clinical, logical, exact. And yet she was looking at the death of part of herself.
“Poor Doll,” she said in a whisper. “Poor, poor Doll. It is so awful I can hardly bear to think of it. What worse thing could happen to a woman?”
“I wish I had not had to tell you.” It sounded lame, an excuse where there was none. He was certain she had not known. But then neither did she disbelieve it now. Had Doyle known, and would he have cared? Not on Doll’s behalf. She was a servant. Servants frequently get with child.
“Who else might have known?” he asked. Wheeler had. He was the only one of the Greville servants at Ashworth Hall, apart from Doll herself. Unless they had brought a coachman. They were close enough not to have taken the train. He had not asked. “Did you drive over?”
She understood immediately. “Yes … but … but no one else knew. We thought she was ill … a fever … I feared it might have been tuberculosis. People with tuberculosis can have those flushed cheeks, the bright eyes. She looked so …”
“Wheeler knew.”
“Wheeler?” Again she was not afraid. She did not even consider it possible. “He would … never …”
“What?”
“He would never have hurt Ainsley.”
“What were you going to say, Mrs. Greville?”
“That once or twice I thought perhaps he did not like him, but he was far too well trained to show it, of course.” She shook her head to dismiss it. “It was just an impression I had. And he did not have to stay with us. He could easily have found a position elsewhere. He was excellent at his job.”
Pitt thought it was his feeling for Doll which had kept him in the house of a man he despised, perhaps even hated, but he did not say so. He would have Tellman make sure Wheeler’s time was as closely accounted for as they had supposed.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” Eudora said reluctantly.
Justine appeared, followed immediately by Charlotte. They both looked flushed and tired, as if they had been too close to the withdrawing room fire and had found the evening’s forced conversation trying. But even weary and with a few tendrils of her hair escaping Gracie’s coiffure, Charlotte looked marvelous in the blue silk gown. It was one of Vespasia’s. Pitt wished he could afford to buy his wife clothes like that. Again he was reminded how naturally she fitted in here. It was the life she could so easily have had if she had married a man of her own social station, or rather better, as Emily had.
Justine was quick to notice Eudora’s pallor and the tension in her hands as they twisted together on her lap. She came over immediately, filled with concern.
Charlotte remained in the doorway. She had the feeling that she and Justine had intruded. It was not specific, just a look on Pitt’s face and something of regret in Eudora, a way in which she turned back to him before speaking to Justine.
She asked Pitt about it later, when they were preparing to go to bed. She tried to sound casual. As usual he was ready before she was. Gracie had gone, and Charlotte was combing her hair. There were considerable knots to get out after the way it had been dressed, and they would be worse by morning. Also there was rose milk to smooth into her skin, and she loved the luxurious feel of that, whether it did any good or not.
“Eudora seemed distressed,” she said, avoiding meeting Pitt’s eyes in the glass. He had already told her what little had transpired in his meeting in London, but she knew there was something else since then, something which had moved him far more deeply. “What have you discovered since you returned home?” she asked.
He looked so weary there were shadows around his eyes, and he sat up against the pillows awkwardly. He was still very stiff.
“Greville forced himself on Doll and got her with child,” he said quietly. “Then he insisted she do away with it or he would have her put out on the street with nothing.”
Charlotte froze. She heard the rage in his voice, but it barely matched the horror she felt, as if something icy had torn a wound inside her. She thought of her own children. She remembered the first time she had held Jemima, fragile, immeasurably precious, herself and yet not herself. She would have given her life to protect her daughter, given it without thought or hesitation. If Doll had killed Ainsley Greville, then Charlotte would do all she could to save her, let the law go to perdition.
She turned around slowly on the stool and stared at Pitt.
“Did she kill him?”
“Doll or Eudora?” he asked, staring at her.
“Doll, of course!” Then she realized that it could also be Eudora, from the same act, for different reasons. Was that why Pitt had looked so very gentle with her? He understood and pitied her? She was beautiful, vulnerable, so desperately in need of strength and support. Her world had been shattered, the present, the future, and some of the past too. In a space of days she had been robbed of all that she was. No wonder he was sorry for her. She called out to all that was best in him, the gentleness, the ability to see without judgment, to pursue truth—and yet still suffer for the pain it brought.
There was much of the knight errant in him, the hunger to be needed, to struggle and to rescue, to measure his strength against the dragons of wrong. Eudora was the perfect maiden in distress. Charlotte was not, not anymore. She was vulnerable in quite different ways, only inside herself. She stood in no danger, just a faint sense of not being entirely included, not factually but in some depth of the emotions.
“No, I don’t believe so,” he said, answering her question about Doll.
“Does it have anything to do with Greville’s death?”
“I don’t know … directly or indirectly. I hope not.”
She turned back to the dressing table, reaching for the rose milk. She was not ready to go to bed yet. She
