the apple tree. As soon as he felt Pitt’s presence in the room, even though there had been no sound, he turned around and stood up. His face was pale and there were still shadows around his eyes. He looked as if he had suffered a long illness and was only barely well enough to be out of his bed.
“What’s happened?” Pitt demanded, closing the door behind him.
Matthew seemed startled, as though the directness of the question had been unexpected.
“Nothing, at least nothing new. I … I wondered if you had been able to learn anything more about Father’s death.” He opened his eyes wide and stared at Pitt questioningly.
Pitt felt guilty, even though he had every reason for having been unable to even think of the matter.
“No, I … I am afraid not. The assistant commissioner has given me the murder of Susannah Chancellor, and it has driven-”
“I understand. Of course I do,” Matthew interrupted. “You don’t need to explain it to me, Thomas. I am not a child.” He walked towards the French doors as if he meant to go outside into the evening air. “I just … wondered.”
“Is that what you came for?” Pitt asked doubtfully. He joined Matthew in the doorway.
“Of course.” Matthew stepped across the threshold and out onto the paved terrace.
Pitt followed, and together they walked very slowly over the grass towards the apple tree and the shaded section of the wall. There was deep green moss on the stones, rich as velvet, and low down near the ground a creeping plant with yellow starlike flowers.
“What else has happened?” Pitt repeated. “You look dreadful.”
“I had a crack on the head.” Matthew pulled a face and winced. “You were there.”
“Is it worse? Have you had the doctor back?”
“No, no it’s getting better. It’s just slow. This is a fearful business about Chancellor’s wife.” He frowned and took another step across the soft grass. It was thick within the shade of the tree and spongy under the feet. The white drift of the apple blossom was faintly sweet in the air, a clean, uncloying smell. “Have you any idea what happened?”
“Not yet. Why? Do you know anything?”
“Me?” This time Matthew looked genuinely surprised. “Nothing at all. I just think it’s a dreadful stroke of fate for a man so brilliant, and whose personal life was so unusually happy. There are many politicians who could have lost their wives and been little the worse for it at heart, but not Chancellor.”
Pitt stared at him. The remark was curiously uncharacteristic, as if only half his mind were on his words. Pitt was becoming more and more certain that there was in fact something troubling him.
“Did you know Chancellor well?” he asked aloud.
“Moderately,” Matthew replied, continuing to walk, and not looking at Pitt. “He’s one of the most accessible men of high rank. Agreeable to talk to. He comes from a fairly ordinary family. Welsh, I believe, at least originally. They may have been in the Home Counties a while now. It wasn’t political, was it?” He turned to Pitt, curiosity and puzzlement in his face. “I mean, it couldn’t be, surely?”
“I don’t know,” Pitt replied candidly. “At the moment I have no idea at all.”
“None?”
“What did you have in mind when you asked?”
“Don’t play games with me, Thomas,” Matthew said irritably. “I’m not one of your damned suspects!” Then a moment later he was struck with contrition. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I meant. I’m still plagued by Father’s death. Part of my mind is convinced he was murdered, and by the Inner Circle, both to keep him from saying anything more about them and as a warning to other would-be traitors to the oaths. Loyalty’s a hell of a thing, Thomas. How much loyalty can you demand of anyone? I’m not even sure I know what loyalty is. If you had asked me a year ago, or six months ago, I would have been quite convinced it was a stupid question, not even worth asking because the answer was so obvious. Now I can’t answer it.” He stood still on the grass, his face full of confusion, his eyes searching Pitt’s. “Can you?”
Pitt thought for a long time before he replied, and even then it was tentative.
“I suppose it is honoring your promises,” he said slowly. “But then it is also honoring your obligations, even if there have been no specific promises made.”
“Exactly,” Matthew agreed. “But who sets out what those obligations are, or to whom? Whose is the first claim? What when people assume you have some obligation to them, and you don’t assume it? They can, you know.”
“Sir Arthur and the Inner Circle?”
Matthew lifted his shoulders in a gesture of vague assent. “Anyone. Sometimes we take for granted things, and imagine that other people do too … and perhaps they don’t. I mean … how well do we know each other, how well do we even know ourselves, until we are tested? You imagine you will behave in a certain way if you are faced with a choice, but when the time comes, you find you don’t.”
Pitt was even surer that Matthew had something specific in mind. There was too much passion in his voice for it to be mere philosophizing. But equally obviously, he was not yet ready to speak of it openly. Pitt did not even know if it was actually to do with Sir Arthur, or if he had merely mentioned that as something they had in common from which to begin.
“You mean a division of loyalties?”
Matthew moved a step away. Pitt knew he had touched a nerve, and it was too soon.
Matthew waited a moment before he replied. The garden was silent. Somewhere beyond the hedges a dog barked. A tortoiseshell cat walked along the wall and dropped soundlessly into the orchard.
“Some of those men at the inquest genuinely felt as if he had betrayed a trust,” Matthew said at last. “A loyalty to their secret society, perhaps in a way to their class. Somebody in the Colonial Office is betraying their country, but perhaps they don’t see it like that.” He took a deep breath, his eyes on the wind in the apple leaves. “Father felt that to keep silent about the Inner Circle was to betray all that he felt most important in life, although he might never have thought to give it a name. I’m not sure I like giving things names. Does that sound like evasion? Once you give things a name and promise allegiance, you’ve given part of yourself away. I’m not prepared to do that.” He looked at Pitt with a frown. “Can you understand that, Thomas?”
“Most things don’t ask for an unlimited allegiance,” Pitt pointed out. “That is what is wrong with the Inner Circle; it asks men to promise loyalty in advance of knowing what will be asked of them.”
“A sacrifice of conscience, Father called it.”
“Then you have answered your own question,” Pitt pointed out. “You didn’t need to ask me, and you shouldn’t care what my answer would have been.”
Matthew flashed him a sudden, brilliant smile. “I don’t,” he confessed, putting his hands into his pockets.
“Then what still troubles you?” Pitt asked, because the shadow and the tension were still in Matthew, and the smile faded as quickly as it had come.
Matthew sighed, turning away from the orchard wall and beginning to walk slowly along it. “Yes, you and I can say that comfortably because we have no issue between us that we see differently. But how would you feel if my course led me to do something which you felt betrayed you? Wouldn’t you hate me for it?”
“Are you talking about all this in theory, Matthew, or is there something specific you are trying to find the courage to say?” Pitt fell in step beside him.
Matthew looked away, facing back towards the house. “I don’t even know of anything about which I believe all that differently from you. I was thinking of Father, and his friends in the Inner Circle.” He glanced sideways for a moment at Pitt. “Some of them were his friends, you know? That is what he found so terribly difficult”
Nothing that Matthew said was untrue, but Pitt still had the feeling that in some way Matthew was lying. They walked up the lawn towards the house together but they did not touch on the subject again. Charlotte invited Matthew to stay and dine with them, but he declined, and took his leave, his face still shadowed with anxiety, and Pitt watched him go with a sadness he could not rid himself of all evening.
Charlotte looked at Pitt enquiringly when Matthew was gone. “Is he all right? He looked …” She searched for a word.
“Troubled,” Pitt supplied it for her, sitting down in his chair and leaning back, stretching a little. “Yes, I am almost sure there is something else, but he cannot bring himself to say it.”
“What sort of thing?” She looked at him anxiously. He was not sure whether she was concerned for Matthew
