Anne Perry - Belgrave Square

“I’ll get it for yer,” she said, her eyes keen, and she disappeared into the back room. Several minutes later she returned with a piece of paper in her hand. She held out her other hand for the money.

Pitt gave it to her, counting it out carefully, and then quickly took the paper. He unfolded it and saw written in a strong, emotionally charged hand:

Sholto, my love,

We have shared a rare and high passion which most of the world will never know as we do. It must never be lost, or denied us. When I look back on our hours together, they hold all that is most exquisite to the body, and the soul. I will permit no one to tear it from me.

Have courage! Fear nothing, and keep our secret in your heart. Turn it over and over, as I do, in the long hours alone. Dream of times past, and times to come.

There was no more, no signature. Apparently there had been at least one other page, and it was missing.

Pitt kept it in his hand. It was a passionate letter, nothing modest in it or waiting to be wooed. Indeed it seemed Laura Anstiss had been a woman of violent emotions, self-assured, willful, not even considering that her love might not be equally returned.

He began to see how indeed she might have been so stunned by rejection that it temporarily unbalanced her mind and threw her into a state of melancholia. If Byam had ever received that letter, he would have been far less surprised at her suicide.

“ ’ere-gimme it back!” Liza Cobb said sharply. “Yer read it.”

Had Laura Anstiss lived in a world of her own fantasy? The letter implied they had been lovers in a very physical sense. Anyone reading it would assume so. Had Anstiss seen either this, or some other like it?

“No,” he said levelly. “It is evidence in a murder case. I’ll keep it for now.”

“Yer thievin’ swine!” She lunged forward at him, but he was taller and heavier than she. He held out his other hand in a loose fist and she met it hard and retreated with ugly surprise in her face. “It’s mine,” she said between closed teeth.

“It was apparently never sent, so it belongs to Lady Anstiss,” he contradicted. “And since she is dead, presumably to her heirs.”

Her lip curled in a sneer. “Yer goin’ ter give it ter ’is lordship, are yer? I’ll bet-at a price. The more fool you! D’yer fink if it were that easy I wouldn’t ’a done that meself? I know ’im. You don’t. ’e’ll never pay yer. ’Orse-whip yer more like.”

“I’m going to give it to the police,” he said with a tight smile. “Which I am-Inspector Pitt of Bow Street. When the case is finished, if you’d like to come to Bow Street, you can try to claim it back.” And he turned on his heel and marched out, hearing her string of epithets and curses following him.

He walked briskly, pushing past the now wildly curious crowd. He was glad that the corner of small, open square lay across his way; the sight of the leaves against the sky was a clean and uncomplicated thing after the greed and the rage of the fishmonger’s shop and the woman in it. Reading the letter gave him a much clearer picture of why Byam had paid Weems for over two years. It was not the innocent passion he had implied, at least not in Laura Anstiss’s mind, and would not be read as such by any impartial person now.

If Frederick Anstiss hated Byam it would not be surprising. It would take a man of superhuman forgiveness not to feel betrayed by such emotions in his wife for his best and most trusted friend, and guest under his roof.

The square was crossed diagonally by a path and there were two couples strolling along, heads close in conversation, and a third couple standing facing each other in what was unmistakably an angry exchange. The man in a high winged collar was very pink in the face and clutched his cane fiercely, twitching it now and again, jabbing at the air. The woman was equally heated, but there was a certain air of enjoyment in her, and it served only to exacerbate her companion’s rage. After a few moments more he turned on his heel and strode off, and then as he passed a flower bush he lifted the cane high and sliced off a small branch in sheer temper. The action was so sudden and unforeseen it took Pitt by surprise.

Then startlingly he had a picture in his mind of Lord Anstiss standing in front of Weems’s desk in his office while Weems read that damning letter aloud, jeering, demanding money, and a stick going up in the air without warning, striking Weems on the side of the head, robbing him of his senses long enough for Anstiss to take up the blunderbuss, fill the powder pan and load it with gold coins, and fire it.

Or it might have been anyone else, any gentleman who quite normally carried a stick or a cane, and any other provocation. But the letter stayed in his mind, and the image of Anstiss’s face.

Had Weems, after two years of successful blackmail of Byam, tried his hand with Anstiss, and met a very different man; a man not plagued by guilt, but still burning with injury, humiliation and a long-hidden and unsatisfied hatred?

But why should he hide the hatred, if indeed he felt it? Friends drift apart; it would need no explanation, and Byam of all people would understand. He would never tell anyone the truth, in his own interest if not in Anstiss’s.

Pitt quickened his step.

Or was this the first time Anstiss had realized his wife’s guilt? Perhaps until then he had accepted Byam’s word for the innocence of the affaire, that it was simply an unwise friendship into which she alone had imagined love?

No one had thought to ask where Anstiss was on the night Weems was shot. He had never been a suspect; he was the injured party, not the offender.

The injured party.

He slowed down again unconsciously, the spring going out of his step. That was true. Anstiss was the one wronged. He had done nothing whatever to indicate a hatred of Byam or a desire to do anything but forget the whole matter. He did not seem a man to act in rage so uncontrollable as to commit murder.

No. If it was he who had struck Weems, and then shot him, there must have been a more powerful motive than simply to avoid paying a few guineas in blackmail over a letter which branded his long-dead wife as an adulteress.

He was well beyond the square now and walking quickly along the street towards the thoroughfare where he could get an omnibus home. It was early, but he wanted to speak to Charlotte.

The omnibus seemed ages in coming, and when it did, was hot and crowded. He sat squashed between two large ladies with shopping baskets, but he was unaware of them as he thought more and more of Anstiss and the terrible wound to his pride of his wife so obsessed with Byam. It was a passionate, immodest letter. There was something willful, almost commanding about it. It changed his view of Laura Anstiss entirely. He had imagined her as fragile, utterly feminine with a haunting beauty, and her suicide as a solitary grief, hugged to herself, a terrible loneliness. But the letter sounded far more robust, almost domineering, as though she expected to be obeyed, in fact had little doubt of it. Was she really such a spoilt beauty? Pitt thought he would not have liked her.

Perhaps Byam had been secretly nonplussed and had rejected her fairly roughly after once succumbing to physical temptation. That would explain his guilt even after so many years. He had betrayed Anstiss by making love to Laura, and then when he discovered her nature more fully, had rejected her pretty abruptly.

He reached home still preoccupied with his thoughts, and threw the door open. He called Charlotte’s name, and there was no answer. He went down the corridor and through the kitchen out into the garden.

“Thomas!” Charlotte swung around from the roses where she was snapping off the dead flower heads. “What has happened? Are you all right?”