A sudden, fearful death - Anne Perry [162]
“Ah, we are nearly finished,” Edith replied, her face filled with light again. “We have written all his experiences in India, and such things in Africa you wouldn’t dream of. It was quite the most exciting thing I have ever heard in my life. You must read them when we have finished….” Then something of the light drained away as the inevitable conclusion occurred to all of them. Edith had been unable to leave the home which stifled her, the parents who felt her early widowhood meant that she should spend the rest of her life as if she were a single woman, dependent upon her father’s bounty financially, and socially upon her mother’s whim. She had had one chance at marriage, and that was all any woman was entitled to. Her family had done its duty in obtaining one husband for her; her misfortune that he had died young was one she shared with a great many others. She should accept it gracefully. The tragedy of her brother’s death had opened up ugliness from the past which was far from healed yet, and perhaps never would be. The thought of returning to live in Carlyon House again was one which darkened even the brilliance of this summer day.
“I shall look forward to it,” Hester said quietly. She turned to the major. “When do you expect to publish?”
He looked so deep in anxiety and concentration she was surprised when he answered her.
“Oh—I think …” Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He let it out slowly. His face was very pink. “I was going to say there is much work to be done, but that is not true. Edith has been so efficient there is really very little. But I am not sure if I can find a publisher willing to take it, or if I may have to pay to have it done.” He stopped abruptly.
He took another deep breath, his face even pinker, and turned to Edith with fierce concentration. “Edith, I find the thought of concluding the work, and your leaving, quite intolerable. I thought it was writing about India and Africa which was giving me such pleasure and such inner peace, but it is not. It is sharing it with you, and having you here every day. I never imagined I should find a woman’s company so extremely … comfortable. I always considered them alien creatures, either formidable, like governesses and nurses, or totally trivial and far more frightening, like ladies who flirt. But you are the most … agreeable person I have ever known.” His face was now quite scarlet, his blue eyes very bright. “I should be desperately lonely if you were to leave, and the happiest man alive if you were to remain—as my wife. If I presume, I apologize—but I have to ask. I love you so very dearly.” He stopped, overcome by his own audacity, but his eyes never left her face.
Edith looked down at the floor, blushing deeply; she was smiling, not with embarrassment but with happiness.
“My dear Hercules,” she said very gently. “I cannot think of anything in the world I should like so much.”
Hester rose to her feet, kissed Edith gently on the cheek, then kissed the major in exactly the same way, and tiptoed outside into the sun to walk back toward more suitable transport to the Old Bailey and Oliver Rathbone.
11
BEFORE HE COULD BEGIN the case for the defense, Rathbone went to see Sir Herbert again to brief him now that he would be called to the witness stand.
It was not a meeting he looked forward to. Sir Herbert was far too intelligent a man not to realize how slender his chances were, how much depended on emotion, prejudices, sympathies; certainly intangibles that Rathbone was well skilled in handling, but frail threads from which to dangle a man’s life. Evidence was unarguable. Even the most perverse jury seldom went against it.
However, he found Sir Herbert in a far more optimistic mood than he had feared. He was freshly washed and shaved and dressed in clean clothes. Except for the shadows around his eyes and a certain knack of twisting his fingers, he might have been about to set off for the hospital and his own professional rounds.