neither bland nor artless. She was far less innocent than he had been at her age-perhaps than he was even now?
“What about Beau Astley?”
She hesitated a moment. Was there a touch of color on her skin, or was it only a reflection of the firelight?
“Charming.” she said without expression in her voice. “Very agreeable, although I admit I do not know him well. It is something of a hasty judgment. If you are expecting me to come up with any profundity, Papa, I am afraid I shall disappoint you. I had no idea Sir Bertram had perverted tastes. I fully thought he was after that silly Woolmer creature, and meant to marry her. And since she has no money at all, and no family to speak of, I can only imagine it was for the most physical of reasons.” She glanced over at him. “I’m sorry if I shock you. Sometimes I find you incredibly stuffy!”
He was aware that she found him so, but it still hurt to hear it in such words. He did not wish to pursue the matter by defending himself and, at the same time, was conscious that he should. She had no business to speak to him with so little respect.
“Then either he did not go to the Devil’s Acre for the reason supposed-or else he was a man of very diverse tastes,” he said dryly.
She laughed outright. Her hands held the china ornament up in the air; she had beautiful fingers, small and slender. “You know I quite expected you to be furious! Instead you turn out to have a sense of humor.”
“A sense of the absurd,” he corrected, which was a pleasant feeling. “If Bertie Astley was as diligent in his pursuit of Miss Woolmer as you suggest, I find it hard to believe he was also satisfying quite different appetites in the Devil’s Acre. Or had Miss Woolmer declined him?”
She gave a little snort. “Far from it. She grasped onto him like a drowning woman. And her mother was even worse. If they can manage it, they’ll catch poor Beau now! She’s a great lump of a girl, like clotted cream.”
“And ‘poor Beau’ is unwilling?”
Again she hesitated, her fingers tightening on the ornament. “I really have no idea. As I said before, I do not know them except in the briefest way. It is really none of my concern.” She set the ornament down and smiled, turning from the table to come toward the fire. The light shone on the satin of her dress, gleaming brilliantly for a moment, then falling into rich shadows again.
“Have you ever heard of any of the other victims?” As soon as he said it, he knew it was a ridiculous question, and wished he could withdraw it. “Apart from Max, of course!” he added by way of making it at least logical within itself, even if it was stupid in the whole.
Perhaps some memory of Max’s service in this house stirred in her. She swallowed. He felt guilty for having mentioned it.
“Hardly,” she said casually. “Wasn’t one a doctor and one a schoolteacher, or something? Not exactly my social circle, Papa. Isn’t there a saying about necessity making strange bedfellows, or something of the sort?” She laughed a little harshly. “Maybe they were all possessed of the same vice. Maybe they gambled in the Devil’s Acre, and lost. I seem to have heard that Bertie Astley gambled. Not to pay one’s debt is a social sin of monstrous proportions, you know. Didn’t they teach you that in the officers’ mess?”
“They blackballed welshers,” he said soberly, watching her. “They didn’t kill them and-” He hesitated to use a graphic word in front of her, embarrassed for himself, and then ashamed of his embarrassment. Why should he falter around in euphemisms like an old woman? Why should he speak of masculinity in a whisper? “Castrate them,” he finished.
She did not seem to notice the word. The firelight on her face made her skin warm anyway; he could see no extra blush.
“We are not dealing with officers and gentlemen in the Devil’s Acre, Papa,” she pointed out with some sarcasm. “Blackballing them would hardly serve!”
Of course she was right. Whatever use would that threat be to a man? It would get the gambler not a penny of his debt repaid. The losers would simply go to another place in future-if not in the Acre, then in some slum back room elsewhere. And the man owed would not dare broadcast the fact or he would lose face everywhere, and from then on no one would pay him.
“Actually,” she continued, turning to look at him, “I would have thought that this method would be most effective. I’m amazed it has needed four men dead to have made the point.”
“It is more than amazing.” He spoke slowly, turning it over in his mind and finding himself inexplicably cold. “In fact, it is incredible.”
She was not looking at him. The light on her dress accented the slender curve of her body as she turned away. She did not look very different from when she had been seventeen, yet he felt as if she were unreachable. Had she always been so, and only his complacency had allowed him to imagine he knew her because she was his daughter?
“One does not hate someone so passionately over a gambling debt.” He went back to the subject because he had not yet exorcised it.
“Perhaps they are mad?” She shrugged. “Who knows what it was? Really, it is a most unpleasant affair, Papa. Must we discuss it?”
An apology was on his tongue, and then he changed his mind. “Do you find you can dismiss it?” he asked instead. “I cannot.”
“Apparently.” She had an excellent shadow of Augusta’s cold scorn. “Yes, I can. I do not find the goings-on of the denizens of the slums as fascinating as you do. I greatly prefer the society in which I was brought up.”
“I thought you found it tedious.” He was surprised how sharp his own tongue had become. “I have frequently heard you say so.”
She lifted her chin a little and moved away. “Do you suggest I should look in the Devil’s Acre for a little variety then, Papa?” Her voice was brittle. “I don’t think Alan would care for that! And Mama would be appalled.” She walked over to the bell and pulled it. “I am afraid that, like most other women, I shall just have to put up with a certain tedium and a great deal of trivia in daily life. But I find your moralizing insufferably pompous. You have not the faintest idea what caused these murders, and I can’t think why you want to go on talking about them, unless it is to make yourself feel superior. I don’t care to discuss it anymore. As Mama says, it is unbelievably sordid.”
The bell was answered by the footman.
“Please call my carriage, Stride,” she said coolly. “I am ready to return home.”
Balantyne was filled with a mixture of relief and a sense of loss as he watched her go. Was it the difference between men and women, or one generation and another that set the gulf between their understanding? It seemed these days there were fewer and fewer people he could talk to with ease, and feel that they were discussing something significant, not merely exchanging conventional words that one neither believed in nor cared about.
Why had he wanted to talk about the murders with Christina? Or with anybody? There were a thousand other things to discuss, all pleasant or interesting-even amusing. Why the Devil’s Acre? … Because in remembering some of the things Brandy had spoken of, the poverty and the pain, he could understand the hatred that might drive someone to kill a creature like Max-even if the savage mutilation was beyond his understanding. He would have executed the man, simply, with a shot through the brain. But perhaps, after all, if it were his wife or his daughter Max had used in his whorehouse, he might have felt the need not only to kill but to destroy the offender’s manhood, the means of his power and the symbol of his abuse. There was a kind of justice in it.
He could not put it from his mind. And there was no one with whom he could discuss it without arousing anger or being accused of fatuity and empty moralizing. Was that how his family, the women he loved, saw him? An insensitive man, pompous, obsessed with a series of sordid killings in an area that he knew nothing about?
Surely Charlotte did not see him like that. She had seemed so interested. Could it have been only kindness? He remembered the letters from Wellington’s soldier in Spain, she had affected to find them so exciting. Could that light in her face have been just a politeness? The thought was abhorrent.
He stood up and walked smartly out of the room and across the hallway to the library. He pulled out paper and wrote a letter to Emily Ashworth. She was Charlotte’s sister; she would pass on the message tactfully that the soldier’s letters were available if Charlotte cared to read them for herself. He sent it off with the footman before he had time to reconsider whether he was being foolish.
The following afternoon, at the earliest hour acceptable for calling, the parlormaid came in with a message that Miss Ellison was in the morning room, and did the general wish to receive her?
