by Anne Perry
Pitt stood stock-still. “Another grave?” he said fatuously.
“Yes, sir—robbed, like the last one. Coffin—but no corpse.”
“And whose is it?”
“A Mr. W. W. Porteous, sir. William Wilberforce Porteous, to be exact.”
4
PITT DID NOT tell Charlotte about the second grave, nor indeed about the result of the postmortem. She heard about the latter two days later in the early afternoon. She had just finished her housework and put Jemima to bed for her rest when the doorbell rang. The woman who came in three mornings a week to do the heavy work had gone before midday, so Charlotte answered the door herself.
She was startled to see Dominic on the step. At first she could not even find words but stood stupidly, without inviting him in. He looked so little different it was as if memory had come to life. His face was just as she had remembered it, the same dark eyes, the slightly flared nostrils, the same mouth. He stood just as elegantly. The only difference was that it did not tighten her throat anymore. She could see the rest of the street, with its white stone doorsteps and the net twitching along the windows.
“May I come in?” he asked uncomfortably. This time it was he who seemed to have lost his composure.
She recollected herself with a jolt, embarrassed for her clumsiness.
“Of course.” She stepped back. She must look ridiculous. They were old friends who had lived in the same house for years when he had been her brother-in-law. In fact, since he had apparently not remarried, even though Sarah had been dead for nearly five years, he was still a member of the family.
“How are you?” she asked.
He smiled quickly, trying to look comfortable, to bridge the immense gap.
“Very well,” he replied. “And I know you are. I can see, and Thomas told me when I met him the other day. He says you have a daughter!”
“Yes, Jemima. She’s upstairs, asleep.” She remembered that the only fire was in the kitchen. It was too expensive to heat the parlor as well, and anyway, she spent too little time in there for it to matter. She led him down the passage, conscious of the difference between this, with its well-worn furniture and scrubbed board floors, and the house in Cater Street with five servants. At least the kitchen was warm and clean. Thank goodness she had blackened the stove only yesterday, and the table was almost white. She would not apologize; not so much for herself as for Pitt.
She took his coat and hung it behind the door, then offered him Pitt’s chair. He sat down. She knew he had come for some reason, and he would tell her what it was when he had found the words. It was early for tea, but he was probably cold, and she could think of nothing else to offer.
“Thank you,” he accepted quickly. She did not notice his eyes going round the room, seeing how bare it was, how every article was old and loved, polished by owner after owner, and mended where use had worn it down.
He knew her too well to play with gentilities. He could remember her sneaking the newspaper from the butler’s pantry when her father would not allow her to read it. He had always treated her as a friend, a strong friend, rather than as a woman. It was one of the things that used to hurt.
“Did Thomas tell you about the grave robbing?” he asked suddenly and baldly.
She was filling the kettle at the sink. “Yes.” She kept her voice level.
“Did he tell you much?” he went on. “That it was a man called Lord Augustus Fitzroy-Hammond, and that they dug him up twice and left him where he was bound to be found quickly—the second time in his own pew in church, where it would be his family who saw him?”
“Yes, he told me.” She turned off the tap and set the kettle on the stove. She could not think what to offer him to eat at this time of day. He was bound to have lunched, and it was far too early for afternoon tea. She had nothing elegant. In the end she settled for biscuits she had made, sharp, with a little ginger in them.
He was looking at her, his eyes following her round the room, anxious. “They did a postmortem. Thomas insisted on it, even though I begged him not to—”
“Why?” She met his eyes and tried to keep all guile out of her face. She knew he had come for some kind of help, but she could not give it if she did not understand the truth, or at least as much of it as he knew himself.
“Why?” He repeated her question as if he found it strange.
“Yes.” She sat down opposite him at the scrubbed table. “Why do you mind if they do a postmortem?”
He realized he had not told her about his connection with the family and assumed that that was why she was confused. She could see the thoughts crossing his mind and was surprised how easily she read them. In Cater Street he had seemed mysterious, private, and out of reach.
She allowed the mistake.
“Oh,” he acknowledged his omission. “I forgot to explain—I know Lady Alicia Fitzroy-Hammond, the widow. I met her at a ball some little time ago; we became—” He hesitated, and she knew he was debating whether to tell her the truth or not; not from any sensitivity to old feelings, because he had never been aware of them, but from a habitual delicacy in discussing such things. One did not speak freely of a relationship with a recent widow, still less of another man’s wife. Personal emotion of any sort was hinted at, rather than named.
She smiled very slightly, allowing him to flounder.
He met her eyes, and memory was too strong for him. “—friends,” he finished. “In fact, I hope to marry her—when a decent time has passed.”
She was glad she had been prepared for it; somehow it would have been a shock if it had come without any warning. Was her resentment for Sarah’s memory, or for her own, a final shedding of girlhood dreams?
She forced her mind back to the disinterment. “Then why do you mind there being a postmortem?” she asked frankly. “Are you afraid it will uncover something wrong?”
His face colored, but he remained looking at her fixedly. “No, of course not! It is the suspicion! If the police demand a postmortem, that means they must have a strong belief there is something to discover. In any event, they were wrong.”
She was surprised. Pitt had not told her it had been done. “You mean it is over?” she asked.
His eyebrows went up. “Yes. You didn’t know?”
“No. What did they find?”
He looked angry and unhappy. “They made it worse than before. It made their suspicions obvious, without proving anything. Alicia consented to it because Thomas told her it would put an end to all the speculation. But the answer was equivocal. It could have been natural heart failure, or it could have been an overdose of digitalis. And an overdose could have been accidental—his mother keeps it for her heart—or it could have been murder.”
Of course she knew he would say this, but now that he had, she did not know how to answer. She asked the obvious question.
“Is there any reason to suppose it was murder?”
“The damned corpse was dug up twice!” he said furiously, his helplessness breaking through in anger. “That isn’t exactly common, you know! Especially in that sort of society. Good God, Charlotte, have you forgotten what suspicion of murder did to us in Cater Street?”
“It stripped off the facade, so we saw all the weak and ugly things we had learned to hide from ourselves and each other,” she said quietly. “What are you afraid you will see here?”
He stared at her, something close to dislike in his face. She would have expected it to hurt her, and yet it did not, not closely, inside herself where real pain lived; rather, it was the distant ache one feels for someone unknown, whose misfortune one has seen before and known to expect.
“I’m sorry.” She meant it, not as an apology but as an expression of regret, even sympathy. “I really am sorry, but I don’t know of anything I can say or do to help.”
His anger vanished. He was caught; he knew all the disillusion, the malice, and the fear that almost inevitably would follow, and he was afraid.
He was still looking for
an escape. “Can’t they leave it now?” he said quietly, his voice tight, his hands white on the wooden tabletop. “Alicia didn’t kill him; I didn’t; and the old lady wouldn’t have, unless she gave him a dose accidentally, and it was too much for him.” He looked up at Charlotte. “But no one can prove it; all they will do is raise a lot of doubts, make everyone look with suspicion at each other. Can’t Thomas just leave it now? Then there’ll be some hope that whoever did this wretched thing will give up, be convinced at last that there’s nothing to it?”
She did not know what to say. She would like to have believed him and accepted that it was simply either a natural death or an accident. But why the disinterment—twice? And why was he afraid? Was it no more than the shadow of Cater Street indelible in the memory, or was there growing in him a fear that Alicia could have become so in love with him, so frustrated by her husband that she had taken a simple, easily grasped opportunity and given him a fatal dose of his mother’s medicine? She looked at Dominic’s handsome face and felt as she sometimes did towards Jemima.
“He may do.” She wanted to comfort him; she had known him a long time, and he had been part of her life, part of the deepest of her emotions in those callow, vulnerable years before she met Pitt. Yet it would be both useless and stupid to lie. “But grave robbing is a crime,” she said clearly. “And if there is a chance he can find who did it, he will have to continue.”
“He won’t find out!” He spoke with such conviction she knew it was for himself he insisted, not for her.
“Probably not,” she agreed. “Unless, of course, they do it again? Or they do something else?”
It was a thought he had been trying to banish. Now she had brought it where it could not be denied.
“It’s insane!” he said hotly. It was the easiest way to explain it, the only acceptable way. Insanity did not have to have reason; by its very nature any incongruity could be explained and wiped away.
“Perhaps.”
He had finished his tea, and she collected his cup to remove it.
“Can’t you ask Thomas?” He leaned forward a little, urgently, his face puckered. “Point out the harm it will do to innocent people? Please, Charlotte? There will be such injustice! We won’t even have the chance to deny or disprove what has only been whispered, never said outright. When people whisper, lies become bigger and bigger as they are passed around—”
The injustice convinced her. For a moment she placed herself in Alicia’s position, in love with Dominic; she could still remember how sharp that was, full of excitement and pain, wild hope and hot disillusion. And to be tied to a husband without imagination or laughter! Then if he died, and at last you were free? Suspicion reached out its ugly fingers and soils everything; no one says to you what they think; it is all smiles and sympathy to your face, polite smirks in the withdrawing room. The moment you are gone the acid overflows, creeping wider and wider, eating away the fabric of everything good. The gossips court you; old friends no longer call. She had seen enough of envy and opportunism before.
“I’ll ask him,” she agreed. “I can’t say what he will do, but I’ll ask.”
His face lit up, making her feel guilty for having promised when she knew she could influence Pitt very little where his job was concerned.
“Thank you.” Dominic stood up, as graceful as always now that his fear had gone. “Thank you very much!” He smiled, and the last few years slipped away—they could have been conspirators again in something trivial, like the filching of Papa’s newspaper.
When Pitt came home she said nothing at first, allowing him to warm himself, to speak with Jemima and see her to bed, and then to eat his meal and relax before the fire. The kitchen was comfortable from the day-long heat of the stove. The scrubbed wood was pale, almost white, and the pans gleamed on the shelves. Flowered china on the dresser reflected the gaslight.
“Dominic came here today,” she said casually.
She was sewing, mending a dress of Jemima’s where she had trodden on the hem and toppled over. She did not notice Pitt stiffen.
“Here?” he asked.
“Yes, this afternoon.”
“What for?” His voice was cool, guarded.
She was a little surprised. She stopped sewing, needle in the air, and looked up at him. “He said you’d done a postmortem on Lord whatever his name is—the man who fell off the cab after the theatre.”
“So we did.”
“And you didn’t discover anything conclusive. He died of heart failure.”
“That’s right. Did he come here to tell you that?” His voice was a beautiful instrument, precise and evocative. It was rich with sarcasm now.
“No, of course not!” she said sharply. “I don’t care what the wretched man died of. He was frightened that the suggestion of murder might cause gossip, whispering that would hurt a lot of people. It is very difficult to deny something that no one has said outright.”
“Such as that Alicia Fitzroy-Hammond murdered her husband?” he asked. “Or that Dominic did himself?”
She looked at him a little coolly. “I don’t think he was afraid for himself, if that is what you are trying to say.” As soon as the words were out she thought better of them. She loved Pitt, and she sensed in him a vulnerability, even though she did not know what it was. But justice was strong, too, and the old loyalty to Dominic died hard, perhaps because she knew his weaknesses. Pitt was the stronger; she had no need to defend him. He could be hurt, but he would not hurt himself, crumble under pressure.
“He ought not be,” Pitt said drily. “If Lord Augustus was murdered, Dominic is an obvious suspect. Alicia inherits a good deal, not to mention an excellent social position; she’s in love with Dominic—and she’s an extremely handsome woman.”
“You don’t like Dominic, do you?” She was listening not to his words, but to what she read in them.
He stood up and walked away, pretending to fiddle with the curtains. “Like and dislike have nothing to do with it,” he answered. “I am speaking of his position; he is a natural suspect if Lord Augustus was murdered. It would be naive to imagine otherwise. We cannot always have the world as we would like it, and sometimes even the most charming people, people we have known and cared for, for years, are capable of violence, deceit, and stupidity.” He let the curtains go and turned back to her because he had to know what she was feeling. He would not ask her what Dominic had meant under his words, how he had spoken, what he had left unsaid.
Her face was calm, but there was anger under the surface, and he was not sure exactly why. He had to press until he did, even if it hurt him in the end, because not knowing was worse.
“Don’t talk to me as if I were a child, Thomas,” she said quietly. “I know that perfectly well. I don’t think Dominic killed him, because I don’t think he would want to enough. But I think he is afraid that she did. That is why he came here.”
His eyes narrowed a little. “What did he expect you to do?”
“Point out to you the injustice that might be done if you continue with an investigation, especially since you are not even sure if there has been any crime.”
“You think I shall be unjust?” He was looking for a quarrel now. Better to hear it than leave it in the air, waiting.
She refused to reply, biting her tongue instead of telling him not to be idiotic. She would like to have said it, but she did not dare.
“Charlotte!” he demanded. “Do you think that because it is Dominic, I shall be unjust?”
She looked up from Jemima’s dress, the needle still in her fingers. “It does not need anyone to be unjust for injustice to happen,” she said a little tartly. Really, he was being stupid on purpose! “We all know what suspicion can do, and we have said as much. And in case you think otherwise, I told Dominic that you would do whatever was necessary, and I should have no influence upon you.”
“Oh.” He walked back across the room and sat down in his chair opposite her.
“But you still don�
��t like Dominic,” she added.
He did not answer. Instead, he pulled out the box where he kept the pieces he was making into a train for Jemima and began working on them skillfully with a knife. He had got enough of the answer he wanted. For tonight, he would prefer to leave it alone. She was still cross, but he knew it was not to do with Dominic, and that was all that mattered.
He carved at the wood with satisfaction, beginning to smile as it took shape.
The following day Charlotte determined to do something about the matter herself. She had not a really good winter dress, but she had one that, although it was very much last year’s fashion, flattered her. Its cut fit her extremely well, especially now that her figure was quite back to its weight before Jemima’s birth, in fact, if anything a little improved. The gown was the color of warm burgundy, complementary both to her hair and her complexion.
She remembered what Aunt Vespasia had said about a suitable hour to call, and she spent the next day’s housekeeping on a hansom cab to take her to Gadstone Park. She could not possibly be seen arriving on an omnibus, even if such a thing were to run anywhere near.
The parlormaid was surprised to see her but well trained enough to show it only slightly. Charlotte had no card to present, as most callers did in society, but she kept her chin in the air and begged the maid to be good enough to inform her mistress that Mrs. Pitt was here at her invitation.
She was more relieved than she had realized when the girl accepted this somewhat odd introduction and led her to an empty withdrawing room to wait, while Lady Cumming-Gould was apprised of the event. It was probably the word “invitation” that had decided it; after all, it was just possible Lady Cumming-Gould had invited her, the old lady being a trifle eccentric.
Charlotte was too tense to sit down. She stood with her hat and gloves still on and tried to affect an air of indifference, in case the maid should return before she heard her; anyway, it was good practice.
When the door opened it was Vespasia herself, dressed in dove gray and looking like a figure from a silversmith’s dream. She was more magnificent in her seventies than most women ever are.
