Death in the Devil's Acre tp-7

by Anne Perry

  And Bertie Astley belonged to Balantyne’s own class, something less than true aristocracy, but far more than merely gentry. Anyone might come by money, and manners could be mimicked or learned. Wit, fashion, and even beauty were nothing; one enjoyed them, but no one worth a thought was taken in by them. But the Astleys had breeding; generations of honorable reputation, of service to church or state, had made them part of a small world of privilege that had once seemed golden-and safe. Occasionally some knave or fool stepped out of it-but no invader had beaten his way in.

  How had Bertram Astley’s body come to be found in a doorway to a male brothel? Balantyne, of course, was not naive enough to exclude the possibility that Astley had gone there for the obvious purpose, or that he had been murdered by a chance lunatic. Neither could he dismiss the fear that it was not accident but design that had selected him. He mistrusted the comfortable belief in a random killer that chose two men, Max and Bertie, so dramatically dissimilar, yet both known to him.

  He broached the subject to Augusta. She immediately assumed he wished to discuss the Devil’s Acre itself, and some plan for reform of prostitution and its ills; her face closed over.

  “Really, Brandon, for a man who has spent the best part of his adult years in the army, you are singularly ingenuous!” she said with some contempt. “If you imagine you are going to alter the baser instincts of human nature by a little well-meaning legislation, then you belong in some nice village pulpit where you can dispense tea and platitudes to unmarried ladies of earnest disposition, and do very little harm by it. Here in a sophisticated society, you are ridiculous!”

  He was stung. It was not only cruel, but totally unjust. And it was not what he had meant. “There are many words I have heard applied to the murder of Bertie Astley,” he said cuttingly. “But you are the first to choose ‘sophisticated.’ It is an allusion whose appropriateness escapes me!”

  A dull color marked her cheeks. He had misunderstood her willfully, and as painfully as she had mistaken him. “I do not appreciate sarcasm, Brandon,” she answered. “And you have not the wit to do it successfully. Bertie Astley was an unfortunate victim of whatever lunatic is perpetrating these outrages. What purpose took him to that area we will probably never know, and it is none of our business. Suffer him to be buried in peace, and his family to mourn him decently. It is indelicate in the extreme to remind anyone of the circumstances of his death. I imagine a gentleman would not do so.”

  “Then it is time we had fewer gentlemen-and a greater number of police, or whatever it is that it takes to get something done!” he retorted. “I, for one, do not desire to see any more mutilated corpses turning up in London.”

  She looked at him wearily. “We have few enough gentlemen already. I would wish there were more, not less!” She turned and walked away, leaving him with the feeling that he had lost the argument in spite of the fact that he was in the right.

  The following day, Christina had luncheon with her mother but declined to go calling. Balantyne found himself in the withdrawing room alone with his daughter. The fire was blazing halfway up the chimney, and the room was full of warm, flickering light. It seemed familiar, comfortably timeless, almost as if they could have slipped back into his youth and her childhood, when affection was taken for granted.

  He sat back in his chair and stared at Christina as she stood by the round piecrust table. Her face was remarkably pretty: the small features, rounded lips, wide eyes, shining hair. Her figure, in its fashionable dress, still had the freshness of a girl’s. She was a strange mixture of child and woman-perhaps that was her charm. Certainly she had had many admirers before she married Alan Ross. And, to judge from the social occasions at which he had seen her, she still had, even if they were now more discreet.

  “Christina?”

  She turned and looked at him. “Yes, Papa?”

  “You knew Sir Bertram Astley, didn’t you.” He did not allow it to be a question, because he would not accept denial.

  She faced him when she spoke, but bent her eyes to a china ornament on the table. The subject was trivial, not worth a conversation.

  “Slightly,” she replied. “One is bound to meet most of the people in Society at some time or another.” She did not ask why he had mentioned it.

  “What sort of a man was he?”

  “Pleasant, as far as I could judge,” she answered with a slight smile. “But quite ordinary.”

  She was so confident that he could not disbelieve her. And yet he knew she moved in circles that were neither bland nor artless. She was far less innocent than he had been at her age-perhaps than he was even now?

  “What about Beau Astley?”

  She hesitated a moment. Was there a touch of color on her skin, or was it only a reflection of the firelight?

  “Charming.” she said without expression in her voice. “Very agreeable, although I admit I do not know him well. It is something of a hasty judgment. If you are expecting me to come up with any profundity, Papa, I am afraid I shall disappoint you. I had no idea Sir Bertram had perverted tastes. I fully thought he was after that silly Woolmer creature, and meant to marry her. And since she has no money at all, and no family to speak of, I can only imagine it was for the most physical of reasons.” She glanced over at him. “I’m sorry if I shock you. Sometimes I find you incredibly stuffy!”

  He was aware that she found him so, but it still hurt to hear it in such words. He did not wish to pursue the matter by defending himself and, at the same time, was conscious that he should. She had no business to speak to him with so little respect.

  “Then either he did not go to the Devil’s Acre for the reason supposed-or else he was a man of very diverse tastes,” he said dryly.

  She laughed outright. Her hands held the china ornament up in the air; she had beautiful fingers, small and slender. “You know I quite expected you to be furious! Instead you turn out to have a sense of humor.”

  “A sense of the absurd,” he corrected, which was a pleasant feeling. “If Bertie Astley was as diligent in his pursuit of Miss Woolmer as you suggest, I find it hard to believe he was also satisfying quite different appetites in the Devil’s Acre. Or had Miss Woolmer declined him?”

  She gave a little snort. “Far from it. She grasped onto him like a drowning woman. And her mother was even worse. If they can manage it, they’ll catch poor Beau now! She’s a great lump of a girl, like clotted cream.”

  “And ‘poor Beau’ is unwilling?”

  Again she hesitated, her fingers tightening on the ornament. “I really have no idea. As I said before, I do not know them except in the briefest way. It is really none of my concern.” She set the ornament down and smiled, turning from the table to come toward the fire. The light shone on the satin of her dress, gleaming brilliantly for a moment, then falling into rich shadows again.

  “Have you ever heard of any of the other victims?” As soon as he said it, he knew it was a ridiculous question, and wished he could withdraw it. “Apart from Max, of course!” he added by way of making it at least logical within itself, even if it was stupid in the whole.

  Perhaps some memory of Max’s service in this house stirred in her. She swallowed. He felt guilty for having mentioned it.

  “Hardly,” she said casually. “Wasn’t one a doctor and one a schoolteacher, or something? Not exactly my social circle, Papa. Isn’t there a saying about necessity making strange bedfellows, or something of the sort?” She laughed a little harshly. “Maybe they were all possessed of the same vice. Maybe they gambled in the Devil’s Acre, and lost. I seem to have heard that Bertie Astley gambled. Not to pay one’s debt is a social sin of monstrous proportions, you know. Didn’t they teach you that in the officers’ mess?”

  “They blackballed welshers,” he said soberly, watching her. “They didn’t kill them and-” He hesitated to use a graphic word in front of her, embarrassed for himself, and then ashamed of his embarrassment. Why should he falter around in euphemisms like an old woman? Why sh
ould he speak of masculinity in a whisper? “Castrate them,” he finished.

  She did not seem to notice the word. The firelight on her face made her skin warm anyway; he could see no extra blush.

  “We are not dealing with officers and gentlemen in the Devil’s Acre, Papa,” she pointed out with some sarcasm. “Blackballing them would hardly serve!”

  Of course she was right. Whatever use would that threat be to a man? It would get the gambler not a penny of his debt repaid. The losers would simply go to another place in future-if not in the Acre, then in some slum back room elsewhere. And the man owed would not dare broadcast the fact or he would lose face everywhere, and from then on no one would pay him.

  “Actually,” she continued, turning to look at him, “I would have thought that this method would be most effective. I’m amazed it has needed four men dead to have made the point.”

  “It is more than amazing.” He spoke slowly, turning it over in his mind and finding himself inexplicably cold. “In fact, it is incredible.”

  She was not looking at him. The light on her dress accented the slender curve of her body as she turned away. She did not look very different from when she had been seventeen, yet he felt as if she were unreachable. Had she always been so, and only his complacency had allowed him to imagine he knew her because she was his daughter?

  “One does not hate someone so passionately over a gambling debt.” He went back to the subject because he had not yet exorcised it.

  “Perhaps they are mad?” She shrugged. “Who knows what it was? Really, it is a most unpleasant affair, Papa. Must we discuss it?”

  An apology was on his tongue, and then he changed his mind. “Do you find you can dismiss it?” he asked instead. “I cannot.”

  “Apparently.” She had an excellent shadow of Augusta’s cold scorn. “Yes, I can. I do not find the goings-on of the denizens of the slums as fascinating as you do. I greatly prefer the society in which I was brought up.”

  “I thought you found it tedious.” He was surprised how sharp his own tongue had become. “I have frequently heard you say so.”

  She lifted her chin a little and moved away. “Do you suggest I should look in the Devil’s Acre for a little variety then, Papa?” Her voice was brittle. “I don’t think Alan would care for that! And Mama would be appalled.” She walked over to the bell and pulled it. “I am afraid that, like most other women, I shall just have to put up with a certain tedium and a great deal of trivia in daily life. But I find your moralizing insufferably pompous. You have not the faintest idea what caused these murders, and I can’t think why you want to go on talking about them, unless it is to make yourself feel superior. I don’t care to discuss it anymore. As Mama says, it is unbelievably sordid.”

  The bell was answered by the footman.

  “Please call my carriage, Stride,” she said coolly. “I am ready to return home.”

  Balantyne was filled with a mixture of relief and a sense of loss as he watched her go. Was it the difference between men and women, or one generation and another that set the gulf between their understanding? It seemed these days there were fewer and fewer people he could talk to with ease, and feel that they were discussing something significant, not merely exchanging conventional words that one neither believed in nor cared about.

  Why had he wanted to talk about the murders with Christina? Or with anybody? There were a thousand other things to discuss, all pleasant or interesting-even amusing. Why the Devil’s Acre? … Because in remembering some of the things Brandy had spoken of, the poverty and the pain, he could understand the hatred that might drive someone to kill a creature like Max-even if the savage mutilation was beyond his understanding. He would have executed the man, simply, with a shot through the brain. But perhaps, after all, if it were his wife or his daughter Max had used in his whorehouse, he might have felt the need not only to kill but to destroy the offender’s manhood, the means of his power and the symbol of his abuse. There was a kind of justice in it.

  He could not put it from his mind. And there was no one with whom he could discuss it without arousing anger or being accused of fatuity and empty moralizing. Was that how his family, the women he loved, saw him? An insensitive man, pompous, obsessed with a series of sordid killings in an area that he knew nothing about?

  Surely Charlotte did not see him like that. She had seemed so interested. Could it have been only kindness? He remembered the letters from Wellington’s soldier in Spain, she had affected to find them so exciting. Could that light in her face have been just a politeness? The thought was abhorrent.

  He stood up and walked smartly out of the room and across the hallway to the library. He pulled out paper and wrote a letter to Emily Ashworth. She was Charlotte’s sister; she would pass on the message tactfully that the soldier’s letters were available if Charlotte cared to read them for herself. He sent it off with the footman before he had time to reconsider whether he was being foolish.

  The following afternoon, at the earliest hour acceptable for calling, the parlormaid came in with a message that Miss Ellison was in the morning room, and did the general wish to receive her?

  He felt a rush of excitement boil up inside him, sending the blood into his face. That was ridiculous-she had come to see the letters. It was not personal. She would have come just as quickly, whoever had possessed them.

  “Yes.” He swallowed and tried to meet the parlormaid’s eyes quite casually. “By all means. She has come to see some historical documents, so show her into the library, and then bring tea.”

  “Yes, sir.” If the parlormaid found it strange, there was nothing in her face to betray it.

  He stood up and pulled his jacket a little straighter. Without thinking, he raised his hands to his cravat. It seemed tight. He loosened it a fraction, and made sure in front of the glass that it was properly tied.

  Charlotte was in the library. She turned and smiled as the general came in. He did not even notice the warm reds of her street gown, or that her boots were soaked. All he saw was the light in her face.

  “Good afternoon, General,” she said quickly. “It is most kind of you to allow me to read the letters. I do hope I have not called inconveniently?”

  “No-not at all.” He wished she would use his name, but it would be grossly familiar to ask her to. He must behave with dignity or he would embarrass her. He kept his face cool. “I have no other engagements for the meantime.” He was going to have late tea with Robert Carlton, but that was unimportant; they were old friends and the arrangement was quite informal.

  “That is very generous of you.” She was still smiling.

  “Please sit down,” he said, indicating the big chair near the fire. “I have asked the maid to bring tea. I hope that is acceptable?”

  “Oh, yes, thank you.” She sat down and put her feet on the fender. For the first time, he noticed how wet her boots were, and that they were quite worn. He looked away, and went for the letters out of the bookcase.

  They studied them together for half an hour. The maid brought tea, Charlotte poured it, and they returned to the utterly foreign world of Spain at the beginning of the century. The soldier wrote with such intense honesty that they knew his thoughts, felt his emotions, sensed the closeness of other men and the impact of battle, endured with him endless marches over dry hills, his hunger, and the long hours of waiting followed by sudden fear.

  At last Charlotte sat back, her eyes wide, seeing far away. “You know, with his writing that soldier has given me a portion of his life. I feel very rich. Most people are restricted to one time and place, and I have been privileged to see another so vividly it is as if I had been there but come away without the injury or the cost.”

  He looked at her face, alive with pleasure, and felt ridiculously rewarded. The sense of being alone vanished like night when the whole earth whirls suddenly upward toward the sun.

  He found himself smiling back at her. Instinctively he put out his hand and touched her for a moment.
The warmth of her spread right through him till his whole body felt it. Then, reluctantly, he withdrew his hand. It was a moment he dared not linger over. The intensity with which he wished to was warning enough.

  What could he say that was honest? He would shatter the moment if he were to descend to platitudes, ordinary and born of someone else’s mind. “I’m glad,” he said simply. “It mattered to me, too. I felt as if I knew that soldier better than I know most of the people I see and talk to, and whose lives I thought I understood.”

  Her eyes moved away from his and she took a deep breath. He observed the smooth curve of her body, her throat, the fine line of her cheek.

  “Merely living close to people does not mean you know them,” she said thoughtfully. “All you know is what they look like.”

  Christina came to his mind.

  “One tends to believe that other people care about the same things,” she went on. “It comes as a shock to discover sometimes that they don’t. I cannot get the murders in the Devil’s Acre out of my thoughts, and yet most of the people I know prefer not to hear anything about them. The circumstances remind us of poverty and injustices that hurt.” She swung around to look at him, her eyes level. She felt a little embarrassed. “I’m sorry-do you find it unbecoming that I should mention it?”

  “I find it offensive and frightening that anyone should be prepared to ignore it,” he said honestly. Would she think him as pompous as Christina did? She could not be more than a few years older than Christina. That was a realization that shot through him with sudden and startling pain. His face flushed and he felt self-conscious. The past hour’s comfort fled. He was being ridiculous.

  “General Balantyne?” She spoke very gravely, her hand touching his sleeve. “Are you being kind to me? Are you sure I have not offended you by raising such a subject?”

  He cleared his throat. “Of course I’m sure!” He leaned back hard against the upright of his chair, where he could not feel the warmth of her, or smell the faint aroma of lavender and clean hair, a sweet musk of the skin. Wild sensations stirred inside him, and he strained after intelligent thought to drown them. He heard his voice as if it came from far away. “I have tried to discuss the matter. Brandy is most concerned, and Alan Ross as well. But it distresses the women.” Already he was becoming pompous!