effort of will. “And we don’t know who did it. It is all part of a long story.”
Vespasia indicated the large chair to one side of the fire, burning high up in the grate and sending warmth throughout the room.
Charlotte sat down gratefully. Now that she was there it was less easy to put her fears into words. As always, Vespasia sat upright, straight-backed, her silver hair curled and braided in a coronet, her silver-gray eyes under their hooded lids bright with intelligence and concern. Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould was an aristocrat from an ancient family with many lands, obligations, and knowledge of honor and privilege. She could freeze an impertinence at twenty feet and make the unfortunate trespasser wish he or she had never spoken. She could trade wit with philosophers, courtiers, and playwrights. She had smiled at dukes and princes and made them feel honored by it. In her eighties the bones of her face were still exquisite, her coloring delicate, her movements a good deal stiffer but not without the pride and assurance of the past. One could easily believe that half a century ago she had been the greatest beauty of the age. Now she was old enough and rich enough not to care in the slightest what society thought of her, and she was enjoying the exquisite freedom it gave her to be utterly herself.
It was Charlotte’s immense good fortune that Emily’s first husband had been Vespasia’s great-nephew. Vespasia had become fond of both Emily and Charlotte, and more remarkably, considering the chasm between their situations, of Pitt as well.
Vespasia was looking more closely at Charlotte. “Since it is apparently so serious,” she said gravely, “perhaps you had better begin at the beginning, wherever you believe that to be.”
That was easy. “It started with going to Ashworth Hall to protect Ainsley Greville,” Charlotte replied.
“I see.” Vespasia nodded. “For political reasons, I assume? Yes, of course. One of our more notable Catholic diplomats; discreetly Catholic, naturally. He is not a man to allow his religion to get in the way of his career. He married Eudora Doyle, a very beautiful woman from one of the outstanding Irish Catholic Nationalist families, but they have always lived here in England.” A ghost of irony crossed her features. “Is it to do with this absurd Parnell-O’Shea business?”
“I don’t know,” Charlotte replied. “I don’t think so. Although perhaps indirectly it is. I’m not sure ….”
Vespasia put her long, thin hand with its moonstone rings very gently on Charlotte’s lap.
“What is it, my dear? You seem very deeply troubled. It can only be some person for whom you care very much. From the tone in which you told me of his death, I assume it is not the unfortunate Mr. McGinley, and I cannot imagine that it is Mr. Greville. He is not a very pleasant man. He has great charm, considerable intelligence, and certainly diplomatic skill, but a basically self-serving nature.”
“He did have,” Charlotte agreed with the shadow of a smile.
“Don’t tell me he has had a sudden conversion to the light,” Vespasia said incredulously. “That I must see ….”
Charlotte laughed in spite of herself, but it ended abruptly.
“No. Thomas was there in order to protect him from threats of assassination, and I am afraid he did not succeed.” She took a deep breath. “He was murdered ….”
“Oh.” Vespasia sat very still. “I see. I am sorry. And I assume you do not yet know who is responsible?”
“No … not yet, though it will be one of the Irishmen who are staying there this weekend ….”
“But that is not what you have come to see me about.” Vespasia put her head a little to one side. “I am tolerably well-acquainted with Irish politics, but not with the identity of individual assassins.”
“No … of course not.” Charlotte wanted to smile at the idea, but the reality was too painful. She remembered that morning vividly, the physical shock of the explosion, and then the realization a moment later of what it was. She had not been close to such powerful violence before. There was something quite new and terrible about an actual room being blown apart.
“I think you had better leave the beginning and come to the middle.” Vespasia slid her hand over Charlotte’s. “It is obviously very serious. Ainsley Greville has been murdered, and now this Mr. McGinley, and so far you do not know who has killed them, except that it is someone still at Ashworth Hall. You have experienced crimes before, and Thomas has solved some exceedingly difficult murders. Why does this trouble you so much you have left Ashworth and come here?”
Charlotte looked down at her hands, and Vespasia’s older, thinner, blue-veined hand over them.
“Because Eudora Greville is so vulnerable,” she said quietly. “In the space of a few days she has lost everything, not only her husband—and therefore her safety, her position, and whatever he earned, if that matters —but what really hurts is that she has lost what she believed he was.” She looked at Vespasia. “She has been forced to learn that he was a philanderer, and uglier than that, a man who used people without any regard for their feelings, or even for what happened to them as a result.”
“That is very unpleasant,” Vespasia agreed. “But, my dear, do you suppose she really had no suspicion? Is she completely naive?” She shook her head a little. “I doubt it. What hurts is that the rest of the world will know it too, or at least that part of the world with which she is familiar. It will become impossible for her to deny it to herself any longer, which is something we all tend to do when the truth is too painful.”
“No, there is more than that.” Charlotte looked up and met Vespasia’s eyes. In hard, angry words full of pain she told her about Doll.
Vespasia’s face was bleak. She was an old woman and she had seen much that was hideous, but even so, this twisted deep in her, in her memory of holding her own children, in the miracle and the fragility and the infinite value of life.
“Then he was a man with much evil in him,” she said when Charlotte had finished. “That will be very difficult indeed for his wife to learn to live with.”
“And his son,” Charlotte added.
“Very difficult indeed,” Vespasia agreed. “I feel more deeply for the son. Why is it Eudora who bothers you more?”
“She doesn’t.” Charlotte smiled at her own vulnerability. “But she does Thomas. She’s the perfect maiden in distress for him to rescue.”
