by Anne Perry
Her thoughts were interrupted by the hansom’s arrival at Vere Street and Oliver Rathbone’s offices, and she was obliged to descend and pay the driver. Since it was already five minutes before her appointment, she mounted the steps and presented herself to the clerk.
A few minutes later the inner door opened and Rathbone came out. He was precisely as she had remembered him; indeed she was taken aback by the vividness of her recall. He was little above average height, with fair hair graying a trifle at the temples, and dark eyes that were acutely aware of all laughter and absurdity, and yet liable to change expression to anger or pity with an instant’s warning.
“How agreeable to see you again, Miss Latterly,” he said with a smile. “Won’t you please come into my office, where you may tell me what business it is that brings you here?” He stood back a little to allow her to pass, then followed her in and closed the door behind him. He invited her to sit in one of the large, comfortable chairs. The office was as it had been last time she was there, spacious, surprisingly free from the oppressive feeling of too many books, and with bright light from the windows as if it were a place from which to observe the world, not one in which to hide from it.
“Thank you,” she accepted, arranging her skirts only minimally. She would not give the impression of a social call.
He sat down behind his desk and regarded her with interest.
“Another desperate case of injustice?” he asked, his eyes bright.
Instantly she felt defensive, and had to guard herself from allowing him to dictate the conversation. She remembered quickly that this was his profession, questioning people in such a way that they betrayed themselves in their answers.
“I would be foolish to prejudge it, Mr. Rathbone,” she replied with an equally charming smile. “If you were ill, I should be irritated if you consulted me and then prescribed your own treatment.”
Now his amusement was unmistakable.
“If some time I consult you, Miss Latterly, I shall keep that in mind. Although I doubt I should be so rash as ever to think of preempting your judgment. When I am ill, I am quite a pitiful object, I assure you.”
“People are also frightened and vulnerable, even pitiful, when they are accused of crime and face the law without anyone to defend them—or at least anyone adequate to the occasion,” she answered.
“And you think I might be adequate to this particular occasion?” he asked. “I am complimented, if not exactly flattered.”
“You might be, if you understood the occasion,” she said a trifle tartly.
His smile was wide and quite without guile. He had beautiful teeth.
“Bravo, Miss Latterly. I see you have not changed. Please tell me, what is this occasion?”
“Have you read of the recent death of General Thaddeus Carlyon?” She asked so as to avoid telling him that with which he was already familiar.
“I saw the obituary. I believe he met with an accident, did he not? A fall when he was out visiting someone. Was it not accidental?” He looked curious.
“No. It seems he could not have fallen in precisely that way, at least not so as to kill himself.”
“The obituary did not describe the injury.”
Memory of Damaris’s words came back to her, and a wry, bitter humor. “No—they wouldn’t. It has an element of the absurd. He fell over the banister from the first landing onto a suit of armor.”
“And broke his neck?”
“No. Please do not keep interrupting me, Mr. Rathbone—it is not something you might reasonably guess.” She ignored his look of slight surprise at her presumption. “It is too ridiculous. He fell onto the suit of armor and was apparently speared to death by the halberd it was holding. Only the police said it could not have happened by chance. He was speared deliberately after he had fallen and was lying senseless on the floor.”
“I see.” He was outwardly contrite. “So it was murder; that, I presume, I may safely deduce?”
“You may. The police enquired into the matter for several days, in fact two weeks. It occurred on the evening of April twentieth. Now the widow, Mrs. Alexandra Carlyon, has confessed to the crime.”
“That I might reasonably have guessed, Miss Latterly. It is regrettably not an unusual circumstance, and not absurd, except as all human relationships have an element of humor or ridiculousness in them.” He did not go on to guess for what reason she had come to see him, but he remained sitting very upright in his chair, giving her his total attention.
With an effort she refrained from smiling, although a certain amusement had touched her, albeit laced with tragedy.
“She may well be guilty,” she said instead. “But my interest in the matter is that Edith Sobell, the sister of General Carlyon, feels most strongly that she is not. Edith is convinced that Alexandra has confessed in order to protect her daughter, Sabella Pole, who is very lightly balanced, and hated her father.”
“And was present on the occasion?”
“Yes—and according to what I can learn of the affair from Damaris Erskine, the general’s other sister, who was also at the ill-fated dinner party, there were several people who had the opportunity to have pushed him over the banister.”
“I cannot act for Mrs. Carlyon unless she wishes it,” he pointed out. “No doubt the Carlyon family will have their own legal counsel.”
“Peverell Erskine, Damaris’s husband, is their solicitor, and Edith assures me he would not be averse to engaging the best barrister available.”
His fine mouth twitched in the ghost of a smile.
“Thank you for the implied compliment.”
She ignored it, because she did not know what to say.
“Will you please see Alexandra Carlyon and at least consider the matter?” she asked him earnestly, self-consciousness overridden by the urgency of the matter. “I fear she may otherwise be shuffled away into an asylum for the criminally insane, to protect the family name, and remain there until she dies.” She leaned towards him. “Such places are the nearest we have to hell in this life—and for someone who is quite sane, simply trying to defend a daughter, it would be immeasurably worse than death.”
All the humor and light vanished from his face as if washed away. Knowledge of appalling pain filled his eyes, and there was no hesitation in him.
“I will certainly keep my mind open in the matter,” he promised. “If you ask Mr. Erskine to instruct me, and engage my services so that I may apply to speak with Mrs. Carlyon, then I will give you my word that I will do so. Although of course whether I can persuade her to tell me the truth is another thing entirely.”
“Perhaps you could engage Mr. Monk to carry out investigations, should you—” She stopped.
“I shall certainly consider it. You have not told me what was her motive in murdering her husband. Did she give one?”
She was caught off guard. She had not thought to ask.
“I have no idea,” she answered, wide-eyed in amazement at her own omission.
“It can hardly have been self-defense.” He pursed his lips. “And we would find it most difficult to argue a crime of passion, not that that is considered an excuse—for a woman, and a jury would find it most … unbecoming.” Again the black humor flickered across his face, as if he were conscious of the irony of it. It was a quality unusual in a man, and one of the many reasons she liked him.
“I believe the whole evening was disastrous,” she continued, watching his face. “Apparently Alexandra was upset, even before she arrived, as though she and the general had quarreled over something. And I gather from Damaris that Mrs. Furnival, the hostess, flirted with him quite openly. But that is something which I have observed quite often, and very few people are foolish enough to take exception to it. It is one of the things one simply has to endure.” She saw the faint curl of amusement at the corners of his lips, and ignored it.
“I had better wait until Mr. Erskine contacts me,” he said with returning gravity. “I will be able to speak to Mrs. Carl
yon herself. I promise you I will do so.”
“Thank you. I am most obliged.” She rose to her feet, and automatically he rose also. Now it suddenly occurred to her that she owed him for his time. He had spared her almost half an hour, and she had not come prepared to pay. His fee would be a considerable amount of money from her very slender resources. It was an idiotic and embarrassing error.
“I shall send you my account when the matter is closed,” he said, apparently without having noticed her confusion. “You will understand that if Mrs. Carlyon engages me, and I accept the case, what she tells me will have to remain confidential between us, but I shall of course inform you whether I am able to defend her or not.” He came around from behind the desk and moved towards the door.
“Of course,” she said a little stiffly, overwhelmed with relief. She had been saved from making a complete fool of herself. “I shall be happy if you are able to help. I shall now go and tell Mrs. Sobell—and of course Mr. Erskine.” She did not mention that so far as she was aware, Peverell Erskine knew nothing about the enquiry. “Good day, Mr. Rathbone—and thank you.”
“It was a pleasure to see you again, Miss Latterly.” He opened the door for her and held it while she passed through, then stood for several moments watching her leave.
Hester went immediately to Carlyon House and asked the parlormaid who answered the door if Mrs. Sobell were in.
“Yes, Miss Latterly,” the girl answered quickly, and from her expression, Hester judged that Edith had forewarned her she was expected. “If you please to come to Mrs. Sobell’s sitting room, ma’am,” the maid went on, glancing around the hallway, then lifting her chin defiantly and walking smartly across the parquet and up the stairs, trusting Hester was behind her.
Across the first landing and in the east wing she opened the door to a small sunlit room with floral covered armchairs and sofa and soft watercolor paintings on the walls.
“Miss Latterly, ma’am,” the maid said quietly, then withdrew.
Edith rose to her feet, her face eager.
“Hester! Did you see him? What did he say? Will he do it?”
Hester found herself smiling briefly, although there was little enough humor in what she had to report.
“Yes I saw him, but of course he cannot accept any case until he is requested by the solicitor of the person in question. Are you sure Peverell will be agreeable to Mr. Rathbone acting for Alexandra?”
“Oh yes—but it won’t be easy, at least I fear not. Peverell may be the only one who is willing to fight on Alex’s behalf. But if Peverell asks Mr. Rathbone, will he take the case? You did tell him she had confessed, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did.”
“Thank heaven. Hester, I really am most grateful to you for this, you know. Come and sit down.” She moved back to the chairs and curled up in one and waved to the other, where Hester sat down and tucked her skirts comfortably. “Then what happens? He will go and see Alex, of course, but what if she just goes on saying she did it?”
“He will employ an investigator to enquire into it,” Hester replied, trying to sound more certain than she felt.
“What can he do, if she won’t tell him?”
“I don’t know—but he’s better than most police. Why did she do it, Edith? I mean, what does she say?”
Edith bit her lip. “That’s the worst part of it. Apparently she said it was out of jealousy over Thaddeus and Louisa.”
“Oh—I …” Hester was momentarily thrown into confusion.
“I know.” Edith looked wretched. “It is very sordid, isn’t it? And unpleasantly believable, if you know Alex. She is unconventional enough for something so wild and so foolish to enter her mind. Except that I really don’t believe she ever loved Thaddeus with that sort of intensity, and I am quite sure she did not lately.”
For a moment she looked embarrassed at such candor, then her emotions at the urgency and tragedy of it took over again. “Please, Hester, do not allow your natural repugnance for such behavior to prevent you from doing what you can to help her. I don’t believe she killed him at all. I think it was far more probably Sabella—God forgive her—or perhaps I should say God help her. I think she may honestly be out of her mind.” Her face tightened into a somber unhappiness. “And Alex taking the guilt for her will not help anyone. They will hang an innocent person, and Sabella in her lucid hours will suffer even more—don’t you see that?”
“Yes of course I see it,” Hester agreed, although in honesty she thought it not at all improbable that Alexandra Carlyon might well have killed her husband exactly as she had confessed. But it would be cruel, and serve no purpose, to say so to Edith now, when she was convinced of Alexandra’s innocence, or passionately wished to be. “Have you any idea why Alexandra would feel there was some cause for jealousy over the general and Mrs. Furnival?”
Edith’s eyes were bright with mockery and pain.
“You have not yet met Louisa Furnival, or you would not bother to ask. She is the sort of woman anyone might be jealous of.” Her expressive face was filled with dislike, mockery, and something which could almost have been a kind of admiration. “She has a way of walking, an air to her, a smile that makes you think she has something that you have not. Even if she had done nothing whatsoever, and your husband found no interest in her at all, it would be easy to imagine he had, simply because of her manner.”
“That does not sound very hopeful.”
“Except that I would be amazed if Thaddeus ever gave her more than a passing glance. He really was not in the least a flirt, even with Louisa. He was …” She lifted her shoulders very slightly in a gesture of helplessness. “He was very much the soldier, a man’s man. He was always polite to women, of course, but I don’t think he was ever fearfully comfortable with us. He didn’t really know what to talk about. Naturally he had learned, as any well-bred man does, but it was learned, if you know what I mean.” She looked at Hester questioningly. “He was brilliant at action, brave, decisive, and nearly always right in his judgment; and he knew how to express himself to his men, and to new young men interested in the army. He used to come alight then; I’ve watched his eyes and seen how much he cared.”
She sighed. “He always assumed women weren’t interested, and that’s not true. I would have been—but it hardly matters now, I suppose. What I’m trying to say is that one doesn’t flirt with conversation about military strategy and the relative merits of one gun over another, least of all with someone like Louisa. And even if he did, one does not commit murder over such a thing, it is …” Her face puckered, and for a moment Hester wondered with sudden hurt what Oswald Sobell had been like, and what pain Edith might have suffered in their brief marriage, what wounds of jealousy she herself had known. Then the urgency of the present reasserted itself and she returned to the subject of Alexandra.
“I imagine it is probably better that the truth should be learned, whatever it is,” she said aloud to Edith. “And I suppose it is possible the murderer is not either Alexandra or Sabella, but someone else. Perhaps if Louisa Furnival is a flirt, and was casting eyes at Thaddeus, her own husband might have imagined there was more to it than there was, and might finally have succumbed to jealousy himself.”
Edith put her hands up and covered her face, leaning forward across her knees.
“I hate this!” she said fiercely. “Everyone involved is either family or a friend of sorts. And it has to have been one of them.”
“It is wretched,” Hester agreed. “That is one of the things I learned in the other crimes I have seen investigated: you come to know the people, their dreams and their griefs, their wounds—and whoever it is, it hurts you. You cannot island yourself from it and make it ‘them,’ and not ‘us.’ ”
Edith removed her hands and looked up, surprise in her face, her mouth open to argue; then slowly the emotion subsided and she accepted that Hester meant exactly what she said.
“How very hard.” She let her breath out slowly. “Somehow I a
lways took it for granted there would be a barrier between me and whoever did such a thing—I mean usually. There would be a whole class of people whose hurt I could exclude …”
“Only with a sort of dishonesty.” Hester rose to her feet and walked over to the high window above the garden. It was a sash window open at top and bottom, and the perfume of wallflowers in the sun drifted up. “I forgot to tell you last time, with all the news of the tragedy, but I have been enquiring into what sort of occupation you might find, and I think the most interesting and agreeable thing you could do would be as a librarian.” She watched a gardener walk across the grass with a tray of seedlings. “Or researcher for someone who wishes to write a treatise, or a monograph or some such thing. It would pay you a small amount insufficient to support you, but it would take you away from Carlyon House during the days.”
“Not nursing?” There was a note of disappointment in Edith’s voice, in spite of her effort to conceal it, and a painful self-consciousness. Hester realized with a sudden stab of embarrassment that Edith admired her and that what she really sought was to do the same thing Hester did, but had been reluctant to say so.
With her face suddenly hot she struggled for a reply that would be honest and not clumsy. It would not be kind to equivocate.
“No. It is very hard to find a private position, even if you have the training for it. It is far better to use the skills you have.” She did not face her; it was better Edith did not see her sudden understanding. “There are some really very interesting people who need librarians or researchers, or someone to write up their work for them. You could find someone who writes on a subject in which you might become most interested yourself.”
“Such as what?” There was no lightness in Edith’s voice.
“Anything?” Hester turned to face her and forced a cheerfulness into her expression. “Archaeology … history … exploration.” She stopped as she saw a sudden spark of real excitement in Edith’s eyes. She smiled with overwhelming relief and a surge of unreasonable happiness. “Why not? Women have begun to think of going to most marvelous places—Egypt, the Magreb, Africa even.”
