Death On Blackheath (Thomas Pitt 29)

by Anne Perry

  He was on his feet, and she stood up too. ‘Why on earth don’t you tell Thomas? You could save Kynaston … practically from ruin! Thomas isn’t going to make it public. He’ll keep it just as secret as you do, if it … oh!’ She stared at him, looking into his beautiful, long-lashed eyes, still feeling the beat of her heart shaking her. ‘It’s worse than the maid! Could it really be? Like whom? Someone he can’t ever be seen with …’ Her imagination raced.

  ‘Emily, stop it!’ he said firmly. ‘I said I didn’t think maids were his taste, that’s all. I don’t know the man that well, and I certainly don’t have his confidence in romantic affairs! Or even merely lustful ones. I very much want to work with him, but I don’t know if it will be possible. I’d rather err on the side of thinking too well of him than of assuming his guilt before there’s even proof of a crime he might be involved in. Wouldn’t you?’

  She did not answer. She wanted him safe, and she wanted him to talk to her. Above all she wanted him to love her the way he had before he became a Member of Parliament. But to say so would be appallingly childish, embarrassingly so. She blushed hot at the idea he might even guess that that was what she meant.

  ‘I imagine I might,’ she agreed. ‘But there’s something in your voice that makes me think you don’t trust him, for all your generous words. I dare say you are right, and he wouldn’t have an affair with a maid, or even take advantage of her in something less emotional than an affair. But there is something wrong, you just don’t know yet whether it is something you should take notice of or not.’

  He looked disconcerted for a long moment, then he smiled, with the same warm, easy charm she knew right from the beginning. She should stop telling herself she was not still in love with him. She knew better than to believe such a lie anyway.

  ‘You have a gift for putting things horribly plainly,’ he said with a degree of approval. ‘You would never be a success in Parliament. I don’t know how you do it in Society. I wouldn’t dare!’

  ‘You have to smile when you say things people don’t want to hear,’ she replied. ‘Then they think you don’t really mean it. Or at worst, they aren’t sure that you do. And it’s quite different for me anyway; nobody needs to care very much what I think. They can always discount it, if they want to. Except, of course, if I tell them they look marvellous and are up-to-the-minute in fashion. Then, naturally, I am talking perfect sense, and my opinion is infallible.’

  He looked at her for a moment, not sure himself how much to believe. Then he shook his head, kissed her briefly but softly on the cheek, and left the room.

  It was better than it might have been, not yet a disaster, but it was still very much too close to the brink. She must do something, and not with Charlotte this time. Regardless of who did what, Charlotte always got the credit.

  Emily was ideally placed to spend an afternoon with Rosalind Kynaston. She looked through the newspaper Jack had discarded and found a suitable event, and another for tomorrow, and the day after. Then she used her telephone to call Rosalind and invite her to an exhibition of French Impressionist paintings, and then perhaps afternoon tea. Very deliberately she did not invite Ailsa.

  She was happily surprised when Rosalind replied that she had no engagements that afternoon that could not be put off, even though it meant that Emily was not nearly as well prepared as she would like to be as to exactly how she would conduct herself to gain the best advantage she could. She knew perfectly well that she wanted to acquire some information that would assist Pitt, and therefore Jack, in determining what had happened to Kitty Ryder, and who had caused it. She would very much like the perpetrator not to be anyone in the Kynaston house.

  She took great care dressing. The pink had been a disaster. Simply for the memory, apart from anything else, she would not wear it again. In fact, she might well avoid all warm, light colours! She had sufficient means to choose anything she wished. With her fair hair and pale skin, especially after the winter, something delicate and cool was the obvious choice. How had she been so foolish as to do otherwise? Desperation is never a good judge!

  She chose a very pale teal, half-way between blue and green, with a white silk fichu at the neck. She regarded herself critically in the glass, and was satisfied. She must now forget the whole dress issue and concentrate on what she would say.

  They met on the steps of the gallery, Rosalind arriving only moments after Emily. They greeted each other warmly and went inside. It was a very pleasant day, but the wind still had a March bite to it.

  ‘I apologise for such inconsiderate haste,’ Emily said as they reached the entrance hall. ‘I just had a sudden urge to go somewhere simply for the sake of it, not to be correct and have to make conversation.’

  ‘I was delighted,’ Rosalind said with feeling. She glanced at Emily very directly. ‘We shall play truant from obligation for a whole afternoon.’ She did not add anything about her sister-in-law, but somehow it hung in the air between them. The very absence of her name was an observance in itself.

  Emily knew she must not be too direct too soon. She smiled as they walked towards the first gallery.

  ‘I have always liked Impressionist paintings. They seem to have a freedom of the mind. Even if you don’t like the work itself, it offers you a dozen different ways to see it and interpret it. Something that is strictly representational forces on you its reality straight away.’

  ‘I never thought of that,’ Rosalind said with very evident pleasure. ‘Perhaps we could stay here all afternoon?’ She did not add how much the idea appealed to her; it was clear in her face.

  The first room was taken up almost entirely with paintings of trees, light on leaves, shadows on grass, and impressions of movement in the wind. Emily was happy to gaze at them for their own beauty for quite some time, and allow Rosalind to do the same, although she did glance several times at her face and study the expression in it. Rosalind was clearly troubled. Emily had been right in her observation that the subtle nature of the art allowed a great deal of one’s own interpretation, the dark as well as the light. It has been an emotionally dangerous place to come. So much feeling could be laid bare. And yet with time brief, and perhaps the stark reality of betrayal waiting, still the best one. But one mistake of too much candour too soon could destroy it all, like smashing a mirror, so that you would never know what it had reflected.

  She moved up to join Rosalind in front of a pencil drawing of windblown trees.

  ‘Doesn’t it make you wonder what was going on in the mind of the artist?’ she said quietly. ‘There is so much strain in those branches. Some of them look close to breaking.’

  ‘I suppose everyone has their own wind, and their own darkness,’ Rosalind said quietly. ‘Perhaps that is what real art is. Any good journeyman can capture the individual and reproduce what the eye sees. A genius can capture the universal in what everyone feels … or perhaps not everyone, but people of a thousand different sorts.’

  There would never be a clearer opportunity. It was almost as if Rosalind were seeking an opening to speak.

  ‘You are right,’ Emily agreed quietly so that anyone else entering the room would not chance to overhear her. ‘This drawing looks as if the branches are all hugging each other in the darkness, afraid of the violence outside.’

  ‘I see the violence inside, and the darkness beyond,’ Rosalind said with a tiny, tense little smile. ‘And I see them huddling, but not together except by chance.’

  Emily affected not to have noticed anything raw or painful in her words, but her heart was hammering in her chest. ‘What about the picture over there?’ She indicated one also of branches, but utterly different in mood. The inner knots unravelled, and one smiled simply to look at it. ‘To me it is the complete opposite, and yet the subject is the same.’

  ‘The light,’ Rosalind said without hesitation. ‘In that one the wind is warm, and they are dancing in it. All the leaves flutter, like frills, or skirts.’

  ‘Dancers,’ Emily said thoughtfu
lly. ‘That’s right – absolutely. It is very difficult for someone else to tell how your partner is holding you, lightly, supportively, or so tightly you are bruised and you know you cannot escape. I wonder if someone has painted real dancers that way. Or would it be too obvious? It would be something to attempt, wouldn’t it? If you were a painter?’

  ‘Perhaps that is what group portraiture is about,’ Rosalind suggested.

  Emily laughed. ‘Not if you want another commission!’

  Rosalind spread her hands in a tiny little gesture of submission. ‘Of course,’ she agreed. ‘You must paint people the way they wish to be seen. But would any great artist do that, except to earn enough to live on?’

  ‘Can anyone afford not to make accommodations?’ Emily asked in return.

  It was a moment or two before Rosalind replied. By then they had moved to the next room where most of the paintings were seascapes, or views of lakes and rivers.

  ‘I like the sea pictures better,’ Rosalind observed. ‘The open horizon.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘That one is beautiful and terrible – the loneliness in it, even despair. It looks like a gravel pit, deserted and filled in with water.’

  Emily said nothing, waiting.

  ‘I’m sure you must have heard that my lady’s maid is missing,’ Rosalind went on, looking at the painting, not at Emily. ‘And that there was a body found in the gravel pits near us. We don’t know yet whether it is Kitty, or not.’

  ‘Yes,’ Emily agreed. ‘It must be dreadful for you … I can’t imagine.’ She could imagine very well, but it was not the time to be speaking about herself, or the tragedies of her own past.

  ‘The worst part is the suspicion,’ Rosalind went on. ‘I can’t help hoping she is alive and well somewhere, for everyone’s sake. But she wasn’t an irresponsible person at all. Everyone is suggesting that she ran off with the young man she was courting, but I don’t believe it. I can’t. She liked him, but she wasn’t in love. Ailsa says she was, but I know better. Either she’s dead, or she ran away for a reason that seemed real to her.’ For a moment Rosalind’s face looked as utterly bleak as the painted gravel pit on the wall.

  Emily felt she must say something, not only because she could not let the opportunity slip out of her grasp, but out of ordinary kindness.

  ‘Are you sure you are not letting your fondness for her make you overlook her faults?’ she asked gently. ‘Wouldn’t you rather think she was flighty and on rare occasions selfish, rather than dead? After all, who could she be so afraid of that she would run off into the night without a word?’ Dare she take it any further? If she did, it must be now! She hesitated only a moment. ‘Wouldn’t you have sensed it? A look in her face, a clumsiness perhaps, an inattention to detail? It is very hard to conceal fear great enough to make you run off alone into a winter night! It was January then, wasn’t it? I don’t really like to go out in January even wrapped up and in a carriage, and knowing I will come back to my own bed.’

  Rosalind turned a little and stared at her, hollow-eyed. ‘Neither do I,’ she said in a little above a whisper. ‘But I have been safe, physically safe, all my life. I’m not a servant, and I don’t know anything that could be dangerous.’

  ‘What could she know?’ Emily seized the chance offered her. ‘It would have to have been something she couldn’t tell you …’

  ‘That is what frightens me,’ Rosalind replied, her voice now so strained it was barely recognisable. ‘There is nothing about me that is even interesting, let alone threatening to anyone. It must be about my husband, or my sister-in-law.’ She took in a deep breath and let it out. ‘Or Bennett. He’s been dead nearly nine years, and yet it is as if he still lived in the house somewhere just out of sight. No one ever forgets him.’

  Emily thought for only a moment. ‘You mean Ailsa still loves him too much to consider marrying again?’

  Rosalind did not answer immediately. She appeared to give the matter thought. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said at length. ‘She does accept various social invitations from other men, but they seem to cool after a while. So yes, perhaps you are right. That is what she tells Dudley, anyway. But Dudley loved Bennett profoundly. Even for brothers, they were very close.’ She smiled, and there was a deep warmth to it. ‘That is one of the nicest qualities about Dudley: he is totally loyal and, if he judges at all, then he is kindly. He was always protective of the young, and of course Bennett was younger than he. I remember Dudley with our sons. He was patient, no matter how exasperating they were at times … and they were. In fact, he was gentler than I … I am ashamed to admit.’

  ‘And your daughters?’ Emily said with interest.

  Rosalind shrugged. ‘Oh, he was always patient with the girls, and with me. And with Ailsa, for that matter. Women don’t tempt him to be otherwise. I’m not certain if that is because he doesn’t expect so much of us …?’

  ‘Some men just are patient,’ Emily agreed. She thought momentarily of Jack with Evangeline. She could twist him around her little finger, and he did not even bother to deny it.

  She looked at Rosalind, deciding what line next to pursue, intensely aware of the distress in her. ‘Ailsa seems to be strong-willed enough not to need a great deal of protection,’ she observed. ‘Am I jumping to too quick a judgement?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ Rosalind said instantly. ‘I …’ she shook her head. ‘No, I am at fault. I should not judge either. To me Ailsa seems immensely strong, but she was torn apart by Bennett’s death. It was just that with her it seemed on the outside to be anger, even rage that fate had taken from her the one man she loved. I …’ She shook her head again. ‘I never loved in that kind of way. Perhaps because I have children? I don’t know. If Dudley died I would miss him terribly. I expect every day I would be aware of the emptiness, all the things he said, did, cared about … everything. I would weep inside, as he still does for Bennett, I know. But I don’t believe I would rage at fate.’

  Emily thought how she would feel if Jack were to die. Alone … as if she would be alone for the rest of her life. If she knew beyond doubt that he really had left her, either openly, physically, or just by being emotionally absent, then she would rage! Her anger might be beyond control, at times, but it would be a defence against tears. She knew that almost as if it had actually happened. It would be as if the sweet wine of life had turned to vinegar. The thought was cold and real inside her.

  ‘What was he like … Bennett?’ she asked.

  Rosalind gave a little laugh. ‘Like this picture, with the sunlight in the trees,’ she answered. ‘Do you think we should move on? Are we stopping other people from studying this one?’ She glanced around to see if anyone were waiting, but no one else was in the room except a couple of men staring at a different picture over on the opposite wall.

  ‘Probably,’ Emily agreed. ‘We’ll see what’s in the next room.’

  It turned out to be landscapes in various moods, all of them profoundly beautiful in their own way. With so much passion around them it was easier to be honest than it might have been in a more conventional place with the politeness one was accustomed to, and the usual pretences of good manners.

  ‘What was Bennett like?’ Rosalind repeated Emily’s question. ‘When I think back on it, I didn’t see him nearly as often as one would think, from the impression he made on me. He was very like Dudley in some ways: his interests, his mannerisms, his sense of humour. But he was quicker, more certain of himself. He had boundless dreams and he had few doubts that one day he would achieve at least most of them. In a way that’s why it was so difficult to realise he was dead. It all happened very quickly. One day he was ill, and in a week he was gone. We couldn’t grasp it – especially not Dudley. After all that had—’ She stopped.

  Emily waited. They were standing near a broad, sweeping landscape with huge skies: the left side was filled with blue distance, the right a driving storm coming in rapidly, darkening everything, heavy with threat.

  ‘We thought the worst was past,’ R
osalind said simply, as if everyone would know what she meant.

  Perhaps it was indelicate, but Emily could not now leave it.

  ‘He had been ill before?’ she asked.

  ‘Bennett was in Sweden,’ Rosalind said after a moment or two. ‘Many years ago now. Before he ever met Ailsa. I don’t know what happened. Dudley was frantic. I’ve never seen him so desperate. He received a message and dropped everything. He went to Sweden the very next day and I didn’t hear from him for weeks. When he returned he brought Bennett with him, and they never told me what happened. Bennett looked ashen, and thin. He stayed with us. Dudley wouldn’t let him out of his sight.’

  Two gentlemen walked past them talking earnestly.

  ‘He used to have nightmares,’ Rosalind continued when they were out of earshot. ‘I heard him crying out in the night. Dudley never told me what it was, and gradually it passed. Bennett regained his strength and went back to his work. A year or two after that he met Ailsa and shortly after they were married.’

  ‘Then the illness returned?’ Emily said with a heavy sense of tragedy herself. ‘But this time it was too swift, and there was nothing they could do to help him?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Rosalind answered, looking suddenly away from the painting and at Emily. ‘But that was all long before Kitty came to us, and there was definitely nothing about it that was anything except tragic. I … I wish I could do something to help! Dudley has had more than enough pain.’

  Emily looked at the racing clouds in the painting and the heavy shadow they cast on the land. She shivered involuntarily.

  ‘That sounds self-pitying, doesn’t it!’ Rosalind said, annoyed with herself. ‘We have a beautiful home. Dudley’s work is terribly important and he is extremely good at it. We have money and position, and healthy sons and daughters, and here am I with the arrogance to speak of pain.’

  ‘Not knowing is painful,’ Emily said with sincerity. ‘No matter how much you love, if you are afraid of losing it all, then the icy edge of that storm is upon you already.’