Anne Perry - Resurrection Row

He was still looking for an escape. “Can’t they leave it now?” he said quietly, his voice tight, his hands white on the wooden tabletop. “Alicia didn’t kill him; I didn’t; and the old lady wouldn’t have, unless she gave him a dose accidentally, and it was too much for him.” He looked up at Charlotte. “But no one can prove it; all they will do is raise a lot of doubts, make everyone look with suspicion at each other. Can’t Thomas just leave it now? Then there’ll be some hope that whoever did this wretched thing will give up, be convinced at last that there’s nothing to it?”

She did not know what to say. She would like to have believed him and accepted that it was simply either a natural death or an accident. But why the disinterment-twice? And why was he afraid? Was it no more than the shadow of Cater Street indelible in the memory, or was there growing in him a fear that Alicia could have become so in love with him, so frustrated by her husband that she had taken a simple, easily grasped opportunity and given him a fatal dose of his mother’s medicine? She looked at Dominic’s handsome face and felt as she sometimes did towards Jemima.

“He may do.” She wanted to comfort him; she had known him a long time, and he had been part of her life, part of the deepest of her emotions in those callow, vulnerable years before she met Pitt. Yet it would be both useless and stupid to lie. “But grave robbing is a crime,” she said clearly. “And if there is a chance he can find who did it, he will have to continue.”

“He won’t find out!” He spoke with such conviction she knew it was for himself he insisted, not for her.

“Probably not,” she agreed. “Unless, of course, they do it again? Or they do something else?”

It was a thought he had been trying to banish. Now she had brought it where it could not be denied.

“It’s insane!” he said hotly. It was the easiest way to explain it, the only acceptable way. Insanity did not have to have reason; by its very nature any incongruity could be explained and wiped away.

“Perhaps.”

He had finished his tea, and she collected his cup to remove it.

“Can’t you ask Thomas?” He leaned forward a little, urgently, his face puckered. “Point out the harm it will do to innocent people? Please, Charlotte? There will be such injustice! We won’t even have the chance to deny or disprove what has only been whispered, never said outright. When people whisper, lies become bigger and bigger as they are passed around-”

The injustice convinced her. For a moment she placed herself in Alicia’s position, in love with Dominic; she could still remember how sharp that was, full of excitement and pain, wild hope and hot disillusion. And to be tied to a husband without imagination or laughter! Then if he died, and at last you were free? Suspicion reached out its ugly fingers and soils everything; no one says to you what they think; it is all smiles and sympathy to your face, polite smirks in the withdrawing room. The moment you are gone the acid overflows, creeping wider and wider, eating away the fabric of everything good. The gossips court you; old friends no longer call. She had seen enough of envy and opportunism before.

“I’ll ask him,” she agreed. “I can’t say what he will do, but I’ll ask.”

His face lit up, making her feel guilty for having promised when she knew she could influence Pitt very little where his job was concerned.

“Thank you.” Dominic stood up, as graceful as always now that his fear had gone. “Thank you very much!” He smiled, and the last few years slipped away-they could have been conspirators again in something trivial, like the filching of Papa’s newspaper.

When Pitt came home she said nothing at first, allowing him to warm himself, to speak with Jemima and see her to bed, and then to eat his meal and relax before the fire. The kitchen was comfortable from the day-long heat of the stove. The scrubbed wood was pale, almost white, and the pans gleamed on the shelves. Flowered china on the dresser reflected the gaslight.

“Dominic came here today,” she said casually.

She was sewing, mending a dress of Jemima’s where she had trodden on the hem and toppled over. She did not notice Pitt stiffen.

“Here?” he asked.

“Yes, this afternoon.”

“What for?” His voice was cool, guarded.

She was a little surprised. She stopped sewing, needle in the air, and looked up at him. “He said you’d done a postmortem on Lord whatever his name is-the man who fell off the cab after the theatre.”

“So we did.”

“And you didn’t discover anything conclusive. He died of heart failure.”

“That’s right. Did he come here to tell you that?” His voice was a beautiful instrument, precise and evocative. It was rich with sarcasm now.

“No, of course not!” she said sharply. “I don’t care what the wretched man died of. He was frightened that the suggestion of murder might cause gossip, whispering that would hurt a lot of people. It is very difficult to deny something that no one has said outright.”

“Such as that Alicia Fitzroy-Hammond murdered her husband?” he asked. “Or that Dominic did himself?”

She looked at him a little coolly. “I don’t think he was afraid for himself, if that is what you are trying to say.” As soon as the words were out she thought better of them. She loved Pitt, and she sensed in him a vulnerability, even though she did not know what it was. But justice was strong, too, and the old loyalty to Dominic died hard, perhaps because she knew his weaknesses. Pitt was the stronger; she had no need to defend him. He could be hurt, but he would not hurt himself, crumble under pressure.

“He ought not be,” Pitt said drily. “If Lord Augustus was murdered, Dominic is an obvious suspect. Alicia inherits a good deal, not to mention an excellent social position; she’s in love with Dominic-and she’s an extremely handsome woman.”

“You don’t like Dominic, do you?” She was listening not to his words, but to what she read in them.

He stood up and walked away, pretending to fiddle with the curtains. “Like and dislike have nothing to do with it,” he answered. “I am speaking of his position; he is a natural suspect if Lord Augustus was murdered. It would be naive to imagine otherwise. We cannot always have the world as we would like it, and sometimes even the most charming people, people we have known and cared for, for years, are capable of violence, deceit, and stupidity.” He let the curtains go and turned back to her because he had to know what she was feeling. He would not ask her what Dominic had meant under his words, how he had spoken, what he had left unsaid.

Her face was calm, but there was anger under the surface, and he was not sure exactly why. He had to press until he did, even if it hurt him in the end, because not knowing was worse.

“Don’t talk to me as if I were a child, Thomas,” she said quietly. “I know that perfectly well. I don’t think Dominic killed him, because I don’t think he would want to enough. But I think he is afraid that she did. That is why he came here.”

His eyes narrowed a little. “What did he expect you to do?”

“Point out to you the injustice that might be done if you continue with an investigation, especially since you are not even sure if there has been any crime.”

“You think I shall be unjust?” He was looking for a quarrel now. Better to hear it than leave it in the air, waiting.

She refused to reply, biting her tongue instead of telling him not to be idiotic. She would like to have said it, but she did not dare.

“Charlotte!” he demanded. “Do you think that because it is Dominic, I shall be unjust?”

She looked up from Jemima’s dress, the needle still in her fingers. “It does not need anyone to be unjust for injustice to happen,” she said a little tartly. Really, he was being stupid on purpose! “We all know what suspicion can do, and we have said as much. And in case you think otherwise, I told Dominic that you would do whatever was necessary, and I should have no influence upon you.”