Anne Perry - Cardington Crescent

“Emily!” He caught her hands.

“-and if we don’t find who it is, I could be arrested and imprisoned-”

“Emily! Stop it!”

“-and tried, and hanged!” she finished harshly. She was shaking in spite of the closeness of him, and the strength of his hands holding hers. “People have been hanged wrongly before.” Memories, stories teemed in her mind. “Charlotte knows that, and so do I!” It was a relief to put it into words, to drag the real terror out of the darkness at the back of her mind and share it with him.

“I know,” he said quietly. “But it is not going to happen to you. Charlotte won’t let it-neither will I. It has to be someone in this house. Vespasia has the courage, if she thought such a thing were necessary. But she would never have killed George, and I don’t think she would have had the physical strength to kill Sybilla-not the way it was done. Sybilla was a young, healthy woman….” He hesitated, remembering.

“I know,” she said without pulling her hands away from him. “And Aunt Vespasia is not young, and not strong anymore.”

He smiled bleakly. “I wish I could think of a reason why old Mrs. March would have done it,” he said with feeling. “She’s twice Vespasia’s weight. She’d have the power.”

Emily looked at their locked hands. “But why would she?” she said hopelessly, anger and frustration welling up inside her. “There’d have to be a reason.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Unless George knew something about her.”

“Like what?”

He shook his head. “Something about the Marches? She’s choked up with family pride. I’m damned if I know why. They’ve plenty of money, but no breeding at all. It comes from trade.” Then he laughed at himself. “Not that I wouldn’t be glad of a little of it! My mother was a de Bohun, traces her family back to the Conquest. But you can’t even buy a good meal with that, let alone run a house.”

A wild series of thoughts clashed and jostled in her mind. Had he killed George hoping to marry her for the Ashworth money? But then, what about Tassie? Any man with sense would have chosen that marriage; it was infinitely safer, and his for the asking-or he must have thought so. He didn’t know about Mungo Hare. Or did he? Was he really so astounded by the news of Tassie’s midnight expeditions as he pretended to be? If Charlotte had followed her, so could he-at least, as far as seeing the young curate and realizing Tassie would never marry anyone else. Or perhaps Tassie had even told him herself? She was honest enough. She might have chosen not to delude him with false hope-not of love, but of money.

Emily shivered. She wanted to look at him-surely she had some ability of judgment left. And yet she also dreaded what she would see, and what she would reveal of herself. But as long as it remained undone it would crowd out all other thought from her mind. It was like vertigo, standing at the edge of a high balcony with the compulsive desire to look down, feeling the void pulling at you.

She looked up quickly and found his eyes worried, serious; she could see no deceit in them at all. It solved nothing. To find ugliness there might have freed her, let her believe the worst of him and kill the hope that-that what?

She refused to put it into words. It was too soon. But the thought stayed at the edge of her mind, something to move towards, beckoning her like a warm room at the end of a winter journey.

“Emily?”

She recalled her attention. They had been talking about the old woman. “She might have done something scandalous in her youth,” she offered. “Or maybe her husband did. Perhaps we should learn more of how the Marches got all their money-it could be something that would put an end to any idea of a peerage. Perhaps George knew of it. After all, it was her-” She swallowed. “Her medicine that was the poison.”

Memory of death came back sharp and cold, physically painful, and the tears stung in her eyes. She found she was clinging to his hand so hard she must be hurting him, but he did not pull away. Instead he put his arm round her and held her, touching her hair with his lips, whispering words that had no meaning, but whose gentleness she felt with an ease that made weeping not an ache but a release from pain, an undoing of the hard, frightened knots inside her.

She realized that she wanted the solution to the crime almost as much for him as for herself. She longed with an intense need to know that he was untouched, unmarked by it.

Charlotte also was happy to be alone, and spent some time in the dressing room which was her bedroom, repeating in her mind all that she had learned since the first news of George’s death right up to Pitt’s departure this morning.

It was half past three when she went downstairs with the small spark of an idea she wanted to disbelieve. It was ugly and sad, and yet it answered all the contradictions.

She was in the withdrawing room, almost at the curtains which half covered the French doors to the conservatory, when she heard the voices.

“How dare you say such a thing in front of everyone!” It was Eustace, loud and angry. His broad back was to the doors and beyond him she could just see the sunlight on William’s flaming hair. “I can forgive you a lot in your bereavement,” Eustace went on. “But that insinuation was appalling. You as good as said I was guilty of murder!”

“You were perfectly happy to see Emily blamed-or Jack,” William pointed out.

“That’s entirely different. They are not part of us.”

“For God’s sake, what has that got to do with it?” William demanded furiously.

“It has everything to do with it!” Eustace was growing angrier, and there was an ugly note in his voice, as if the dark and unrefined mass of inner thoughts were too close to the frail surface of manners that overlaid them. “You betrayed the family in front of strangers! You suggested there was something secret and shameful which you knew and others didn’t. Have you no conception what a meddling and inquisitive busybody that Pitt woman is? The dirty-minded little chit will never rest until she either uncovers or invents something to fit your wild ramblings. God knows what scandal she’ll start!”

William moved back a step; his face was twisted with pain and contempt. “She’ll have to be very dirty-minded indeed to get to the depths of your soul, if that is not too grand a word for it. Perhaps belly would be more apposite?”

“There’s nothing wrong with a man having stomach,” Eustace said with answering scorn. “I sometimes think if you had more stomach and fewer airy-fairy ideas you’d be more of a man! You mince around dabbling in paints and dreaming of sunsets like a lovesick girl. Where’s your courage? Where’s your heart, your manliness?”

William did not answer. Beyond Eustace, standing with his back to her, Charlotte could see the white, almost deathlike look on William’s face, and she could feel pain in the air like the hot settling of condensation on the lily leaves and the vines.

“Great God!” Eustace shouted with unutterable disgust. “No wonder Sybilla took to flirting with George Ashworth! At least he had something in his trousers besides his legs!”

William winced with revulsion so acute Charlotte thought for a moment he had actually been struck. She was so offended for him herself that she felt sick; her hands were clammy and hurt with the strength of her clenched fists. Yet she still stood transfixed, listening, with a terrible foresight.

William’s answer when it came was quiet, heavy with irony.

“And you expect me to be discreet for you in front of Mrs. Pitt? Father, you have no sense of the ridiculous-indeed the grotesque.”

“Is it grotesque to expect a little responsibility from you?” Eustace shouted. “Family loyalty? You owe us that, William.”