Ashworth Hall

by Anne Perry

  The door opened and Piers looked out. He had obviously only just got into bed and had not yet fallen asleep, which, considering what the evening had already held for him, was not surprising. He saw Justine first.

  “Is something wrong?” he said in immediate alarm. “Are you ill?” His face in the dim light from the landing was full of concern.

  “Yes,” Justine answered with irony. “I must speak with you. I’m sorry it is so late. But tomorrow there will be other things … perhaps.”

  “I’ll get dressed.” He was about to retreat when he saw Charlotte. “Mrs. Pitt!”

  “I think it would be as well if we came in,” Charlotte said decisively. “We can sit in the dressing room—”

  “It’s quite small … there are not three chairs ….”

  “In the circumstances it hardly matters,” she murmured, leading the way through the door and inside. “We do not wish to awaken anyone else by speaking outside in the corridor,” she went on. “Or by walking around more than we have to.”

  “Why?” He was trying not to look alarmed now. He was very pale and tired. There were heavy shadows like bruises around his eyes, his hair falling forward over his brow at the front and standing up in spikes at the crown. “What has happened, Mrs. Pitt? No one else is … dead … are they?”

  “No,” she assured him quickly. Although, considering what Justine was about to tell him, he might prefer someone were. “Please sit down. I can stand.”

  Now thoroughly fearful, he obeyed, turning from Charlotte to Justine.

  Justine sat on the other chair and Charlotte stood in the shadows by the wall. There was a single lamp burning. Piers must have lit it before he answered the door.

  Justine glanced at Charlotte once, then she began.

  “Piers, we don’t know who killed your father by breaking his neck. I imagine it was one of the Irishmen, but I don’t know which.” Her voice was very nearly steady. Her effort of will must have been immense. “But it was I who hit him over the head with the jar of bath salts and pushed him under the water—” She stopped abruptly, waiting.

  There was utter silence but for the faint hiss of the gas.

  Twice Piers opened his mouth as if to speak, then realized he did not know what to say. It was left to Justine to continue. Her voice was harsh with pain. Charlotte knew from the tightness of her back, the rigidity of her shoulders, that she had kept some kind of hope until this moment, and now she had at last let it go. She was speaking from despair.

  “I meant to kill him,” she went on flatly. “I didn’t actually, only because he was already dead. I had been his mistress … for money … and he was going to tell you.” She smiled with a bitter mockery at herself. “I thought I couldn’t bear that. I still love you, and I wanted you to love me more than I wanted anything else in the world. It would have been much easier to bear than this … having to tell you myself, and not only tell you what I was but what I have done as well. I’m sorry … I’m sorry I did this to you. You will never be able to understand how sorry ….”

  He stared at her as if he had not seen her before.

  She looked back in silence, without evasion, almost without blinking.

  Charlotte was locked immobile. She would have felt intrusive if she had thought either of them had the slightest awareness of her.

  “Why?” he said at last, his face almost bruised with shock and incomprehension at what he had heard. “Why did you live that … that kind of … life?”

  This time Justine did not use the word whore. If she were tempted to make excuses, she resisted it. Charlotte would never know if it was her presence there which accomplished that.

  “At first it was to survive,” Justine answered, her voice low, expressionless, as though the feeling in it were too great to be allowed through. “My father was killed at sea, and my mother and I had nothing. She was ostracized because she had married a foreigner. Her family would do nothing for us. Later I got used to the things it could buy me, the safety, the warmth, and in time the beauty, the freedom from worrying every day where the next week’s food and rent would come from.”

  She took a deep breath and went on. “I knew it wouldn’t last. Women get old, then no one wants them. You can’t earn much past thirty, even less past thirty-five. I wanted to save so I could buy a business of some sort. I kept meaning to get out, but it was too easy to stay in. Until I met you at the theater. I came to love you, and I realized what I had paid for my safety. I stopped from that day on.” She did not make any protestations that it was the truth.

  Again he sat silent, only shivering a little, as from physical shock.

  Minutes passed by—five, ten, a quarter of an hour. Neither of them moved or made a sound.

  Charlotte was getting stiff and, in spite of her gown, thoroughly chilled. But she must not interrupt. Justine had not looked at her. She would, if she wanted her to take any part.

  At last Piers drew in a breath and let it out in a long sigh. “I …” He shook his head a little. “I can’t …” He looked wretched, shattered, confused, hurting too much to know how to express it. “I can’t think what to say …” he confessed. “I … I’m sorry. I need a little time … to think ….”

  “Of course,” Justine said quickly in a curiously flat tone. It was an acknowledgment of defeat, of a kind of little death inside. She rose to her feet and at last looked at Charlotte. “Good night,” she said to Piers with a formality which was at once absurd and yet understandable. What else was there to say? She turned and went to the door, leaving him also standing helpless, watching her go.

  Charlotte followed her and closed the door behind them both. They went back along the passage to Justine’s room. Charlotte was not sure if Justine might want to be alone, but she was afraid to leave her, knowing the despair she must now feel. Without asking, she went into the room after her.

  Justine was walking in a nightmare, as if unaware even where she was anymore. She walked into the corner of the bed, bruising herself against the wood and barely registering the pain. She sat down suddenly, but she was too numb to weep.

  Charlotte closed the door and went over to her. There was nothing to say which would mean anything. It would be ridiculous and painful to talk about hope or even to imagine plans. There was nothing which could have been done differently or better as far as Piers was concerned, and anyway it was all past. She did not know whether Justine would find touch comforting or intrusive, but it was her instinct to reach out. She sat beside her on the bed and very gently put her arms around her.

  For minutes they sat unmoving, Justine rigid, locked inside her own pain. Then at last she relaxed and leaned against Charlotte’s shoulder. The wound was no less, but she consented to share it for a space.

  Charlotte had no idea how long they sat. She grew stiff and even colder except where Justine’s body kept her warm. Her arm started prickling with pins and needles. When she could bear it no longer and her muscles were beginning to jump, she spoke.

  “You might try to sleep a little. I’ll stay with you if you like—or go, if you’d prefer?”

  Justine turned around slowly. “How selfish of me,” she answered. “I’ve sat here as if there were no one else in the world. You must be exhausted. I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m not,” Charlotte lied. “Do you want me to stay? I can sleep here anyway.”

  “Please …” Justine hesitated. “No, that’s stupid. I can’t expect you to stay with me forever. I brought this on myself.”

  “We bring a lot of our griefs upon ourselves,” Charlotte said honestly. “It doesn’t make it hurt any less. Lie down and get warm. Perhaps then you’ll sleep a while.”

  “Will you lie down too? Under the covers, or you’ll be frozen.”

  “Yes, certainly I will.” Charlotte suited the act to the words, and Justine turned out the gas. They lay in silence. Charlotte had no idea how long it was before sleep overtook her at last.

  She woke with a start to hear knocking on the doo
r. It took her a moment to remember that the person beside her was not Pitt, but Justine, and then to remember why.

  She slid out of bed. She was still wearing her robe. She had climbed into bed without bothering to remove it. She made her way over to the door gingerly, feeling where she went in the dark. She opened it and saw Piers standing in the passage, the gaslight yellow behind him. There was no hint of daylight yet from the windows of the landing beyond. He looked haggard, as though he had been pacing all night, but his gaze met hers directly, without flinching.

  “Come in,” she whispered, standing aside for him.

  Justine sat up slowly, reaching for the candle. She lit it, and Charlotte closed the door.

  Piers walked over to the bed and sat on it facing Justine, Charlotte temporarily forgotten.

  “You know at first I thought it might have been Mama,” he said with a crooked, painful smile. “She would have had as good a reason. Or Doll Evans; I think she had an even better one. Poor Doll.”

  Justine stared at him, searching his eyes, last night’s despair suddenly, agonizingly quickened with hope again.

  “Haven’t you noticed?” she asked softly. “Wheeler is in love with her, perhaps he has been for ages, but she thought after what happened with Greville that he wouldn’t have anything to do with her ….”

  “Why not?” he said with a jerky laugh. “It wasn’t her fault. You can be fascinated by someone, and then revolted if they don’t live up to your ideal.” His eyes were very steady on her face. “But if you love them, you expect them to be real, as you are yourself, to have the power and the possibility to be stupid and angry and greedy, and make terrible mistakes … and to have the courage to keep on trying, and the understanding to forgive. Not that Wheeler has anything to forgive Doll for.”

  She looked at him with a blaze of hope like a scald of light across the darkness.

  “Those are brave words,” she whispered. “Do you think we can live up to them?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted frankly. “Have you the courage to try? Do you think it’s worth it? Or would you rather not take the risk, and leave now?”

  For the first time she looked down.

  “I don’t think I shall have the chance … although I would like it if I had. I’m all kinds of things, but I’m not a coward. There isn’t anything else I want, except to be with you. There’s nothing else to take as second best.”

  “Then …” he started, leaning forward and holding her hands.

  She pulled them away.

  “Mr. Pitt won’t allow that, Piers. I’m guilty of a crime … not the crime I intended, but a crime all the same. He’ll arrest me in the morning, I expect. If not then, later, after he solves the real murder and the death of Mr. McGinley.”

  “Maybe he won’t,” Charlotte intervened. “It’s legally a crime, of course, but it isn’t one which matters a lot.” She looked at Piers. “Unless, as the nearest relative of the deceased, you want to press a charge of defiling the dead? I don’t know what he’ll do. And I don’t know about Tellman either. I don’t know what they have to do.”

  Piers turned to Charlotte, his eyes wide. “What will they do to her? A few months in prison at the worst, surely?” He looked back at Justine. “We can wait ….”

  She lowered her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. What medical practice would you have, married to a wife who had spent time in prison, let alone for defiling the bodies of the dead?”

  He said nothing, trying to muster an argument.

  “You wouldn’t get a single patient,” Charlotte agreed, hating to have to be realistic. “You would have to go abroad, perhaps to America …” The thought began to look better. “That way you would also run no risk of meeting anyone you had known previously.”

  Justine turned her head and looked at Charlotte with a wry smile. “How very tactfully put.” She looked at Piers again. “You can’t marry a defiler of bodies, my dear, and you can’t marry a whore either.” She winced at the word, using it to wound herself before he could. “No matter how exclusive or expensive.” She laughed. “I know a lot of respected ladies of rank and wealth have extremely loose morals, but they do it for gifts, not for money, and there is all the difference in the world in that. I don’t really understand why. They don’t do it to earn their living. They have plenty of money; they do it because they are bored. I suppose it is the old difference between amateurs and players.” Her voice was rich with mockery. “Trade is so vulgar, after all.”

  They all laughed, jerkily, a little too close to hysteria.

  “America,” Piers said, looking at Justine, then at Charlotte.

  “America,” Justine agreed.

  “What about your mother?” Charlotte asked. “What if she needs you?”

  “Me?” Piers looked surprised. “She’s never needed me.”

  “And if your uncle Padraig is the one who really killed your father and Lorcan McGinley?”

  His face darkened and he looked down again. “It’s pretty possible, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It looks as if it could be either him or Fergal Moynihan, and frankly, I don’t think Fergal has the stomach.”

  Piers seemed very slightly amused by her bluntness, but it was the humor of despair.

  “No, neither do I. But I think Padraig has. And he had plenty of cause, at least where my father is concerned. But I’m not staying here, so if Mama doesn’t want to go back to Ireland, to the Doyle family, who’ll probably make her welcome, then she’d better come to America with us. I can’t see the far west suiting her, but we’d all have to make the best of it. At least there they will have plenty of need for doctors, and they won’t care very much if we are Irish, English, or half-and-half, and they certainly won’t care what our religion is. And as you said, there won’t be much chance of one running into old acquaintances, not if we go to the frontier.”

  His voice dropped a little. “But we’ll be poor. All I have won’t last us very long. People may not pay doctors much out there, and they may take a long time to get used to me and accept me. It will be hard work. There’ll be none of the luxuries we take for granted here. Certainly no servants, no pretty gowns, no hansom cabs to call, no sophisticated theater, music, or books. The climate will be harder. There may even be hostile Indians ….I don’t know. Are you still willing?”

  Justine was torn between hope and terror of the unknown, the grim and dangerous, perhaps beautiful, but hideously unfamiliar. But it was all she had. She nodded slowly, but with absolute certainty.

  “We still have to tell your mother something.”

  He nodded also. “Of course. But not yet. Let us see what Mr. Pitt does about Uncle Padraig first, and what he has … decided.”

  Charlotte moved away from the shadows at last. “It will be dawn soon. The maids will be up already.” She looked at Piers. “I think we should go back to our rooms and try to get ready for the day. We will need all our strength and whatever courage and intelligence we can bring to it.”

  “Of course.” Piers went to the door and opened it for her. He turned and looked at Justine. Their eyes met in something almost like a smile.

  “Thank you,” Justine said to both of them, then she spoke to Piers. “I know there is a very great way to go yet, even if I am not prosecuted. I shall have to prove to you that I am what I am trying to be. There is no point in saying I am sorry over and over again. I will show it by being there, every hour, every day, every week, until you know it.”

  Charlotte and Piers went out, glanced at each other, then turned their separate ways.

  When Charlotte reached her own room the small light was still on in the dressing room, but the bedroom door was ajar and it was dark inside. She was about to take off her robe and creep in when she was startled by a noise and whisked around to find Pitt standing just inside the room, his face drawn with exhaustion. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, his voice rough-edged with anxiety.

  Guilt washed over her in a wave. She had not even
thought of telling him where she was.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, aghast at herself. “I stayed with Justine. She was so … so devastated. She told Piers. It took him all night, which in the circumstances is no time at all, but I think it will be all right.” She took a step towards him. “I’m sorry, Thomas. I didn’t think.”

  “No,” he agreed. “She tried to kill Greville. You can’t protect her from that.”

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked. “Arrest her for killing a corpse? I’m sure it is a crime, but does it matter? I mean …” She shook her head. “I know it matters, but will it really help anyone to prosecute her?”

  He said nothing.

  “Thomas … she won’t go unpunished. She can’t stay here, and she knows that. She wants to leave her old life, and she and Piers can go to America, to the west, where nobody will know her.”

  “Charlotte …” He looked crumpled and worn out with sadness.

  “You can’t stop him marrying her … if he wants to,” she said quickly. “And she did tell him ….”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I went with her. I don’t know whether it will be all right or not, maybe no one will for years. But he’ll try. Can’t you just … turn a blind eye? Please?” It crossed her mind to say something about Eudora, and what it would mean to her, but she dismissed it as unworthy. This was between herself and Pitt, and Eudora Greville had nothing to do with it. “It will be hard enough for them,” she added. “They will leave everything they know behind them and take only their love, their courage, and their guilt.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her long and very close, and then again, and then a third time. “Sometimes I haven’t the slightest idea what you are thinking,” he said at last, looking puzzled.

  She smiled. “Well, that’s something, I suppose.”

  Gracie woke up, and it was a moment before she remembered what had happened the day before, the strange, sweaty candle in Finn’s room, the look in his eyes when she had touched it … the guilt which had betrayed to her what it was, and then his anger when she had run away, then his arrest. It was hard to feel different about him quickly. There was too much memory of sweetness. One could not turn off emotion in a few hours, not when it had run so deep through you.