by Anne Perry
“I daresay!” The old lady’s voice would have chipped stones—tombstones by the look on her face. “But hardly what one would wish a young lady even to hear about, much less to do. I will thank you not to injure her mind by discussing it. You’ll only upset her and cause her to have ideas. Ideas are bad for young women.”
“Quite,” Eustace added soberly. “They cause heat in the blood, and nightmares.” He took an enormous slice of chicken breast and put it on his plate. “And headaches.”
George was caught between his innate good manners and his sense of outrage; the conflict showed in his face. He glanced at Tassie.
She put her hand out and touched his arm gently. “I really don’t mind going to see the vicar, George. He’s awfully smug, and his teeth are wet and stick out, but he’s really quite harmless—”
“Anastasia!” Eustace sat bolt upright. “That is no way to speak of Mr. Beamish. He is a very worthy man, and deserving of a great deal more respect from a girl of your age.”
Tassie smiled broadly. “Yes, Papa, I am always very nice to Mr. Beamish.” Then sudden honesty checked her. “Well, nearly always.”
“You will go to call upon him this afternoon,” Mrs. March said coldly, sucking at her teeth, “and see if you can be of assistance. There must be several of the less fortunate who need visiting.”
“Yes, Grandmama,” Tassie said meekly. George sighed and, for the time being, gave up.
Emily spent the afternoon with Tassie, doing good works. If one cannot enjoy oneself, one might as well benefit someone else. As it turned out it was really quite agreeable, since Emily liked Tassie more and more each time she saw her, and their visit with the vicar’s wife was actually very brief. Considerably more time was taken up in the company of the curate, a large, soft-spoken young man called Mungo Hare, who had chosen to leave his native western Inverness-shire to seek his living in London. He was full of zeal and very forthright opinions, which were demonstrated by his acts rather than his words. They did indeed offer some real comfort to the bereaved and to the lonely, and Emily returned to Cardington Crescent with a sense of accomplishment. Added to this was the knowledge that Sybilla had spent the time paying afternoon calls with her grandmother-in-law, and must have been bored to distraction.
But Emily did not see George on her return, nor when she changed for dinner. There was no sound from the dressing room except the valet coming in and then leaving, and the feeling of desolation returned.
At the dinner table it was worse. Sybilla looked marvelous in a shade of magenta no one else would have dared to wear. Her skin was flawless, with just a touch of pink on the cheekbones, and she was still as slender as a willow in spite of her condition. Her eyes were hazel; at times they seemed brown, at others, golden, like brandy in the light. Her hair was silken, black and thick as a rope.
Emily felt washed out beside her, a moth next to a butterfly. Her hair was honey fair, softer, delicate rather than rich, her eyes quite ordinary blue; her gown was very fashionable in cut, but by comparison the color was pallid. It took all the courage she possessed to force the smile to her lips, to eat something which tasted like porridge although it appeared to be sole, roasted mutton, and fruit sorbet.
Everyone else was gay, except old Mrs. March, who had never been anything so trivial. Sybilla was radiant; George could hardly take his eyes off her. Tassie looked unusually happy, and Eustace held forth with unctuous satisfaction on something or other. Emily did not listen.
Gradually the decision hardened in her mind. Passivity was not succeeding: It was time for action, and there was only one course of action that she could think of.
There was little she could begin until the gentlemen rejoined them after the meal was over. The conservatory stretched the full length of the south side of the house, and from the withdrawing room there were glass doors under pale green curtains, which opened onto palms, vines, and a walk quite out of sight between exotic flowers.
Emily’s patience was totally exhausted. She moved to sit beside Jack Radley and took the first opportunity to engage him in conversation, which was not in the least difficult. He was only too delighted. In other circumstances she would have enjoyed it, for against her will she liked him. He was too good-looking, and he knew it, but he had wit and a sense of the absurd. She had seen it gleaming in those remarkable eyes a dozen times over the last few days. And, she thought, there was no hypocrisy in him, which in itself was enough to endear him to her after three weeks at Cardington Crescent.
“Mrs. March seemed very nervous of you,” he said curiously. “When you mentioned the word ‘detecting,’ I thought she was going to take a fit and slide under the table.” There was a shadow of laughter in his comment, and she realized just how much he disliked the old lady; a whole region of unhappiness opened a fraction to her guess. Perhaps family and circumstances were pressing him into a marriage for money. Perhaps he wanted such a union no more than the young women who were so mercilessly maneuvered by their mothers into marrying for position, so as not to be left that most pathetic of all social creatures, the unmarried woman past her prime, with neither means to support herself nor vocation to occupy her years.
“It is not my ability which alarms her,” she said with the first smile she had genuinely felt. “It is the way I came by it.”
“Came by it?” His eyebrows rose. “Was it something frightful?”
“Worse.” Her smile increased.
“Shameful?” he pursued.
“Terribly!”
“What?” He was on the edge of outright laughter now.
She bent closer to him and held up her hand. He leaned over to listen.
“My sister married appallingly beneath her,” she whispered, her lips close to his ear, “to a detective in the police!”
He shot upright and turned to face her in amazement and delight. “A detective! A real one, a peeler? Scotland Yard, and all that?”
“Yes. All that—and more.”
“I don’t believe it!” He was enjoying the game enormously, and there was a touch of reality in it that made it all the better.
“She did!” Emily argued. “Didn’t you see Mrs. March’s face? She’s terrified I’ll mention it. It’s a disgrace to the family.”
“I’ll bet it is!” He chortled with delight. “Poor old Eustace—he’ll never recover. Does Lady Cumming-Gould know?”
“Aunt Vespasia? Oh, yes. In fact if you doubt me, ask her. She knows Thomas quite well, and what’s more, she likes him, in spite of the fact that he wears clothes that don’t fit him and perfectly dreadful mufflers of most violent and unseemly colors, and his pockets are always bulging with notes and wax and matches and bits of string and heaven knows what else. And he’s never met a decent barber in his life—”
“And you like him too,” he interrupted happily. “You like him very much.”
“Oh, yes, I do. But he’s still a policeman, and he gets involved in some very gruesome murders.” The memory of them sobered her for a moment; he saw it in her face, and immediately took her mood.
“You know about them?” Now he was truly intrigued. She had his total attention, and she found it exhilarating.
“Certainly I do! Charlotte and I are very close. I’ve even helped sometimes.”
His bright eyes clouded with skepticism.
“I have!” she protested. It was something she was obscurely proud of: it had, really, something to do with life outside the suffocation of drawing rooms. “I practically solved some of them—at least, Charlotte and I did together.”
He was not sure whether to believe her or not, but there was no criticism in his face; his wide gaze was quite genuine. Were she a few years younger she could have lost herself in that look. Even now she was going to make the best of it. She stood up with a little twitch of her skirt.
“If you don’t believe me ...”
He was at her side immediately. “You? Investigating murders?” His voice was just short of incredulous, inviting he
r to convince him.
She accepted, walking half a step ahead of him towards the conservatory doors and the hanging vines and sweet smell of earth. Inside it was hot and motionless among the lilies, dim as a tropical night.
“We had one where the corpse turned up on the driving seat of a hansom cab,” she said deliberately. It was quite true. “After a performance of The Mikado.”
“Now you are joking,” he protested.
“No, I’m not!” She turned her widest, most innocent look on him. “The widow identified it. It was Lord Augustus Fitzroy Hammond. He was buried in the family plot with all due ceremony.” She tried to keep her face straight and stare back into his eyes, with those incredible eyelashes. “He turned up again in the family pew in church.”
“Emily, you’re preposterous!” He was standing very close to her, and for the moment, George was not paramount in her mind. She knew she was beginning to smile, in spite of the fact that it was perfectly true. “We buried him again,” she said with a hint of a giggle. “It was all very difficult, and rather disgusting.”
“That’s absurd. I don’t believe you!”
“Oh it was—I swear! Very awkward indeed. You can’t expect Society to turn up to the same person’s funeral twice in as many weeks. It isn’t decent.”
“It isn’t true.”
“It is! I swear it! We had four corpses before we’d finished—at least I think it was four.”
“And all of Lord Augustus whatever?” He was trying to control his laughter.
“Of course not—don’t be ridiculous!” she protested. She was so close to him she could smell the warmth of his skin and the faint pungency of soap.
“Emily!” He bent and kissed her slowly, intimately, as if they had all the time in the world. Emily let herself go, stretching her arms up round his neck and answering him.
“I shouldn’t do this,” she said frankly after a few moments. But it was a factual remark, not a reproach.
“Probably not,” he agreed, touching her hair gently, then her cheek. “Tell me the truth, Emily.”
“What?” she whispered.
“Did you really find four corpses?” He kissed her again.
“Four or five,” she murmured. “And we caught the murderer as well. Ask Aunt Vespasia—if you’ve the nerve. She was there.”
“I just might.”
She disengaged herself with a shadow of reluctance—it had been nicer than it should have been—and began her way back past the flowers and the vines to the withdrawing room.
Mrs. March was holding forth on the chivalry of the pre-Raphaelite painters, their meticulousness of detail and delicacy of color, and William was listening, his face pinched and pained. It was not that he disapproved, but that she totally misunderstood what he believed to be the concept. She missed the passion and caught only the sentimentality.
Tassie and Sybilla were so positioned that they were obliged either to listen or to be openly rude, and long habit precluded the latter. Eustace, on the other hand, was master of the house and owed no such courtesy. He sat with his back to the group and discoursed upon the moral obligations of position, and George had on his face his look of polite interest which masked complete absence of attention; he was gazing towards the conservatory doors. He must have seen Emily and Jack Radley.
Emily felt a sudden, rather alarming sense of excitement; it was a crisis provoked at last!
She walked a fraction ahead of Jack but was still conscious of him close behind her, of his warmth and the gentleness of his touch. She sat down next to Great-aunt Vespasia and pretended to listen to Eustace.
The rest of the evening passed in a similar vein, and Emily hardly noticed the time until twenty-five minutes to midnight. She was returning to the withdrawing room from the bathroom upstairs, passing the morning room door, when she heard voices in soft, fierce conversation.
“... you’re a coward!” It was Sybilla, her voice husky with anger and contempt. “Don’t tell me—”
“You may believe what you like!” The answer cut her off.
Emily stopped, almost falling over as hope and fear choked each other and left her shaking. It was George, and he was furious. She knew that tone precisely; he had had the same welling up of temper when his jockey was thrashed at the race track. It had been half his own fault then, and he knew it. Now he was lashing out at Sybilla, and her voice came back thick with fury.
The door of the boudoir swung open and Eustace stood with his hand on it. Any moment he would turn and see Emily listening. She moved on swiftly, head high, straining to catch the last words from the morning room. But the voices were too strident, too clashing to distinguish the words.
“Ah, Emily.” Eustace swiveled round. “Time to retire, I think. You must be tired.” It was a statement, not a question. Eustace considered it part of his prerogative to decide when everyone wished to go to bed, as he had always done for his family when they all lived here. He had decided almost everything and believed it his privilege and his duty. Before she died, Olivia March had obeyed him sweetly—and then gone her own way with such discretion he was totally unaware of it. Many of his best ideas had been hers, but they had been given him in such a way he thought them his own, and he therefore defended them to the death and put every last one into practice.
Emily had no will to argue tonight. She returned to the withdrawing room, wished everyone good sleep, and went gratefully to her room. She had undressed, dismissing her maid with instructions for the morning, and was about to get into bed when there was a knock on the dressing-room door.
She froze. It could only be George. Half of her was terrified and wanted to keep silent, pretend she was already asleep. She stared at the knob as if it would turn on its own and let him in.
The knock came again, harder. It might be her only opportunity, and if she turned him away she would lose it forever.
“Come in.”
Slowly, the door opened. George stood in the archway, looking tired and uncomfortable. His face was flushed—Emily knew why immediately. Sybilla had made a scene, and George hated scenes. Without thinking, she knew what to do. Above all, it would be disastrous to confront him. The last thing he wanted now was another emotional woman.
“Hello,” she said with a very small smile, pretending this was not an important occasion, a meeting that might turn their lives and all that mattered to her.
He came in tentatively, followed by old Mrs. March’s spaniel, which to her fury had taken such a liking to him that it had abandoned its mistress. He was unsure what to say, fearful lest she were only biding her time before launching at him with an accusation, a justified charge he could not defend himself against.
She turned away to make it easier, as though it were all perfectly ordinary. She struggled for something to say that would not touch on all that was painful between them.
“I really quite enjoyed my afternoon with Tassie,” she began casually. “The vicar is terribly tedious, and so is his wife. I can see why Eustace likes them. They have a lot in common, similar views on the simplicity of virtue”—she pulled a face—“and the virtue of simplicity. Especially in women and children, which they believe to be roughly the same. But the curate was charming.”
George sat down on the stool before the dressing table, and she watched him with a tiny lift of pleasure. It meant he intended to stay, at least for a few minutes.
“I’m glad,” he said with an awkward smile, fishing for something to continue with. It was ridiculous; a month ago they spoke as easily as old friends—they would have laughed at the vicar together. Now he looked at her, his eyes wide and searching, but only for a moment. Then he looked away again, not daring to press too hard, afraid of a rebuff. “I’ve always liked Tassie. She’s so much more like the Cumming-Gould side of the family than the Marches. I suppose William is, too, for that matter.”
“That can only be good,” Emily said sincerely.
“You’d have liked Aunt Olivia,” he went on. “She was
only thirty-eight when she died. Uncle Eustace was devastated.”
“After eleven children in fifteen years, I should imagine she was, too,” Emily said tartly. “But I don’t suppose Eustace thought of that.”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
She turned to him and smiled, suddenly glad he had never even implicitly expected such a thing of her. For a moment the old warmth was back, tentative, uncertain, but there; then, before she could take too much for granted and be disappointed, she looked away again.
“I’ve always thought visiting the poor was probably more offensive to them than leaving them decently alone,” she went on. “But I think Tassie really did some good. She seems so very honest.”
“She is.” He bit his lip. “Although she’s not yet in Charlotte’s class, thank heaven. But perhaps that’s only a matter of time; she doesn’t have as many opinions yet.” He stood up, wary lest he overstay and risk the precious fragment regained between them. He hesitated, and for a moment the indecision flickered on his face. Dare he bend and kiss her, or was it too soon? Yes—yes, it was still too fragile, Sybilla too recent. He reached out and touched her shoulder and then withdrew his hand. “Good night, Emily.”
She looked at him solemnly. If he came back it must be on her terms, or it would only happen again, and she would not willingly suffer that. “Good night, George,” she replied gently. “Sleep well.”
He went out slowly, the dog pattering after him, and the door clicked shut. She curled up on the bed and hugged her knees, feeling tears of relief prickle in her eyes and run smoothly and painlessly down her cheeks. It was not over, but the terrible helplessness was gone. She knew what to do. She sniffed fiercely, reaching for a handkerchief, and blew her nose hard. It was loud and unladylike—distinctly a sound of triumph.
4
EMILY SLEPT WELL for the first time in weeks and woke late, with the sun filling the room and Millicent rapping on the door.