Anne Perry - Traitors Gate

“Of course I care!” His face was white to the lips. “I wouldn’t have had it this way. I didn’t have options.”

“You did not have to press her till she had no way out but to choose between her loyalty to the husband she loved or to her own integrity.”

“That’s a luxury. The stakes are too high.”

“Central Africa, against the turmoil and death of one woman?”

“Yes … if you like. Ten million people against one.”

“I don’t like. What about five million against twenty?”

“Yes … of course.” There was no wavering in his eyes.

“One million against a hundred? Half a million against a thousand?”

“Don’t be absurd!”

“When does it even out, Peter? When does it stop being worth it? When the numbers are the same? Who decides? Who counts?”

“Stop it, Nobby! You are being ridiculous!” He was angry now. There was no apology in him, no sense that he had to defend himself. “We are talking about one person and a whole race. There is no counting to be done. Look, you want the same things for Africa that I do. Why are we quarreling?” He put his hands up as if to touch her.

She stepped back.

“You don’t know, do you?” she said with slow understanding, and a sadness that tore at her emotions and left her reason like a shining, solitary light. “It is not what you want I cannot tolerate, it is what you are prepared to do to attain it, and what that doing makes of you. You spoke of the end and the means as if they were separate. They are not.”

“I love you, Nobby….”

“I love you also, Peter….”

Again he made a move towards her, and again she stepped back, only a few inches, but the gesture was unmistakable.

“But there is a gulf between what you believe is acceptable and what I believe, and it is one I cannot cross.”

“But if we love each other,” he argued, his face pinched with urgency and incomprehension, “that is enough.”

“No it isn’t.” There was finality in her voice, even a bitter irony. “You counted on Susannah’s love of honor, her integrity, to be greater than her love for Chancellor … and you were right. Why is it you do not expect mine to be also?”

“I do. It’s just that …”

She laughed, a funny, jerky sound, harshly aware of the irony. “It’s just that, like Linus Chancellor, you never thought I could disagree with you. Well I do. You may never know how much I wish I did not.”

He drew in his breath to speak, to argue one more time, and then saw in her eyes the futility of it, and saved himself the indignity and her the additional pain of refusing him again.

He bit his lip. “This is a price I did not expect to have to pay. It hurts.”

Suddenly she could not look at him. Humility was the last thing she had expected. She turned to the roses, and then right around towards the apple tree, so he would not see the tears on her face.

“Good-bye, Nobby,” he said softly, his voice husky, as if he too were in the grasp of an emotion almost beyond his bearing, and she heard his footsteps as he walked away, no more than a faint whispering over the grass.

Charlotte’s mind was preoccupied with Matthew Desmond and the terrible, consuming loneliness he felt because Harriet could not forgive him for having repeated the telephone conversation she had overheard. She would not even have him received in the house. There was no way he could plead his case or offer any comfort or explanation to her. She had shut herself away with her shame, her anger and her sense of being unforgivably betrayed.

Charlotte turned it over and over in her mind; never for a moment did she doubt that what Matthew had done was right. If he made that choice, he lost Harriet, but had he not done so, had he kept silent against his own conscience, to please her, he could not have kept faith with himself. He would have lost what was best in him, that core of truth which in the end is the key to all decisions, all values, the essence of identity. To deny the knowledge of right is something one does not forgive oneself. Ultimately that would have destroyed their love anyway.

But all the time she was about her own chores, simple or complicated, kneading bread or cutting pastry frills for a pie, watching Gracie peel the vegetables, sorting the linen and mending Pitt’s frayed shirt cuffs, finding buttons to replace the lost ones, every time her mind could wander, she could think of nothing but Matthew’s pain, his loneliness and the sense of utter bereavement he must be feeling. Even watching Archie and Angus careering around the kitchen floor after each other brought only a brief smile to her face.

In the few evenings they had together she watched Pitt’s face in repose, and saw the tension which never left him lately, even after the solution to Susannah’s death, and she knew the pity for that ached within him, and the remnants of guilt which still shadowed his thoughts of Arthur Desmond. She longed to be able to help, but putting her arms around him, telling him she loved him, were only palliative, on the surface, and she knew better than to pretend they reached the hurt.

It was the same day that Nobby had called, when she realized what had really hurt her, and what Charlotte was convinced she was going to do about it, that she determined to go and see Harriet herself. Whatever happened, she could hardly make matters any worse, and Harriet, just as much as Matthew, deserved to be told the truth. Her happiness, however much was possible-and that could be a great deal in time-depended on the decision she must make now. She could choose courage, understanding and forgiveness; or she could retreat behind blame, consume herself with anger and outrage, and become a bitter and lonely woman, unloving and unlovely.

But she had the right to know what her choice was in its reality, not the reassuring words of lying comfort.

Charlotte dressed accordingly in a modest but becoming gown of forest green muslin trimmed with blue. It was unusually dark for the summer, and therefore the more striking. She took a hansom to Matthew’s rooms, whose address she had found in Pitt’s desk, and asked the cabby to wait.

He was startled to see her, but made her welcome. He still looked ill and profoundly unhappy.

Briefly she told him her plan and asked him to accompany her, not into Harriet’s home, but at least as far as the street outside.

“Oh no!” He rejected her plan immediately, pain and defeat filling his face.

“If I cannot persuade her, she will never know you were there,” she pointed out.

“You won’t succeed,” he said flatly. “She’ll never forgive me.”

“Were you wrong?” Charlotte challenged.

“I don’t know….”

“Yes you do! You did the only possible thing that was honorable, and you should never doubt it. Think of the alternative. What would that be? To have lied by silence to cover Soames’s treason, not because you believed it was right but because you were afraid Harriet would reject you. Could you live with that? Could you keep your love for Harriet if you had paid that price for it?”

“No …”

“Then come with me and try. Or are you absolutely sure she is too shallow to understand?”

He smiled thinly and picked up his jacket. There was no need to say anything.

She led the way out and this time gave the cabby Harriet Soames’s address. When they arrived she gave Matthew’s hand a quick squeeze, then alighted, leaving him inside the cab, and climbed the steps. She did not intend to allow herself to be turned away if it was humanly possible, short of creating a scene. She knocked, and when the door was opened, looked the maid very directly in the eye and announced her name, adding that she had something of importance of which she wished to inform Miss Soames, and would be greatly obliged if Miss Soames would consent to receive her.