by Anne Perry
Without thinking he reached out his hand and touched her arm.
“You cannot change it for her,” he said gently. “You have no cause to feel oppressed by a grief that you did not create and cannot help.”
“I—” She stopped, her face deeply troubled.
He became aware of his hand still on her arm and removed it quickly. Was that what she had been going to say? That he had trespassed; he was taking advantage of her anxiety to be more familiar than he would have had this been her house, and he the supplicant?
They both began to speak at once, he simply to say her name. He stopped abruptly.
“I’m sorry—”
She smiled fleetingly and then was desperately serious again.
“I know that you told Sholto you will do everything you can, and to begin with that seemed to ease my mind so much that it was almost as if the matter were already over. But now he is so worried he is ill with it.” Her lips tightened for a moment. “He tries to conceal it from me, so as not to frighten me, but I hear him up during the night, pacing the floor, and for long hours the light is on in his study.” She looked at him with a flash of humor so bleak he longed to be able to comfort her. He tried to think of something to say, but there was nothing.
“You will think I intrude into my husband’s affairs,” she went on quickly, looking downward, abashed. “But I don’t. I was simply concerned in case he was ill. I went downstairs to see if there were anything I could do to help …” She stopped and raised her eyes slowly, her voice very soft. “I found him in his study, not working as I had thought, but pacing the floor back and forth.” She bit her lip. “He was angry when he saw me in the doorway, and he denied there was anything wrong. But I know him, Mr. Drummond. He will work late, if there is occasion to. I have seen him stay up till one or two in the morning often. But never before in the eighteen years we have been married has he gone to bed, and then risen at three o’clock to go down and pace the floor of the study, with no papers out, no books, just his thoughts, and all the lights blazing.”
“It would seem there is something that concerns him profoundly,” he said with a chill of fear inside him. He had refused to consider that Byam might actually be guilty. Maybe he was wrong. Perhaps Byam calling him before he was even suspected was a double bluff. Perhaps the letter and the note that Weems was supposed to have kept were only his excuse to call Drummond, and there was something far more damaging yet to come.
He was torn with a dreadful mixture of emotions: dread of discovering irrefutably that it was Byam who had murdered Weems, and sickness inside at having to tell Eleanor-she would feel so betrayed. He was the person she had come to for help. Embarrassment: how could he explain all this to Pitt? He would leave him in a wretched position. And a sudden ease of a gripping weight inside him: if Byam was guilty, then Eleanor would be free.
That was a shameful thought, and the blood burned hot up his face, hot right up to his hair. Free for what? If Byam was hanged she would be a widow. That would not necessarily stop her loving him, and it certainly would not free her from terrible, overwhelming grief.
He did not even think of fear for himself, or his own involvement with the Inner Circle.
“Please—don’t let us stand here,” he said quietly. “Sit, and let us talk of it and learn if there is anything we can do that will resolve this problem.”
She accepted and sank into the chair gratefully. He sat opposite on one of the Chippendales, perched forward on the edge and still staring at her.
“I presume you have asked him what it is that troubles him?”
“Of course, but he will not tell me. He said he simply found it hard to sleep, and came downstairs because he did not wish to disturb me.”
“And is it not possible that that is the truth?”
Her smile was faint and a little twisted. “No. Sholto is not normally troubled by sleeplessness, and if he were he would have found a book from the library and taken it to bed with him, not paced up and down the study. And he looked ashen.” Her eyes met Drummond’s. “No one looks as he did merely because they cannot sleep. His face was haggard—as though he had seen the worst thing he feared.”
He spoke quickly; a question to reach for the last hope, not a dismissal of her fears.
“You are sure it was not the lamplight playing tricks on the features of a man overtired, and perhaps woken from an ill dream?”
“Yes—I am quite sure.” Her voice was very low; there was certainty in it, and pain. “Something terrible has happened, and I do not know what, except it seems inevitable to me that it must have to do with the death of the usurer. Surely if it were anything else he would have told me. He is not ill. We have no family matters, no relatives who might cause us distress.” Her eyes shadowed. “We never had children.” She was speaking more and more rapidly as the tension mounted in her. “My parents are dead and so are his. My brother is quite well, Sholto’s brother is in India but we have had no correspondence from him in the last two weeks. I did think to ask the butler if there had been any overseas letters that perhaps I had not seen, but he said there had not.”
“What about his work at the Treasury?” Drummond suggested it without belief, but he had to exhaust every possibility.
“I can think of nothing that would cause him the dread which I saw in him that night, and the constant fear I can feel at the edge of his mind even through the day.” She was sitting awkwardly on the edge of the chair, her fingers clenched together. “He is nervous, ill at ease. He cannot concentrate on the things which used to give him such pleasure: music, theater, books. He declined an invitation to dine with friends we have known and respected for years.”
“Could it be some friend in trouble?” He knew it was not even as he said it, but still the words spilled out, seeking any solution but the obvious.
“No.” She did not bother to elaborate her answer. It was as if she understood that they were simply making questions to put off the moment. “No,” she said again more softly, but still looking down. “I know him well enough. It is not the way in which he would behave for such a concern.” She bit her lip. “He is not a cold man. I do not mean that he is indifferent to the suffering or distress of friends, but that he is a man of decision. Such a happening would not affect him to such …” She lifted her shoulders very slightly. She was slenderer than he had realized, more fragile. “To such horror and inability to act. You did not see his face.”
“Then we must presume that something has happened that he knows of—and we do not,” he admitted finally. “Or at least he believes that it has. But he will not tell you what it is?” That was only half a question; she had already made the answer plain.
“No.”
“Are you sure you still want to know?”
She closed her eyes. “I’m frightened. I think I can guess what it may be—the least awful guess …”
“What?”
“That someone else has found the letter and the notes that Weems made of Sholto’s payments to him, and the reason. I suppose whoever killed him. Unless someone also was there after he was dead, and before the police found his body. And that person is now trying to blackmail Sholto himself.” She looked up at him suddenly, her eyes full of pain and fear.
He ached to be able to offer her some comfort, anything to take the cutting edge from her distress, or at the very least let her feel that she was not alone. Loneliness lent sharpness to all pains, as he knew only too well. But he knew of no practical comfort, nothing to ease the truth of what she said, and personal comfort would be so appallingly misplaced it would only add a fearful embarrassment to increase her misery, which was the last thing he wished.
“That at least would be proof that he was entirely innocent,” he said, clutching at a shred of hope. “If the worst happens and Pitt cannot find the murderer, then Lord Byam will have to tell what he knows, tell of the further blackmail, and expose the man.” He leaned a little forward. “After all,” he said earnestly, “the most h
e can do is make public the old matter of Laura Anstiss’s death, which would be most unpleasant, and there are some who may feel he was to blame, but may well also have great sympathy with him. And surely he is keeping the matter silent almost as much for Lord Anstiss’s sake as his own. It would be extremely distasteful for him also.”
“I think that troubles Sholto as much as any scandal attaching to himself,” she admitted. A curious look crossed her face, of confusion and distress, and then it was gone. “He admires Frederick so much. They have been friends since their youth, you know. There is something uniquely precious about an old friendship. One has shared so much, seen the passage of time, how it has marked and changed us, the hopes realized and the hopes dashed, the work to fulfill the dreams, and the dreams that are crumbled and kept secret.” She smiled. “One has laughed at the same things, and developed such an understanding because at times there is no need to speak. The knowledge is there simply because sharing has been so long a habit. One knows the best and the worst, and there is no need to explain.”
He felt a gulf between them with a pain so sharp it stopped him from laughing at himself for the idiocy of it. He was shut out. He had a past she knew nothing of: all his life, everything that had brought him to this day, the values, the loves and the griefs, Catriona’s death, his daughters, everything that mattered. To her he was simply a policeman.
And she had a life he could only imagine. All he knew was this desperate woman whose only concern was to help her husband.
“No,” he said abruptly, and heard his own words pour out while all the time his cooler brain was telling him to hold his tongue. “No—I think it is the quality of friendship which matters, not its length. One can have an acquaintance with people all one’s life, and never share a minute’s total understanding, or meet a stranger and feel with her some tremendous experience so deep you can never afterwards tell anyone else exactly how it was, and yet find, the moment your eyes meet, that she knows it as you do.”
She looked at him with surprise and then increasing wonder as the totally contradicting idea became clearer in her mind and she considered it. For seconds they stared at each other, the street outside forgotten, Weems and his murder, even Byam’s involvement with it. There was only the few square yards of the room in the amber sunlight through the big windows, the sofa and the chair they sat on, and the bright pattern on the carpet between them.
He saw her face as indelibly as if it were painted on his eyelids, the fine brow, the steady dark gray eyes with their shadowing lashes, the tiny lines woven by the years, the light on her hair, the softness of her lips.
“Perhaps you are right,” she said at last. “Maybe I have mistaken familiarity for understanding, and they are not the same.”
Now he was confused. He did not know what else to add. He had almost forgotten why they had spoken of friendship at all. It was something to do with Byam—yes—Byam and Anstiss. The pain of exposing Anstiss’s grief that Laura’s death had been suicide, because she loved another man.
“It is very horrible,” he said aloud. “I expect he would hesitate, whoever it was—an old friend or not. The friendship would simply make it the more painful to himself, it would not alter the other person’s grief.”
“Frederick?” She smiled very slightly and turned away. “No, of course not. Sometimes I think Sholto is overly protective of him—of his interests, I mean. He still feels this gnawing guilt for Laura’s death, and it colors his behavior, I am sure.” She smiled, but it was a sad, worried little gesture, without happiness. “Debts of honor can do strange things to people, can’t they? Especially if they can never be repaid.”
He said nothing, seeing from her expression that she had not completed her thought.
“I wonder at times,” she started again, “if perhaps Frederick is aware of it. He can be so funny, such an excellent companion, and then quite without warning he will say something thoroughly cruel, and I can see that Sholto is deeply hurt. Then it is all over again and they are the best of friends.” She shrugged, as if pushing the thought away as foolishness. “Then again, it is probably just that Frederick is less subtle with words. When people are close, sooner or later they will hurt each other, don’t you think? Simply because we use so many words, so easily, I suppose it is inevitable we should be clumsy, or take a meaning where it was not intended. I do it myself, and then wish I could have bitten my tongue out before being so stupid …”
She stopped, seemed to brace herself, and then began again, not looking at him but at the window and the deepening light on the trees rustling in the sunset wind. “If it is hurting Frederick that fills him with such horror, I can understand it very easily. But perhaps he will have no alternative, in the end, but to expose Weems’s murderer and risk his telling everything, at his trial, if not before. I—” She hunched her shoulders and tightened her hands, her fingers knotted in the soft fabric of her skirt.
Instinctively he leaned even closer to her, then stopped. He had no idea whether she was aware of him or not.
“I wonder whether he knows who it is?” she went on, her voice very low and a thrill of horror in it. “And if it is not a stranger, not some poor debtor from Clerkenwell, but a man he has some acquaintance with, even some sympathy for—and that is why he is so reluctant to expose him? That would explain a great deal.”
She shivered. “It would be easier then to understand why he is in such an agony of mind. Poor Sholto. What a fearful decision to have to make.” She turned back to Drummond, her eyes wide. “And if Weems would blackmail Sholto, then he would as easily blackmail someone else, wouldn’t he?”
“We believe he has,” he agreed quietly, Addison Carswell in his mind, and a new shadow of pity. What a miserable and futile waste of life and all its wealth. Over what? An infatuation with a pretty face, a young body and a few hours of an appetite and a dream that could never last.
She saw the distress in his face and her expression changed from hope to sorrow.
“You know who it is?” she said in little more than a whisper.
“I know who it may be—”
In the beginning she had said “the least awful possibility.” Neither of them spoke the most awful—that Byam had killed Weems and his fear was dreadfully and sickeningly for himself. He would not say it now.
It was getting late. The quality of the light was beginning to change, deepening in color, and already the shadows were across the floor and creeping up the brilliance of the far wall, lighting the peacock fire screen. He did not want her to leave, and yet he was afraid if he offered her refreshment she would realize the hour and excuse herself. But what else could he ask her?
“Mr. Drummond—” She turned around towards him, rearranging her skirt.
“I have not offered you anything by way of refreshment,” he said quickly, his voice louder than he had intended.
“Oh please do not put yourself to inconvenience. It is most kind of you to have spared me your time, and at this hour. You must be tired.”
“Please! Allow me to repair my oversight.”
“It is not necessary, I assure you. You have been most patient.”
He stood up and reached for the bell and rang it furiously.
“I have been very remiss. I would like some refreshment myself, and it is far too early for dinner. Please permit me to redeem myself.”
“No redemption is required,” she said with a smile. “But if it would make you feel more comfortable, then I will be glad to take a little tea.”
“Excellent!” His spirits soared and he rang the bell again and immediately Goodall appeared, his face politely inquiring.
“Tea,” Drummond said quickly. “And something …”
“Yes sir.” Goodall withdrew, his face expressionless.
Drummond sat opposite her again, wondering what to discuss. The formal part of her visit seemed to have exhausted itself and he had no desire at all to pursue the subject. He wanted to know more about her, but it seemed too crass
simply to ask. He had not felt so awkward with anyone since before he had been married, when he was a young man raw to the army, and not even having thought of the police force for a career. He could remember balls and soirees then when he had felt this tongue-tied and desperate for something casual and charming to say.
Before the silence grew oppressive she rescued him. No doubt it was easy for her, with a relationship which hardly mattered.
“This is a most pleasing room, Mr. Drummond. Have you always lived here?”
“No—no, I lived in Kensington before my wife died.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I expect you miss her very much.”
“It is some years now, but yes, there are times when it seems very silent, and I imagine what it would be like if she were here,” he replied truthfully. “She was …” He looked at her and saw only interest in her face. He had thought he would not wish to tell her of Catriona, that it would be somehow disloyal, but now that it came to the moment it was not. In fact it seemed a very natural thing to do.
“She was so vivid. She looked at me so directly.” He smiled at the remembrance. “Her father used to criticize her for it and say it was unbecoming in a woman, but I found it honest, as if she were interested in everything and would not stoop to pretending she was not. She liked bright colors, all sorts of reds and glowing blues.” Involuntarily his eyes went to the peacock screen. “I recall once, years ago, she went to dinner in a gown of such a fierce flame color that she was noticed immediately when one entered the room.” His smile broadened. It was all so much easier than he had expected, so much more natural. “Looking back it was rather ostentatious, which was not what she meant at all. She simply loved the color and it made her feel happy to look at it. We laughed about it afterwards. Catriona laughed very easily, she enjoyed so many things.”
“It is a rare gift,” Eleanor said warmly. “And a very precious one. Too much happiness is lost because we spend our time regretting the past and seeking for the future and miss what we are given for the moment at hand. The gift to be happy is a blessing to all around. Do you have a picture of her?”
