Thomas Pitt Bluegate Fields

After she had gone, he turned on Charlotte furiously.

'What in God's name have you been telling her?' he demanded, his voice rising to a shout. 'I can't do anything about it! The man's guilty! You have no right to encourage her to believe-it's grossly irresponsible-and cruel. Do you know

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who I saw today?' He had not planned to tell her anything about it. Now he was smarting raw, and he did not want to be alone in his pain. He lashed out with all the clarity of new memory. 'I saw a prostitute, a boy who was probably sold into homosexual brothels when he was thirteen years old. He sat there on a bed in a room that looked like a cheap copy of a West End whorehouse-all red plush and gilt-backed chairs, and gas lamps dim in the middle of the day. He was seventeen, but his eyes looked as old as Sodom. He'll probably be dead before he's thirty.'

Charlotte stood silent for so long that Pitt began to regret having said what he had. It was unfair; she could not have known what had happened. She was sorry for Eugenie Jerome, and he could hardly blame her for that. So was he-painfully so.

'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have told you that.'

'Why?' she demanded, moving suddenly. 'Isn't it true?' Her eyes were wide and angry, her face white.

'Yes, of course it's true, but I shouldn't have told you.'

Now her anger, fierce and scalding, was directed at him.

'Why not? Do you think I need to be protected, politely deceived like some child? You used not to treat me so condescendingly! I remember when I lived in Cater Street, you forced me to leam something of the rookeries, whether I would or not-'

'That was different! That was starvation. It was poverty you knew nothing of. This is perversion.'

'And I ought to know about people starving to death in the alleys, but not about children being bought to be used by the perverted and the sick? Is that what you're saying?'

'Charlotte-you can't do anything about it.'

'I can try!'

'You can't possibly make any difference!' He was exasperated. The day had been long and wretched, and he was in no mood for high-flown moral rhetoric. There were thousands of children involved, maybe tens of thousands; there was nothing any one person could do. She was indulging in a flight of imagination to salve conscience, and nothing more. 'You've simply no idea of the enormity of it.' He waved his hands.

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'Don't you dare talk down at me like that!' She caught up the cushion from the sofa and flung it at him as hard as she could. It missed, flew past him, and knocked a vase of flowers from the sideboard onto the floor, spilling water on the carpet but fortunately not breaking the vase.

'Damnation!' she said loudly. 'You clumsy creature! You could have at least have caught it! Now look what you've done! I'll have to clean all that up!'

It was grossly unjust of her, but it was not worth arguing about. She picked up her skirts and swept out to the kitchen, then returned with the dustpan and brush, a cloth, and a jug of fresh water. She silently tidied up, refilled the vase with water from the jug, set the flowers back in, and replaced them on the sideboard.

'Thomas!'

'Yes?' He was deliberately cool, but ready to accept an apology with dignity, even magnanimity.

'I think you may be wrong. That man may not be guilty.'

He was stunned. 'You what?'

'I think he might not be guilty of killing Arthur Way-boume,' she repeated. 'Oh, I know Eugenie looks as if she couldn't count up to ten without some man helping her, and she goes dewy-eyed at the sound of a masculine voice, but she puts it all on-it's an act. She's as sharp underneath as