Ashworth Hall - Anne Perry [100]
“She didn’t know it would. Gracie very nearly didn’t tell me.”
She smiled with a flash of humor. “Really, Mr. Pitt! Gracie’s loyalty to you would always win in the end, for a dozen reasons. I know that. Doll must know it too.”
“But Doll didn’t know that anyone else was aware of her tragedy,” he argued back.
“She said so?” Her eyebrows arched delicately.
“Perhaps that is not true,” he conceded. “At least one other servant knew, although I doubt she told him.”
“Him?” she said quickly. “No, more likely she confided in another woman, or they guessed. It is one of the first things that would come to a woman’s mind, Mr. Pitt. They would know something was wrong at the time she was raped … if it was rape. Or seduced, which is more likely. Women are very observant, you know. We notice the slightest change in other people, and we can read our own sex very clearly. I would be surprised if the cook and the housekeeper didn’t know, at least.”
“So she told them it was the master, rather than say who it really was?” He still found the idea difficult, but it was making more sense all the time. “Why? Wouldn’t that be a very dangerous thing to say? What if it were reported back to him?”
“Who would do that?” she asked. “And if it were one of the menservants, surely they would be willing to protect their own? After all, she didn’t say it outside the house. Mr. Greville himself never knew of it, and certainly neither Mrs. Greville nor Piers did.”
He thought about it a little more seriously. It was not impossible.
She saw his indecision in his face.
“Do you really think a politician and diplomat of Mr. Greville’s standing is going to seduce a maid in his own household?” she urged. “Mr. Pitt, this is a political murder, an assassination. Mr. Greville was brilliant at his task. For the first time in a generation it seems there may really be some improvement in the Irish Problem, and he was responsible for that. It was his skill at diplomacy, his genius at the conference table that was bringing it about. This is what was unique about him. Surely that was why he was killed … here … and now?”
Her face became suddenly more grave. There was a new and greater tension in her body. “Perhaps he did not tell you—he may have wished not to frighten anyone further—but there was a very unpleasant happening yesterday when an urn was crashed onto the terrace only a yard away from Mr. Radley. If it had struck him he would unquestionably have been killed. That can only be because he has been out to step into Mr. Greville’s place in the conference. It is political, Mr. Pitt. Please give his family the opportunity to recover from their grief, and mourn for him, without destroying the memories they have.”
He looked at her earnest face. She meant passionately what she said, and it was easy to understand. He would like to protect Eudora himself.
“You have a high opinion of Mr. Greville,” he said gravely.
“Of course. I know a lot about him, Mr. Pitt. I am going to marry his son. Look for the person who envied his brilliance, who was afraid of what he could achieve … and above all, in whose interest it is to keep the Irish Problem unsolved.”
“Miss Baring—”
He got no further. There was an explosive crash. The walls shook, the ground trembled. The looking glass above the mantel shattered outwards, and suddenly the air was full of dust.
The gas mantles fell in shards onto the floor, and out in the hall someone started screaming over and over again.
8
THE NOISE DIED AWAY. For seconds Pitt did not move, too dazed to realize what had happened. Then he knew. A bomb! Someone had exploded dynamite in the house. He spun around and lunged out the door.
The hall was full of smoke and dust. He could not even see who was screaming, but the door of Jack’s study was hanging on one hinge and the small table that had stood outside was lying in splinters on the floor.