Ashworth Hall - Anne Perry [153]
She caught the urgency in his voice even through the remnants of sleep. She sat up, blinking and shielding her eyes, her hair too loosely braided to stay in place, and now falling over her shoulders.
“What is it? What’s happened?” She stared at him, not yet alarmed because there was no fear in him. “Do you know who did it?”
“No … but it wasn’t Justine.”
“Yes, it was.” She was awake now, still blinking in the light, but feeling curious. “It had to be. Why else would she be on the landing in a maid’s dress? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“She went in and hit him on the head, then pulled him under the water,” he agreed. “But she didn’t kill him … he was already dead!”
She glanced at him as if she were not sure if she had grasped what he had said.
“Already dead? Are you sure? How do you know?”
“Yes, I am sure, because Piers said so—”
“Piers?” She was sitting up now. “If he knew, why didn’t he say before?” Her face darkened. “Thomas … maybe he knew it was Justine and he is—”
“No.” He was quite certain. “No, he does not know what it means. He merely told me the evidence ….”
“What evidence?” she demanded. “What evidence does he know now that he didn’t know before?” She was shivering as the bedclothes fell from around her.
“We took the body to the laundry and did something of an autopsy …. Charlotte, Justine had every intention of killing Ainsley Greville, but someone else got there before her and broke his neck … with a single, very expert blow … someone who knows how to kill and has probably done it before.”
She shuddered, but seemed to have forgotten the bedclothes within a hand’s reach of her.
“You mean an assassin,” she said in a whisper. “One of the Irishmen here.”
“Yes, I can think of no other answer,” he agreed.
“Padraig Doyle?”
“I don’t know. Possibly.”
“Eudora will never get over it.” She stared at him. “Thomas …”
“What?” He thought he knew what she was going to say, something about pity and that it was not his fault; not to be too hurt for her, grieved, and above all guilty. He was wrong.
“You must prepare yourself for the possibility that she already knows,” she answered.
Everything in him was repelled by the idea—it was appalling. It was unimaginable that behind those soft features and wounded eyes was an accomplice, even a silent one, in cold, indiscriminate political murder.
Charlotte was looking at him with hurt and sorrow in her face, but for him, not for Eudora. “She is very close to her brother,” she went on quietly. “And she is as Irish as any of them, even if she doesn’t seem like it or hasn’t lived there for twenty years. She might still carry the old hatreds and the unreason which seems to infect everybody in this issue.”
She put out her hand and laid it softly over his. “Thomas … you’ve seen them, you’ve heard them argue. You can see what happens to people once they start talking about Ireland. One man’s freedom is seen as another man’s exploitation and loss, or theft of all he has built up over the generations, and far worse than that, and far more justifiable to defend, as loss of his freedom of faith. A Nationalist independent Ireland would be Roman Catholic. Its laws would be Catholic, whatever the beliefs of the individual. There would be censorship of books according to the Papal Index. All sorts of things would be banned.”
She grasped the coverlets and pulled them half around her.
“I resented it when my own father told me what to read and what not to. I should rebel if the Pope did. He’s not anything to do with me. But in a Catholic Ireland some books would be illegal. I wouldn’t even know they existed ….I’d learn only what the Church decided I should hear. Maybe I don’t want to read them ….I might even agree ….I just want the choice to be mine.”
He did not interrupt.
“On all things, I want laws my own people can vote on ….” She smiled lopsidedly. “Actually, I’d even like to vote on them myself. But either way, I won’t be told by a lot of cardinals in