her was not Pitt, but Justine, and then to remember why.
She slid out of bed. She was still wearing her robe. She had climbed into bed without bothering to remove it. She made her way over to the door gingerly, feeling where she went in the dark. She opened it and saw Piers standing in the passage, the gaslight yellow behind him. There was no hint of daylight yet from the windows of the landing beyond. He looked haggard, as though he had been pacing all night, but his gaze met hers directly, without flinching.
“Come in,” she whispered, standing aside for him.
Justine sat up slowly, reaching for the candle. She lit it, and Charlotte closed the door.
Piers walked over to the bed and sat on it facing Justine, Charlotte temporarily forgotten.
“You know at first I thought it might have been Mama,” he said with a crooked, painful smile. “She would have had as good a reason. Or Doll Evans; I think she had an even better one. Poor Doll.”
Justine stared at him, searching his eyes, last night’s despair suddenly, agonizingly quickened with hope again.
“Haven’t you noticed?” she asked softly. “Wheeler is in love with her, perhaps he has been for ages, but she thought after what happened with Greville that he wouldn’t have anything to do with her ….”
“Why not?” he said with a jerky laugh. “It wasn’t her fault. You can be fascinated by someone, and then revolted if they don’t live up to your ideal.” His eyes were very steady on her face. “But if you love them, you expect them to be real, as you are yourself, to have the power and the possibility to be stupid and angry and greedy, and make terrible mistakes … and to have the courage to keep on trying, and the understanding to forgive. Not that Wheeler has anything to forgive Doll for.”
She looked at him with a blaze of hope like a scald of light across the darkness.
“Those are brave words,” she whispered. “Do you think we can live up to them?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted frankly. “Have you the courage to try? Do you think it’s worth it? Or would you rather not take the risk, and leave now?”
For the first time she looked down.
“I don’t think I shall have the chance … although I would like it if I had. I’m all kinds of things, but I’m not a coward. There isn’t anything else I want, except to be with you. There’s nothing else to take as second best.”
“Then …” he started, leaning forward and holding her hands.
She pulled them away.
“Mr. Pitt won’t allow that, Piers. I’m guilty of a crime … not the crime I intended, but a crime all the same. He’ll arrest me in the morning, I expect. If not then, later, after he solves the real murder and the death of Mr. McGinley.”
“Maybe he won’t,” Charlotte intervened. “It’s legally a crime, of course, but it isn’t one which matters a lot.” She looked at Piers. “Unless, as the nearest relative of the deceased, you want to press a charge of defiling the dead? I don’t know what he’ll do. And I don’t know about Tellman either. I don’t know what they have to do.”
Piers turned to Charlotte, his eyes wide. “What will they do to her? A few months in prison at the worst, surely?” He looked back at Justine. “We can wait ….”
She lowered her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. What medical practice would you have, married to a wife who had spent time in prison, let alone for defiling the bodies of the dead?”
He said nothing, trying to muster an argument.
“You wouldn’t get a single patient,” Charlotte agreed, hating to have to be realistic. “You would have to go abroad, perhaps to America …” The thought began to look better. “That way you would also run no risk of meeting anyone you had known previously.”
Justine turned her head and looked at Charlotte with a wry smile. “How very tactfully put.” She looked at Piers again. “You can’t marry a defiler of bodies, my dear, and you can’t marry a whore either.” She winced at the word, using it to wound herself before he could. “No matter how exclusive or expensive.” She laughed. “I know a lot of respected ladies of rank and wealth have extremely loose morals, but they do it for gifts, not for money, and there is all the difference in the world in that. I don’t really understand why. They don’t do it to earn their living. They have plenty of money; they do it because they are bored. I suppose it is the old difference between amateurs and players.” Her voice was rich with mockery. “Trade is so vulgar, after all.”
They all laughed, jerkily, a little too close to hysteria.
“America,” Piers said, looking at Justine, then at Charlotte.
“America,” Justine agreed.
“What about your mother?” Charlotte asked. “What if she needs you?”
“Me?” Piers looked surprised. “She’s never needed me.”
“And if your uncle Padraig is the one who really killed your father and Lorcan McGinley?”
His face darkened and he looked down again. “It’s pretty possible, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It looks as if it could be either him or Fergal Moynihan, and frankly, I don’t think Fergal has the stomach.”
Piers seemed very slightly amused by her bluntness, but it was the humor of despair.
“No, neither do I. But I think Padraig has. And he had plenty of cause, at least where my father is concerned. But I’m not staying here, so if Mama doesn’t want to go back to Ireland, to the Doyle family, who’ll probably make her welcome, then she’d better come to America with us. I can’t see the far west suiting her, but we’d all have to make the best of it. At least there they will have plenty of need for doctors, and they won’t care very much if we are Irish, English, or half-and-half, and they certainly won’t care what our religion is. And as you said, there won’t be much chance of one running into old acquaintances, not if we go to the frontier.”
