Anne Perry's Silent Nights_ Two Victorian Christmas Mysteries - Anne Perry [38]
But what if someone had learned? Any man might feel unbearably betrayed to be rejected for another woman. It would be seen as the final insult. It would be unendurable if anyone else found out. Was that what the quarrel with John had been?
“Oh,” she said softly, sensing the movement of his thought. “You do not need to be so delicate with me. I am aware of such things, in women as well as in men. But I had no sense that it was so with her.”
Now the blood scorched up his face and he felt ridiculous. If Faraday, not to mention Barclay, knew that he had even entertained such a thought in Melisande’s presence, let alone discussed it with her, they would be appalled.
She was smiling, a flicker of real amusement in her eyes. “I liked Olivia,” she told him. “I felt comfortable with her, and very free to be honest, perhaps not only with her but with myself. And that is not always true for me. If I can bear the way she died, and think of the brutality, and the passion that caused it, then surely I can look at a little human frailty without turning away with thought only for myself? She deserved better than that of me. Moral queasiness is rather a cheap escape, don’t you think?”
He looked at her, and for a moment the pity and the honesty in her face made her infinitely beautiful to him. Faraday, with his lumbering imagination and his simplistic judgments, was a clod, bitterly unworthy of her.
He wondered again if she knew that Faraday had once courted Olivia also? Should he tell her? Was it just a grubby and horribly obvious attempt to spoil her happiness because he envied any man who could spend time in her company, let alone marry her? Or was it the only real honesty, because Faraday might be involved in Olivia’s death?
He had no idea. The only answer would be to learn more about Faraday and then judge what to say. It must be the truth, and it must be fair. It was Melisande’s safety that mattered, not whether she liked Runcorn’s actions and certainly not whether Faraday did.
His face was still hot as he crafted his reply. “I don’t like finding weaknesses in people, even if they help to solve a crime, but I can’t afford to ignore them or lie to myself or others. I would like to have protected you from having to think of this.”
“Thank you, Mr. Runcorn,” she acknowledged. “I do not wish to be protected from life. I think we might miss a great deal more of the good, and the bad would find us anyway. At least the sense of emptiness would. I think I would rather eat something unpleasant now and then, than perish of starvation sitting at the table because I was afraid to try. Please find out what really happened to Olivia.” She turned and walked away before he could find the words to answer her, and repeat his promise.
He had no choice now but to look more deeply into Faraday’s life and character. He began where Miss Mendlicott had ended and, through conventional methods, was able to look up the man’s days in Cardiff University where he was moderately successful in gaining a degree in history, even though he did not need to earn his living by it. He had traveled in Europe on and off for a year or two in all the expected places. He did not see Venice or Capri. He did not venture as far as Athens, which Runcorn had read about, and would have leapt at the chance to see. He did not visit the beautiful city of Barcelona, named after Hannibal Barca, who had crossed the Alps with elephants, to attack Rome, before the days of Julius Caesar. That was one history lesson from school days that had fired Runcorn’s imagination and he had never forgotten it.
Runcorn left the library in Bangor and walked out into the wind with his mind in a whirl. He had visited a different world where all the privileges of class and money did not buy the magic he