meaning to come and see you, but you must know what an awful thing has happened here. Thomas will have told you all about it. Thank heaven it is nothing to do with us this time.” She shuddered and shook her head in a little gesture of denial. “Does that sound terribly callous?” She turned back to Charlotte again with a wide, slightly guilty look.
Charlotte was honest as always.
“I suppose it does, but it is the truth, if we would all but admit it. There is a sort of thrill in horror, as long as it is not too close. People will talk about how dreadful it is and how the mere mention of it distresses them beyond conceivable opportunity.”
Emily’s face relaxed in a smile.
“I’m so glad you’re here. I dare say it is quite irresponsible of me, but I shall love to hear your opinions of the Walk, although I shall never be able to view them in the same way afterward. They are all so very careful, they bore me terribly at times. I’ve an awful feeling I have forgotten how to think frankly myself!”
Charlotte linked her arm in Emily’s, and they walked through the French doors and onto the lawn at the back. The sun was hot on their faces and dazzled from a peerless sky.
“I doubt it,” Charlotte answered. “You were always able to think one thing and say another. I am a social catastrophe because I can’t.”
Emily giggled as memories came back to her, and for a few moments they talked together over disasters of the past that had made them blush at the time but were only bonds of laughter and shared affection now.
Charlotte had even forgotten her real reason for coming when sudden mention of Sarah, their older sister who had been a victim of the Cater Street hangman, made her remember murder, its close, suffocating terror, and the corroding acid of suspicion it brought in its wake. She had never been able to be subtle, least of all with Emily who knew her so well.
“What was Fanny Nash like?” She wanted a woman’s opinion. Thomas was clever, but so often men missed the real things in a woman, things that were perfectly obvious to another woman. The number of times she had seen men taken in by a pretty girl who chose to seem vulnerable, when Charlotte knew really she was as strong and as hard as a kitchen pot!
The laughter died out of Emily’s face.
“Are you going to play detective again?” she said warily.
Charlotte thought of Callander Square. Emily had wanted to detect then. She had even insisted on it, and there had been times when it was a kind of adventure-before the frightening, horrifying end.
“No!” she said immediately. Then, “Well, yes. I can’t help caring, can I? But I’m not going to go around asking questions, of course not! Don’t be foolish. I mean, that would be most unseemly. You should know I wouldn’t do that to you. I can be tactless, I admit, but I am not quite stupid!”
Emily relented, probably because she also was curious and the whole thing was not close enough to be ugly yet.
“Of course, I know that. I’m sorry. I am a little highly strung at the moment,” she colored very faintly at her reference to her condition; she had not yet become accustomed to it, and it was not a subject one discussed. “Fanny was rather ordinary, really. I suppose you do want the truth? She was the last person in the world I would have thought to provoke such a passion in anyone. I can only presume he was quite mad, poor creature. Oh.” She tightened her lip, caught in a social gaffe herself. She took pride that since her marriage she had made herself immune to such things. Charlotte’s influence must be contagious. “I suppose one shouldn’t sympathize with him,” she corrected. “That is quite wrong. Except that, if he is mad, of course, he cannot help it. Will Thomas catch him?”
Charlotte did not know how to reply. She could say simply that she did not know, but that was no answer at all. What Emily was really asking was: did Thomas have any knowledge; was it inside or outside the Walk; could they all dismiss it as a tragedy, but something beyond their own affairs, a brief intrusion, now entirely of the past, something that had happened in the Walk, but could as easily have occurred anywhere else in the mad creature’s path?
“It’s too early to say,” she temporized. “If he is quite mad, he could be anywhere by now, and since there was no reason for selecting Fanny, except that she was there, he will be very hard to recognize-even when we find him.”
Emily looked directly at her.
“Are you saying it is possible it was not someone mad?”
Charlotte avoided her eyes.
“Emily, how can I know? You say Fanny was very- ordinary, not in the least a flirt-”
“No, no one less so. She was not plain, exactly. But you know, Charlotte, the older I get, the more I believe beauty is not so much a matter of what your features or your coloring may be, but the way you behave and what you believe of yourself. Fanny behaved as though she were plain. Whereas Jessamyn, if you look at her dispassionately, is not really so very beautiful, and yet she behaves as if she were quite marvelous. Therefore everyone sees her so! She believes it-and so we do too.”
It was very perceptive of Emily to know that. Charlotte wished she could have known it herself when she was younger and cared desperately. She could recall with painful clarity how wretched she had felt at fifteen when Sarah and Emily seemed so pretty and she felt plain, all elbows and feet. She was already the tallest, and still growing. She might become perfectly gigantic, and no man would ever care for her. She would look over the tops of their heads! She thought young James Fortescue so attractive, but she knew she was at least two inches taller than he was and found herself unable to say anything at all in his presence. He had ended up by admiring Sarah instead.
“You are not listening!” Emily accused.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“That Thomas has been up and down the Walk asking questions of all the men. He even asked George where he was.”
“Of course,” Charlotte said reasonably. This was the part she had been fearing since the beginning. “He has to. After all, George may have seen something that appeared quite usual at the time, but now that we know what happened, he would recognize it as important.” She was pleased with the way she had phrased that. It was immediate and yet completely rational. It did not sound contrived to make Emily comfortable.
“I suppose so,” Emily conceded. “Actually George wasn’t even here that evening. He was in town at his club, so he couldn’t be any help.”
Charlotte was saved the necessity of answering by the arrival of the most magnificent old lady she had ever seen, with hair piled immaculately and back as straight as a ramrod. Her nose was a shade too long, and her eyes a little hooded, and yet the remnant of beauty was unmistakable, and her intimate knowledge of it and its power even more so.
Emily got to her feet with a trifle more haste than dignity. It was a long time since Charlotte had seen her the least out of composure, and it was telling. She hoped it was not anxiety that she would not know how to behave, and thus let her down.
“Aunt Vespasia,” Emily said quickly. “May I present my sister, Charlotte Pitt?” She looked at Charlotte penetratingly. “My great aunt-in-law, Lady Cumming-Gould.”
Charlotte had no need of warning.
“How do you do, ma’am,” she inclined her head very slightly, enough for courtesy and too little for obsequiousness.
Vespasia extended her hand, and her eyes regarded Charlotte frankly from toe to top, ending with a direct stare from her flittering old eyes.
“How do you do, Mrs. Pitt,” she answered levelly. “Emily has often spoken of you. I am pleased that you have been able to call.” She did not add “at last,” but it was in her voice.
Charlotte doubted that Emily had spoken of her at all, still less that it had been often. It would have been most injudicious-and Emily had never been injudicious in her life-but she could hardly argue. Neither could she think of a suitable answer. “Thank you” seemed so foolish.
“It is kind of you to make me welcome,” she heard herself saying.
“I hope you are staying to luncheon?” It was a question.
“Oh yes,” Emily rushed in quickly before Charlotte had time to flounder. “Of course, she will stay. And this
