A Stranger in Mayfair - Charles Finch [96]
It was strange to be in that quintessentially English room, with its hunting prints, its lines of leather-bound books, its fireplace, its old portraits along the wall, and to imagine all the violence that it had borne. Both Ludo’s careless life—marrying a maid, having a child with her, and later accepting him in as a footman (the madness!)—and more importantly Elizabeth Starling’s raging anger, her dark heart.
As she sobbed, dispossessed now beyond a doubt of whatever life she had made for herself, he almost felt pity for her. Then he remembered the other mother, the one in a hotel in Hammersmith, slowly coming apart at the seams.
“Come, Ludo,” he said. “You shall have a drink. This will all be over soon. I’m sorry you had to endure it.”
Ludo looked at Lenox, tears in his puffy, dissipated eyes. “My own son” was all he said. “The insanity of it.”
“What happened?” asked Dallington. “You wanted the blame to fall on Paul?”
“No!” It wasn’t Ludo but Elizabeth who spoke, between sobs, from the chair. Despite her anguish she couldn’t stand to see her son’s name fouled. “He saw it. He saw me. Then when the trial was close he refused to let Collingwood stay in jail any longer.”
“And you—you let Collingwood believe Paul was a murderer? Your son?”
“Why do you think I’m crying, you halfwit?” she said. “Because of Paul. I don’t care whether Freddie Clarke burns in hell. Or his father, for that matter.”
“But I helped you!” said Ludo, shocked again. “You—you told me we had to protect ourselves! Our family!”
“I’m not going to say another word,” Elizabeth answered.
In its dimensions it was more like a Greek tragedy than anything he had ever come across in his career: the striving bastard (who turned out not to be a bastard at all), educating himself, seeking the approval of a diffident father; the mad wife; the incidental victims; the double-crossing and lies. Dallington was glassy-eyed. There was none of the satisfaction that usually comes at the end of a case.
In due course the doctor arrived, and so the wheels of bureaucracy began their slow revolutions. He gave her a sedative; she was docile enough but, true to her promise, didn’t speak. After him the police came, and then more police—the inspector, Rudd, was extremely troubled, needless to say—and soon she was taken away.
Rudd stayed behind, a bluff, genial, stupid man with a great red nose, the sort who would be the most popular man at his local public house. He was one of the two or three men who had risen after the death of Inspector Exeter.
“What do you reckon, Mr. Lenox?” he said. “Can she really have done it?”
“She admitted as much.”
He shook his head as if he didn’t like that much. “And attacked you! Lady Macbeth ain’t in it!”
“She ain’t,” agreed Dallington, still awestruck. Then a thought occurred to him. “I daresay Collingwood will be relieved.”
“Mightily,” said Lenox.
“Ah, you’ve put your finger on the thing, young man—is he innocent? Was he not complicit? What about the green butcher’s apron?”
Both Dallington and Lenox turned uneasy eyes on Ludo, who was sitting in the corner alone, a devastated man; everything in his mien said he hadn’t realized the extent of his wife’s evil.
“He certainly wasn’t involved,” said Lenox, “unless he agreed to go to Newgate to protect the Starlings.”
There was a tremendous commotion at the door just then, and two constables with their hands full of a fifty-year-old woman staggered back into the room.
“Where is she! I’ll kill her!” cried Frederick’s mother. “Where is that devil woman?” Her wild gaze alighted on Ludo. “Oh, Luddy!” she cried and in two or three steps fell on him.
To Lenox’s surprise he returned the embrace, and tears seemed to escape his eyes, too. “I’m so sorry,” Ludo said, patting her on the back. “Our poor son. He was such a lovely boy.”
In that instant Lenox wondered whether Ludo had loved her all along.
Chapter Forty-Eight
The next day Lenox resumed his place in the House of Commons. He was determined