by Anne Perry
He threw himself back into the chair and pulled the desk drawer open, still staring at Pitt. “I never thought you’d work it out! You liked her … you admired her! I didn’t think you’d ever believe she was a traitor to her husband, to all we had both believed, even though I left her at Traitors Gate. It was the perfect place … she deserved that.”
Pitt wanted to say that if he had not, he might never have found the truth, but it was pointless now.
“Linus Chancellor-”
Chancellor pulled his hand out of the desk drawer. There was a small black pistol in it. He turned the barrel on himself and pulled the trigger. The shot was like a whip crack in the room and exploded in his head, splattering blood and bone everywhere.
Pitt was numb with horror. The room rocked like a ship at sea; the light from the chandelier seemed to splinter and break. There was a terrible smell in the air, and he felt sick.
He heard a running of feet outside. A servant threw open the door and someone screamed, but he did not know if it was a man or a woman. He stumbled over the other chair, bruising himself violently as he made his way out, and heard his own voice like a stranger’s sending someone for help.
12
“Why?” Nobby Gunne stood in Charlotte’s front parlor, her face twisted with anxiety. Of course the newspapers had been full of the tragedy of Linus Chancellor’s death. Whatever discretion or pity may have dictated, it was impossible to conceal the fact that he had taken his life suddenly and violently in the presence of a superintendent of the police. No euphemistic explanation would have satisfied even the most naive person. It had to be because the police had brought him some news which was not only unbearable, but so threatening that his response was immediate.
Were it a normal tragedy, some solution to his wife’s death which destroyed the faith and trust he had had in her, or which implied some further disaster, he might well have felt there was no alternative but to take his own life; but he would have done it later, after contemplation, and in the privacy of his own company, perhaps late at night. He would not have done it in the police superintendent’s presence unless he had not only brought shattering news but also a threat to arrest him and place him under such immediate restraint as to make instant action the only possible way of escape.
There might have been other answers, but no one thought further than the murder of Susannah and that Chancellor himself was guilty.
“Why?” Nobby repeated, staring at Charlotte with urgency and mounting distress. “What did she do that he could not possibly have forgiven her? He did love her, I would have sworn to that. Was it-” she swallowed with great difficulty, as though there were something blocking her throat ”-another man?”
Charlotte knew what she feared, and wished intensely that she could have given an answer which would have been painless. But lies were no use.
“No,” she said quickly. “No, it was not another man. You are quite right, I believe they did love each other, each in their own way. Please …” She indicated the closest chair. “It seems …”
“Yes?”
“I was only going to say that it seems so … formal, so cold, to stand here face-to-face across the carpet discussing something so terribly important.”
“Is it … important?” Nobby asked.
“People’s feelings are always important.”
Reluctantly Nobby sat down, a matter of perching on the edge of one of the chairs. Charlotte sat in another opposite her, but farther back in it, less uncomfortably.
“You do know why, don’t you?” Nobby pressed. “Superintendent Pitt will have told you. I remember you used to be most involved in his cases … at the time of …”
“Yes, he told me.”
“Then please, it is of the utmost importance to me. Why did Mr. Chancellor kill Susannah?”
Looking at Nobby’s earnest face, Charlotte was deeply afraid that the answer she had to give was not the one Nobby most feared, but one that would in a way be every bit as hard.
“Because he felt she betrayed him,” she said gravely. “Not with another man! At least not in the way one would usually take that to mean: with another man’s ideas. And he found that intolerable. It would have become public, because she was intending to withdraw her support, and that of the part of the family banking business which was still in her influence. That could not remain private.” She looked at Nobby’s pale face. “You see, she had been one of his most fervent supporters and admirers all the way along. Everyone would know, and would talk about it.”
“But … if she felt … differently …” Nobby started a train of thought, but it died even as she tried to give it words. It was indefinable, something no one had even bothered to express because it was taken for granted. Women owed their husbands their loyalty, not only of supporting them in all they aspired to do, but more subtly than that, going far deeper into the assumptions of man and woman, of trusting their judgment in all matters that lay in the male domain, matters of thought, philosophy, politics and finance. It was taken for granted married women did not require a vote since they were naturally represented by their husbands. It was not open to question, even in the privacy of the home. To challenge publicly was a betrayal of all unspoken agreements everyone assumed, even in a marriage where there was no love, let alone in one where there was love both long-standing and still intense.
“It was a matter of conscience with her,” Charlotte added. “She was not willingly disloyal. I even remember seeing her try to argue with him once. He simply did not hear her, because the idea that she thought differently was inconceivable to him. Heaven knows how many times she tried.”
Nobby looked almost as if it had been she who was bereaved. She seemed stunned, her eyes focusing far away, her attention inward. She even swayed a little when she stood up.
“Yes … yes, of course. I know she did nothing out of malice, or lightly. Thank you. You have been most generous to me. Now, if you will excuse me … I think I have a further call to make….”
Charlotte hesitated on the brink of asking her if she was all right, but she knew the wound was an emotional one and must be endured. No one else could help. She murmured some sort of farewell and watched Nobby go, very upright and fumbling a little, out of the parlor and to the front door.
Nobby rode home barely aware of where she was going. Half of her wanted to go now to see Kreisler, to speak to him in the shadow-thin hope there was some other answer. A far larger part knew it was not only pointless but also absurd. She would only embarrass them both. One did not call upon a man in his rooms to inform him that you were … What? Disillusioned? Heartbroken? That you loved him, which subject had never been discussed between you, never given such words, but that you could not condone what he had done.
He had not asked her to.
She went home engulfed in misery, and it was late in the afternoon, after the time when social calls of a formal nature were paid, when the maid told her that Mr. Kreisler was there to see her.
She considered receiving him in the withdrawing room. The thought of the garden was too painful, too full of memories of a different mood, a closeness and an hour of intimacy and hope.
And yet the withdrawing room-any room in the house-was too small. They would have to stand too close to each other; turning away would be obvious.
“I shall be in the garden,” she replied, and walked quickly out of the door as if, even before he entered, it could be some kind of escape.
She was standing by the border, the roses now in bloom, when he reached her. He did not bother with preamble. They had never spoken to each other in trivialities.
“I imagine you have heard about Linus Chancellor?” he said quietly. “All London has. I wish I could be sure it would mean some space, some interim of relief for Africa, but the treaty will go ahead, and by now I daresay Rhodes is already in Mashonaland.”
She kept her back towards the lawn and did not turn sideways to face him.
“Is that why you did it?�
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“Did what?” He sounded genuinely puzzled. There was no evasion in his voice, no pretense.
She had expected to sound querulous, even tearful, but her question, when it came, was level and surprisingly strong.
“Drove Susannah until she broke.”
He was startled. There was a moment’s silence. She was acutely aware of his physical presence beside her.
“I didn’t!” he said with amazement. “I just … just argued my case!”
“Yes, you did,” she replied. “You pressed her relentlessly, tearing away Chancellor’s reasoning, painting word pictures of greed and ruin in Africa, the ultimate immorality of the destruction of a whole race of people….”
“You know that’s true!” he challenged her. “That is what will happen. You, of all people, know as well as I do what will happen to the Mashona and the Matabele when Rhodes settles there. Nothing can make them obey Lobengula’s laws! It’s laughable … at least it would be if it were not so bloody tragic.”
“Yes I do know that, but that is not the point!”
“Isn’t it? I think it’s precisely the point!”
She turned to face him. “It is not your beliefs I challenged. I wouldn’t even if I didn’t share them. You are entitled to believe as you will….”
His eyebrows rose and his eyes widened, but she ignored him. Sarcasm was beneath the passions and the seriousness of her argument.
“It is the methods you used. You attacked Chancellor where he was vulnerable.”
“Of course,” he retorted with surprise. “What would you have me do, attack him where he is best defended? Give him a sporting chance? This is not a game, with chips to be won or lost at the end. This is life, with misery and destruction the price of losing.”
She was quite sure of what she meant. She faced him without a flicker.
“And the destruction of Susannah, pressing her heart and her loyalties until they broke, and broke her with them, was it a fair price?”
“For God’s sake, Nobby! I didn’t know he was going to kill her!” he protested, his face aghast. “You surely cannot imagine I did. You know me better than that!”
“I don’t imagine you knew it,” she continued, the ache of misery inside her temporarily subsiding under the force of her certainty. “I think you didn’t particularly care.”
“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 r
ight 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.