina was especially intelligent. Indeed, the conversation they had had, as she recalled it, had been mostly trivial, concerned with things of the utmost unimportance.
“Really?” she said with rather more skepticism than she had intended. She did not wish to be rude. “Perhaps I did not know her well enough. But I would have thought it quite possible her mind could have been occupied with some other concern, and she might have made an error.”
“You are confusing intelligence with common sense, Charlotte,” Caroline said spiritedly. “Mina was not fond of study, nor did she concern herself with some of the very odd affairs that you do.” She was too discreet to name them, but a slight lowering of her eyelids and a sidelong glance made Charlotte decide that she was referring to her political convictions with regard to Reform Bills in Parliament, Poor Laws and the like. “But she was well aware of her own skills,” Caroline continued, “and how best to use them. And she had far too much native wit to make mistakes—of any sort. Do you not think so, Monsieur Alaric?”
He glanced down the street over their shoulders into some distance they could not see before turning to face Charlotte.
“We are looking for a genteel way of saying that Mrs. Spencer-Brown had a very fine instinct for survival, Mrs. Pitt,” he replied. “She knew the rules, she knew what could be said and what could not—what could be done. She was never careless, never moved by passion before sense. She did appear trivial on occasion, because that is the socially acceptable way. To talk intelligently of serious subjects is not considered attractive in a woman.” He smiled fleetingly; Caroline could not know they had talked before. “At least not by most men. But underneath the prattle Mina was a skilled and prudent woman, who knew precisely what she wanted and what she could have.”
Charlotte stared at him, trying to control her thoughts.
“You make that sound a little sinister,” she said slowly. “Calculating?”
Caroline took her arm. “Nonsense. One has to use some sense in order to survive! Monsieur Alaric means only that she was not flighty, the sort of silly creature who does not take any care what she is doing. Is that not so?” She looked at him, her face glowing in the cool air, her eyes bright. Charlotte was surprised— and jarringly afraid— to see how lovely she still was. The color, the brilliance, the blood under the skin had nothing to do with the March wind; it was the presence of this man, with his dark head and strong, straight back, standing in the road talking gently about death, and his pity for the tragedy around it.
“Then I fear it may have been suicide!” Charlotte said suddenly and rather loudly. “Perhaps the poor woman got herself into an affaire of the heart, became involved with someone other than her husband, and the situation was unbearable to her. I can see very easily how that could happen.” She did not have the boldness to look at either of them, and there was absolute silence in the street, not even the sound of a bird or of distant hooves.
“Such adventures very often end in disaster,” she continued after a harsh breath. “Of one sort or another. Maybe she preferred death to the scandal that might have accompanied such a thing becoming public!”
