by Anne Perry
“Doll?” Her delicate eyebrows rose in disbelief. It was almost laughter. “Why on earth would Doll wish him any harm? She is as English as you are, and completely loyal to me. She has no cause to hurt us, Mr. Pitt. We looked after her when she was ill, and kept the position for her return. She would be the last person to harm either of us.”
“Was she with you all that quarter hour when your husband was in the bath?” he repeated.
“No. She went to fetch something, I don’t recall what. It may have been a cup of tea, I think it was.”
“How long was she away?”
“I don’t know. Not long. But the idea that she would attack my husband in the bath is absurd.” It was plain in her face that she had no fear it could be true. She sincerely thought it was preposterous.
“Did Mr. Doyle visit you often, either in London or at Oakfield House?”
“Why? What is it you are seeking after, Mr. Pitt?” She was frowning now. “Your questions do not make any sense. First you ask about Doll, now Padraig. Why?”
“What illness did Doll suffer? Did Mr. Doyle know of it?”
“I don’t remember.” She tightened her hands in her lap. “Why? I don’t know what illness it was. What can it matter?”
“She was with child, Mrs. Greville—”
“Not by Padraig!” She was horrified, denial was fierce and instant.
“No, not by Mr. Doyle,” he agreed. “By Mr. Greville, and not willingly … by coercion.”
“She … she had a child!” She was really finding it difficult to catch her breath. Unconsciously, she put her hand up to her throat as though her silk fichu choked her.
He wanted to lean forward and take her hand, steady her, but it would have appeared like an overfamiliarity, even an intrusion. He had to remember where he was, formal, removed, going on hurting her, watching her face to judge whether she had known this before or not.
“No,” he answered. “He insisted that she abort it, and she could not afford to defy him. She would be out on the street with no money and no character. She could not have cared for a child. He had it done away with.” He chose the words deliberately and saw her face lose every shred of its color and her eyes darken with horror. She stared at him, trying to probe into his mind and find something that would tell her it was not true.
“She was … different … when she came back,” she said slowly, more to herself than to him. “She was … sadder, very quiet, almost slow, as if she had no will anymore, no laughter. I thought it was just because she was not yet fully recovered.”
Once she saw he was sincere, she did not fight against it. She was looking backward, trying to remember anything which would disprove it, and there was nothing. It was almost like examining a wound. Part of her was clinical, logical, exact. And yet she was looking at the death of part of herself.
“Poor Doll,” she said in a whisper. “Poor, poor Doll. It is so awful I can hardly bear to think of it. What worse thing could happen to a woman?”
“I wish I had not had to tell you.” It sounded lame, an excuse where there was none. He was certain she had not known. But then neither did she disbelieve it now. Had Doyle known, and would he have cared? Not on Doll’s behalf. She was a servant. Servants frequently get with child.
“Who else might have known?” he asked. Wheeler had. He was the only one of the Greville servants at Ashworth Hall, apart from Doll herself. Unless they had brought a coachman. They were close enough not to have taken the train. He had not asked. “Did you drive over?”
She understood immediately. “Yes … but … but no one else knew. We thought she was ill … a fever … I feared it might have been tuberculosis. People with tuberculosis can have those flushed cheeks, the bright eyes. She looked so …”
“Wheeler knew.”
“Wheeler?” Again she was not afraid. She did not even consider it possible. “He would … never …”
“What?”
“He would never have hurt Ainsley.”
“What were you going to say, Mrs. Greville?”
“That once or twice I thought perhaps he did not like him, but he was far too well trained to show it, of course.” She shook her head to dismiss it. “It was just an impression I had. And he did not have to stay with us. He could easily have found a position elsewhere. He was excellent at his job.”
Pitt thought it was his feeling for Doll which had kept him in the house of a man he despised, perhaps even hated, but he did not say so. He would have Tellman make sure Wheeler’s time was as closely accounted for as they had supposed.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” Eudora said reluctantly.
Justine appeared, followed immediately by Charlotte. They both looked flushed and tired, as if they had been too close to the withdrawing room fire and had found the evening’s forced conversation trying. But even weary and with a few tendrils of her hair escaping Gracie’s coiffure, Charlotte looked marvelous in the blue silk gown. It was one of Vespasia’s. Pitt wished he could afford to buy his wife clothes like that. Again he was reminded how naturally she fitted in here. It was the life she could so easily have had if she had married a man of her own social station, or rather better, as Emily had.
Justine was quick to notice Eudora’s pallor and the tension in her hands as they twisted together on her lap. She came over immediately, filled with concern.
Charlotte remained in the doorway. She had the feeling that she and Justine had intruded. It was not specific, just a look on Pitt’s face and something of regret in Eudora, a way in which she turned back to him before speaking to Justine.
She asked Pitt about it later, when they were preparing to go to bed. She tried to sound casual. As usual he was ready before she was. Gracie had gone, and Charlotte was combing her hair. There were considerable knots to get out after the way it had been dressed, and they would be worse by morning. Also there was rose milk to smooth into her skin, and she loved the luxurious feel of that, whether it did any good or not.
“Eudora seemed distressed,” she said, avoiding meeting Pitt’s eyes in the glass. He had already told her what little had transpired in his meeting in London, but she knew there was something else since then, something which had moved him far more deeply. “What have you discovered since you returned home?” she asked.
He looked so weary there were shadows around his eyes, and he sat up against the pillows awkwardly. He was still very stiff.
“Greville forced himself on Doll and got her with child,” he said quietly. “Then he insisted she do away with it or he would have her put out on the street with nothing.”
Charlotte froze. She heard the rage in his voice, but it barely matched the horror she felt, as if something icy had torn a wound inside her. She thought of her own children. She remembered the first time she had held Jemima, fragile, immeasurably precious, herself and yet not herself. She would have given her life to protect her daughter, given it without thought or hesitation. If Doll had killed Ainsley Greville, then Charlotte would do all she could to save her, let the law go to perdition.
She turned around slowly on the stool and stared at Pitt.
“Did she kill him?”
“Doll or Eudora?” he asked, staring at her.
“Doll, of course!” Then she realized that it could also be Eudora, from the same act, for different reasons. Was that why Pitt had looked so very gentle with her? He understood and pitied her? She was beautiful, vulnerable, so desperately in need of strength and support. Her world had been shattered, the present, the future, and some of the past too. In a space of days she had been robbed of all that she was. No wonder he was sorry for her. She called out to all that was best in him, the gentleness, the ability to see without judgment, to pursue truth—and yet still suffer for the pain it brought.
There was much of the knight errant in him, the hunger to be needed, to struggle and to rescue, to measure his strength against the dragons of wrong. Eudora was the perfect maiden in distress.
Charlotte was not, not anymore. She was vulnerable in quite different ways, only inside herself. She stood in no danger, just a faint sense of not being entirely included, not factually but in some depth of the emotions.
“No, I don’t believe so,” he said, answering her question about Doll.
“Does it have anything to do with Greville’s death?”
“I don’t know … directly or indirectly. I hope not.”
She turned back to the dressing table, reaching for the rose milk. She was not ready to go to bed yet. She smoothed the milk into her face over and over again, then into her neck, then her face once more, pressing her hands up to her temples, regardless of getting it into her hair. It was ten more minutes before she turned out the gas lamp and crawled into bed beside Pitt. She touched him gently, but he was already asleep.
Breakfast was extremely trying. Charlotte made the effort to rise early, though she did not feel in the least like it, but she could not leave Emily to cope alone. As it was, she was the first to arrive, followed almost immediately by Padraig Doyle. She welcomed him, watching with interest as he helped himself to food from the sideboard and took his place. As he had been every day since he arrived, he was immaculately dressed, and his sleek, dark hair was brushed almost to a polish. His long face, with its humorous eyes and mouth, was set in lines of perfect composure.
“Good morning, Mrs. Pitt,” he said with a slight lift to his voice. She was not sure if it was genuine indifference to the distress in the house, a determination to overcome it, a natural will to fight despair and the courage to sustain the battle, or simply the music of the Irish brogue. She could not help responding to it. Regardless of its reason, one felt better for it. She liked him so much better than Fergal Moynihan, with his somber, rather dour air. If she had been Iona, looking for someone to fall in love with, she would have chosen Padraig Doyle far sooner, regardless of the twenty years or so between them. He would have been so much more interesting, more fun to be with.
“Good morning, Mr. Doyle,” she replied with a smile. “Have you seen what a clear sky it is? It will make walking in the woods very pleasant.”
He smiled back; it was a gesture of understanding as well as friendship.
“A relief,” he agreed. “It is rather difficult to find sufficient to do on a wet day, when conversation is as full of pitfalls as ours.”
She allowed herself to laugh very slightly, and reached for the toast and apricot preserves.
Iona came in, greeting them both and taking her place. As usual, she declined the food on the sideboard and took instead toast and honey. She was dressed in a deep, romantic blue which heightened the shadowed blue of her eyes. She ate without speaking again. She was remarkably self-contained. Her beauty was dramatic, almost haunting, but it had a remoteness to it which to Charlotte was cold. Was it because she was absorbed in her own problems and they consumed everything else she might have felt? How deeply did she love Fergal Moynihan? Why? Had she ever loved her own husband, or had it been a marriage made for other reasons? Charlotte did not know how old Iona had been at the time of her marriage. Perhaps only seventeen or eighteen, too young to have realized much of the woman she would become in the next fifteen years, or what hungers would waken in her during that time.
Did Lorcan love her? He had seemed angry and embarrassed at the awful scene in the bedroom, rather than emotionally shattered. If she had been deceived by Pitt like that, her world would have ended. Lorcan looked far from so destroyed. But then, people do not always wear their emotions where everyone else can see them. Why should they? Perhaps his way of dealing with such pain was to hide it. It would be natural enough. Pride was important to most people, especially men.
Was Iona lurching from one disaster to another, looking for companionship, some passion or shared charm, where she would never find it? Was it to fire Lorcan with jealousy, to waken in him a hunger or a need which had grown stale? Or was it the simple outrageousness of it, something no one else would do, something to make her talked of, a name to run like fire on every tongue, a bid for her own immortality, another Neassa Doyle, only alive?
As Charlotte was thinking, Fergal came in. “Good morning,” he said politely, looking at each of them in turn. Everyone murmured a reply, Iona glancing up quickly and then down again.
Fergal took a portion of eggs, bacon, mushrooms, tomatoes and kidneys, and sat down almost the length of the table away from Iona, but where he could look at her—in fact, where he could hardly avoid it. His face in the hard morning light was smooth, only the faintest of lines around his eyes, and a deeper score from nose to mouth. There seemed an inner complacency about him. If any emotion tore him apart, he hid it with a consummate skill. There were slight shadows under his eyes, but no tension, not the ravages of sleeplessness Charlotte thought she would have suffered in a like situation.
Was that what Iona saw in him, what she needed, some cold challenge to thaw with the heat of her dreams, some icebound heart upon which to exercise her magic?
Or was Charlotte being unfair because she did not like Fergal herself? And was that because she saw him through Kezia’s eyes, through her hurt and anger?
“Looks like another agreeable day,” Padraig observed, regarding the sky beyond the long windows. “Perhaps we shall have an opportunity for a little walk after luncheon.”
“The rain might hold off,” Fergal agreed.
“I don’t object to a touch of autumn rain.” Padraig smiled. “Patter of it among the fallen leaves, smell of the damp earth. Better than the conference room!”
“You’ll not get away from the conversation,” Fergal warned. He did not look at Iona, but Charlotte had the sense that he was acutely conscious of her, as if he had to exercise an effort of will to keep his eyes from her.
Iona was concentrating on her tea and toast as single-mindedly as if it were a complicated fish full of bones.
No one had brought in the morning newspapers. Was that because the verdict of the Parnell-O’Shea divorce would be in them?
The atmosphere was crackling stiff, like overstarched linen. Charlotte could not decide whether she should try to say something, artificial as it would sound, or if that would only make it worse.
Justine came in, greeting everyone.
“Good morning. How are you?” She hesitated a moment for the tacit reply of nods and half smiles.
“Well, thank you,” Padraig answered. “And you, Miss Baring? This can hardly be what you expected when you arrived here.”
“No, of course not,” she said gently. “No one ever expects tragedy. But we must support each other.” She took a small serving from the sideboard and then sat opposite Charlotte, smiling at her, not blindly in mere politeness, but with a sharp light of understanding, and not without a dry humor.
“I noticed a wonderful bank of hawthorn beyond the beech trees to the west,” she observed, mostly to Charlotte. “That must be wonderful in the spring. I love the perfume of them, it is almost intoxicating in the sun.”
“Yes, it’s marvelous,” Charlotte agreed. She had no idea because she had never been there in the spring, but that was irrelevant now. “And the flowering chestnuts,” she added for good measure. “Do you have them in Ireland?” She looked directly at Iona.
Iona seemed surprised. “Yes, yes, of course we do. I always think it’s a pity we can’t bring them inside,” she added.
“Why can’t you?” Fergal took the excuse to speak to her.
“It’s bad luck to bring the May blossom into the house.” She fixed him with her brilliant blue gaze, and he seemed unable to turn himself away.
“Why?” he whispered.
“It’s unlucky for the housemaid who has to clean up after them,” Charlotte said quickly. “They drop hundreds of little petals … and little black dots of something too ….”
“Insects,” Justine offered with a smile.
Padraig winced, but not with distaste.
Suddenly the conversation was easier. Charlott
e found herself relaxing a little. By the time Lorcan and Carson O’Day joined them there was even a glimmer of laughter, which did not stop even when Piers came in.
Jack, Emily and Pitt came not long after, and everyone was drawn into at least a semblance of involvement.
O’Day was either in very optimistic spirits or was determined to appear so.
“Have you ever been to Egypt?” he asked Jack with interest. “I have recently been reading some most fascinating letters. They are quite old. I cannot think how I came to miss them.” He smiled at Emily, then at Charlotte. “Written by women. One was Miss Nightingale, whose name we all know, of course. But there were several other extraordinary women who traveled as far and were profoundly moved by their experiences.” And he proceeded to repeat what he had read of Harriet Martineau and Amelia Edwards, to everyone’s interest. Justine in particular was obviously fascinated. At another time, Charlotte would have been also.
Kezia was the last to come, dressed in pale green with a trimming of flowered silk. They were Emily’s colors, if not her style, and with her similarly fair hair and skin she was extremely handsome. Charlotte wondered what would happen to her. She was far nearer thirty than twenty. She was highly intelligent, at least politically if not academically. She had fallen in love once, passionately and utterly, and her family and her faith had denied her a consummation. She then made a sacrifice of her heart in order to further her conviction. Would she now feel that something bought at such a price must be made to yield her a return?
Or would she feel that Fergal’s betrayal had freed her from her own obligation?
Sitting across the table from her, Charlotte was still sharply aware of the anger in her movements, the tightness with which she gripped her fork, the rigidity of her shoulders, and the fact that she spoke pleasantly to everyone else but did not speak to her brother at all, or to Iona.
The discussion had moved from Egypt, the Nile and its temples and ruins, its hieroglyphics and tombs, to Verdi’s recent opera on the story of Othello.