Anne Perry - Seven Dials

Charlotte turned from the stove, the kettle now on the hob. Her eyes were bright. “Very well,” she confirmed, not looking at Gracie.

He caught the tension, the shadow somewhere, the communication in that neither had looked at each other, almost as if the answer was agreed before he had come in.

“What have you been doing?” he asked conversationally.

Charlotte looked at him, but after a hesitation so minute that had he not been watching her closely, he would have missed it. It was as if she had been going to turn to Gracie first, and then decided not to.

“What have you been doing?” he repeated, before she had time to say something less than the truth, which she would then be unable to withdraw.

She took in a deep breath. “Gracie has a friend whose brother seems to be missing. We have been trying to find out what happened to him.”

He read her expression. “But you haven’t succeeded,” he said.

“No. No, and we don’t know what to do next. I’ll tell you about it… tomorrow.”

“Why not tonight?” The question sprang from the nudge of anxiety that she was delaying because something in the story would displease or disturb him.

She smiled. “Because you are tired and hungry, and there are far better things to talk about. We have tried, and not achieved very much.”

As if released from waiting on every word, Gracie swiveled around and darted to the pantry to slice the cold meat, and Charlotte went upstairs to wake the children.

They came racing down the stairs and threw themselves at Pitt, almost overbalancing him off his chair, hugging him, asking question after question about Egypt, Alexandria, the desert, the ship, and constantly interrupting the answers. Then he opened his case and gave them all the gifts he had brought, to everyone’s intense delight.

BUT IN THE MORNING he raised the question again, when Gracie was out shopping and Daniel and Jemima were at school. He had slept late, and came down to find Charlotte making bread.

“Who is the missing brother?” he asked, accepting tea and toast and fishing in the marmalade pot to see if there was sufficient left to satisfy his hunger for it. Its tart pungency was one of his favorite flavors, and it seemed like months since he had enjoyed crisp toast. He thought there might be just enough. He looked up at her. “Well?”

Now her face was shadowed. She went on kneading automatically. “He was valet to Stephen Garrick, in Torrington Square. A very respectable family, although Aunt Vespasia doesn’t care for the father at all-General Garrick, a-” She stopped, her hands motionless. “What is it?”

“General Garrick?” he asked.

“Yes. Do you know him?” At the moment she was no more than curious.

“He was commanding officer in Alexandria when Lovat was invalided out of the army,” he replied.

Her hands stopped kneading the dough and she looked up at him. “Does that mean anything?” she said slowly, turning over the idea in her mind. “It’s just coincidence… isn’t it?” But even as she spoke, other thoughts gathered in her mind-doubts, shadows, memories of things Sandeman had said.

“What is it?” Pitt prompted, and she knew he had seen it in her face.

She wiped her hands on her apron. “I really fear something could have happened to Martin Garvie,” she replied gravely. “And perhaps even Stephen Garrick as well. I found the priest that Martin went to in the Seven Dials area just before he disappeared. He works especially with soldiers who have fallen on hard times.” She saw the anxiety in his face and hurried on before he could give expression to it. “I went in daylight. It was all perfectly all right! Thomas, he was very upset indeed.” She remembered it with a shiver, not for the dirt or the despair, but for the pain that she had seen rack Sandeman so deeply.

Pitt was waiting, stiff, his tea forgotten and going cold in the cup.

“A priest?” he said curiously. “Why? Could he tell you anything?”

“No… not in words.”

“What do you mean? If not in words, how? How?” he demanded.

“By his reaction,” she replied. She sat down opposite him, ignoring the bread. It would come to no harm for a while. “Thomas, when I mentioned Martin’s name he was filled with a horror so great that for several moments he barely recovered his composure enough to be able to speak to me.” She knew her voice was thick with the emotion that came back to her in a rush-welling up inside her. “He knows something terrible,” she said quietly. “But because it came to him in a confession, he cannot repeat it. Nothing I could say made any difference, even that Martin’s life could be in danger.” She waited, watching his face, longing for him to be able to take the burden of confusion from her, provide some other way she had not thought of in which she could still help.

“In danger from whom?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. She told him very briefly what little she had been able to learn, and from it what she had deduced. “But whatever Martin said to him, Mr. Sandeman would not-” She stopped. Pitt’s eyes were wide, his face pale and his body suddenly rigid as if caught in a moment of fear. “Thomas- What? What is it?”

“Did you say Sandeman?” he asked, his voice catching in his throat.

“Yes. Why? Do you know of him?” Without any clear thought, she felt his alarm as if she understood. “Who is he?” She did not want to learn something ugly of the priest. He had seemed to her a man of intense and genuine compassion, but she could not afford less than the truth, and to turn from it now would avail nothing. The fear would be just as lacerating as anything he could tell her. “Do you?” she said again.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “But in the army, Lovat had three friends with whom he spent most of his off-duty time: Garrick, Sandeman, and Yeats. You mentioned both Garrick and Sandeman as being in possible danger, or in distress. It is hard to believe that is coincidence.”

“What about Yeats?”

“I don’t know, but I think I need to find out.”

“So Lovat’s death did have something to do with Egypt and not necessarily with Ryerson?” she said, but surprisingly there was none of the lift of hope she would have expected only an hour ago.

“Possibly,” he agreed. “But it still doesn’t make any sense. Why now, years after leaving Alexandria? And what has Ayesha Zakhari to do with it? Lovat didn’t want to marry her, it was just an infatuation. And from all I could learn, she wasn’t in love with him either.”

“Wasn’t she?” she said skeptically.

He smiled. “No. She had really loved one man. He was utterly different from Lovat, a man of her own people, older, a patriot who was fatally flawed, and who betrayed her and everything they both believed in.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, and she meant it. She had never met Ayesha Zakhari, and she knew very little about her, but she tried to imagine the bitterness of disillusion, and the magnitude of her pain. “But surely the fact that Lovat was shot in her garden can’t be coincidence?” She looked at him steadily, seeing pity and reluctance in him, and a new, raw edge of feeling about the whole tragedy. She reached across and slid her hand over his.

He turned his over, palm up, and closed his fingers gently.

“I don’t suppose it can,” he agreed. “But I have to find Yeats, and if he is dead, then how it happened, and why.”

“Ryerson’s trial begins tomorrow,” she said, watching his face.

“Yes, I know. I’ll try to find Yeats today.” He hesitated only a moment, then, letting go of her hand, pushed his chair back and stood up.

PITT STOOD on the steps in the sun, blinking, not so much at the soft, autumn sunlight as at what the stiff, sad-faced officer had told him.