once.
He could bear it no longer. He pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket, dropping keys and a pencil along with it, and went forward to give it to her, arm outstretched. He no longer cared what Pitt thought, or what detective strategy he might be using. He also hated Shaw, with an utterly new emotion that had never touched him before, because Flora wept for him with such heartbreak.
“He in’t dead, miss,” he said bluntly. “He was out on a call somewhere an’ ’e’s terrible upset-but he in’t even hurt. Mr. Oliphant, the curate, took him back to his lodgings for the night. Please don’t cry like that-”
Lutterworth’s face was dark. “You said he was dead.” He swung around, accusing Pitt.
“No, Mr. Lutterworth,” Pitt contradicted. “You assumed it. I am deeply sorry to say that Mr. Lindsay is dead. But Dr. Shaw is perfectly well.”
“Out again?” Lutterworth was staring at Flora now, his brows drawn down, his mouth tight. “I’ll lay odds that bounder struck the match ’imself.”
Flora jerked up, her face tearstained, Murdo’s handkerchief clasped in her fingers, but now her eyes were wide with fury.
“That’s a terrible thing to say, and you have no right even to think it, let alone to put it into words! It is completely irresponsible!”
“Oh, and you know all about responsibility, of course, girl,” Lutterworth retorted, by now regardless of Pitt or Murdo. His face was suffused with color and his voice thick in his emotion. “Creepin’ in and out at all hours to see ’im- imagining I don’t know. For heaven’s sake, ’alf Highgate knows! And talk about it over the teacups, like you were some common whore-”
Murdo gasped as if the word had struck him physically. He would rather have sustained a dozen blows from a thief or a drunkard than have such a term used of Flora. Were it any other man he would have knocked him to the ground-but he was helpless.
“-and I’ve nothing with which to call them liars!” Lutterworth was anguished with impotent fury himself, and anyone but Murdo would have pitied him. “Dear God-if your mother were alive she’d weep ’erself sick to see you. First time since she died I ’aven’t grieved she weren’t ’ere with me-the very first time …”
Flora stared at him and stood even straighter. She drew a breath to defend herself, her cheeks scarlet, her eyes burning. Then her face filled with misery and she remained silent.
“Nothing to say?” he demanded. “No excuses? No-what a fine man he is, if only I knew ’im like you do, eh?”
“You do me an injustice, Papa,” she said stiffly. “And yourself also. I am sorry you think so ill of me, but you must believe what you will.”
“Don’t you come high and mighty with me, girl.” Lutterworth’s face was torn between anger and pain. Had she been looking at him more closely she might have seen the pride as he gazed at her, and the shattered hope. But his words were unfortunate. “I’m your father, not some tomfool lad following after you. You’re not too big to send to your room, if I have to. An’ I’ll approve any man that sets ’is cap at you, or you’ll not so much as give ’im the time o’ day. Do you hear me, girl?”
She was trembling. “I’m sure everyone in the house hears you, Papa, including the tweeny in the attic-”
His face flushed purple with anger.
“-but if anyone does me the honor of courting me,” she went on before he had mustered the words, “I shall most certainly seek your approval. But if I love him, I’ll marry him whether you like him or not.” She turned to Murdo, and with a barely shaking voice thanked him for informing her that Dr. Shaw was alive and well. Then, still clutching his handkerchief, she swept out and they heard her footsteps go across the hall and up the stairs.
Lutterworth was too wretched and too embarrassed to apologize or seek polite excuses for such a scene.
“I can’t tell you anything you don’t know for yourselves,” he said brusquely when the silence returned. “I ’eard the alarm and went out to see, same as ’alf the street, but I didn’t see nor ’ear anything before that. Now I’ll be going back to my bed and you’d best get about your business. Good night to you.”
“Good night sir,” they replied quietly, and found their own way to the door.
It was not the only quarrel they witnessed that night.
Pascoe was too distressed to see them, and his servant refused on his behalf. They trudged in silence and little expectation of learning anything useful, first to the Hatches’ house: to question Lindsay’s maid, who was bundled up in blankets and shaking so violently she could not hold a cup steady in her hand. She could tell them nothing except that she had woken to the sound of fire bells and had been so terrified she did not know what to do. A fireman had come to the window and carried her out, across the roof of the house and down a long ladder to the garden, where she had been soaked with water from a hose, no doubt by accident.
At this point her teeth were chattering on the edge of the cup and Pitt recognized that she was unlikely to know anything useful, and was beyond being able to tell him anyway. Not even the prospect of a clue towards who had burned two houses to the ground, with their occupants inside, prompted him to press her any further.
When she had been escorted upstairs to bed, he turned to Josiah Hatch, who was gaunt faced, eyes fixed in horror at the vision within his mind.
Pitt watched him anxiously, he seemed so close to retreating into himself with shock. Perhaps to be forced to speak and think of and answer questions of fact would be less of a torture than one might suppose. It would draw him from the contemplation of the enormity of destruction, and from the flicker in the muscles in his eyelids and the corners of his mouth, the fear of the evil which now was so obviously still in their midst.
“What time did you retire this evening, Mr. Hatch?” he began.
“Ugh?” Hatch recalled himself to the present with difficulty. “Oh-late-I did not look at the clock. I was in deep contemplation of what I had been reading.”
“I heard you come up the stairs at about quarter to two,” Prudence put in very quietly, looking first at her husband and then at Pitt.
He turned a blank face towards her. “I disturbed you? I’m sorry, that was the last thing I intended.”
“Oh no, my dear! I had been roused by one of the children. Elizabeth had a nightmare. I had merely not yet gone back to sleep.”
“Is she well this morning?”
Prudence’s face relaxed into the ghost of a smile. “Of course. It was simply an ill dream. Children do have them, you know-quite often. All she required was a little reassurance.”
“Could not one of the older children have given her that without disturbing you?” He frowned, seizing on the matter as if it were important. “Nan is fifteen! In another few years she may have children of her own.”
“There is a world of difference between fifteen and twenty, Josiah. I can remember when I was fifteen.” The tiny smile returned again, soft and sad. “I knew nothing-and I imagined I knew everything. There were entire regions-continents of experience of which I had not the faintest conception.”
Pitt wondered what particular ignorances were in her mind. He thought perhaps those of marriage, the responsibility after the romance had cooled, the obedience, and perhaps the bearing of children-but he could have been wrong. It might have been worldly things, quite outside the home, other struggles or tragedies she had seen and coped with.
Hatch apparently did not know what she referred to either. He frowned at her in incomprehension for a few moments longer, then turned to Pitt again.
“I saw nothing of any import.” He answered the question before it was asked. “I was in my study, reading from the work of St. Augustine.” The muscles in his jaw and neck tightened and some inner dream took hold of him. “The words of men who have sought after God in other ages are a great enlightenment to us-and comfort. There has always been powerful evil in the world, and will be as long as the soul of man is as weak and beset by temptations as it is.” He looked at Pitt again. “But I am afraid I can be of no assistance to you. My mind and my senses were totally absorbed in contemplation and study.”
“How terrible,” Prudence said to no one in particular, “that you were awake in your study, reading of the very essence of the conflict between good and evil.” She shivered and held her arms close around herself. “And only a few hundred yards away, someone was setting a fire that murdered poor Mr. Lindsay-and but for a stroke of good fortune, would have murdered poor Stephen as well.”
“There are mighty forces of evil here in Highgate.” He stared straight ahead of him again, as if he could see the pattern in the space between the jardiniere with its gold chrysanthemums and the stitched sampler on the wall
