'Yes, I-' She bit her lip and stared at the middle button of his coat. 'I don't suppose it helps, but I. . .'
' 'It might.'' He watched her face, absorbing every fleeting expression, staring as if he would mark it indelibly in his mind. 'Perhaps in time she may feel . . . that it was good that people came.'
' 'Yes.'' She made no move to leave. ' 'I-I think I am glad people came to-to-' She was very close to weeping. The tears stood out in her eyes, and she swallowed hard. 'To Lockwood's funeral.' She took a deep breath and at last raised her face to meet his eyes. 'I loved him, you know.'
'Of course I know,' he said so gently it was little more than a whisper. 'Did you think I ever doubted it?'
' 'No.'' She gulped helplessly as emotion and years of pent-up pain overtook her.' 'No!'' And her body shook with sobs.
With a tenderness so profound it tugged at Charlotte's heart to watch them, he took her in his arms and held her while she wept, his cheek against her hair, then his lips, for a moment, brief and immeasurably private.
Charlotte shrank behind the gravestone and crept away in the rain. At last she understood the icy politeness, the tension between them, and the honor which kept them apart, their terrible loyalty to the man who had been her husband and his father. And his death had brought no freedom to them, the ban on such a love was not dissolved-it was forever.
Pitt attended the funeral without hope that he would learn anything of value. During the service he stood at the back and watched each person arrive. He saw Charlotte with Ves-pasia and a woman of striking appearance and much more fashionable than Charlotte had led him to expect, but he presumed she must be Zenobia Gunne. Perhaps he was more
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ignorant of the niceties of fichus and sleeves and bustles than he had thought.
Then he saw Lady Mary Carfax sweep in in a gown so nearly identical as to look like a copy, and he knew he had been right the first time.
He also saw the new, inner calmness in Helen Carfax, and the self-assurance that had deserted James, and recalled what Charlotte had told him about Zenobia's visit. One day, if it were possible without social awkwardness, he would like to meet Zenobia Gunne.
He had noticed Charles Verdun as one of the first to arrive, and remembered how much he had liked him. Yet a business rivalry between Verdun and Hamilton was not impossible. Heaven knew, nothing yet made any real pattern; there were only isolated elements, passions, injustices, terrible loss and hatred, possibilities of error in the dark, and always in the background the murmur of anarchy in the ugly, teeming back streets beyond Limehouse and Whitechapel and St. Giles. Or madness-which could be anywhere.
Hamilton and Etheridge were physically similar, of the same height and general build under an evening coat, both with longish, pale, clean-shaven faces and thick silver hair. Sheridan had been younger, and fair-haired, but within an inch of the height. And on the bridge, between the small spheres of light in the vast darkness of the sky and river, what difference was there to the eye between gray hair and blond?
Was it some grotesque, lunatic mistake? Or was the murderer totally sane in its purpose, and there a key to it which he had not even guessed at yet?
He watched the players as they sat in outward devotion through the tedious service. He noticed Somerset Carlisle, and remembered his strange, passionate morality which had held to such bizarre behavior when they had first met, years ago. He saw the widow and felt churlish to question her grief. He watched Jasper and Garnet Royce, and Amethyst Hamilton.
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He saw Barclay Hamilton deliberately sit as far from them as he could without drawing attention to himself by asking others to move.
When the service was over he did not follow them to the graveside. He would be too conspicuous; no one would take him for family or associate. It would be a pointless intrusion.
Instead he hung back near the entrance to the vestry and watched. He saw Charlotte return and then look in her reticule and hurry back again out into the rain.
Micah Drummond stepped in a moment later, shaking the water off his hat and coat. He looked cold, and there was an increasing anxiety stamped in his face. Pitt could imagine the accusing
