Ashworth Hall - Anne Perry [158]
“Why?” He was trying not to look alarmed now. He was very pale and tired. There were heavy shadows like bruises around his eyes, his hair falling forward over his brow at the front and standing up in spikes at the crown. “What has happened, Mrs. Pitt? No one else is … dead … are they?”
“No,” she assured him quickly. Although, considering what Justine was about to tell him, he might prefer someone were. “Please sit down. I can stand.”
Now thoroughly fearful, he obeyed, turning from Charlotte to Justine.
Justine sat on the other chair and Charlotte stood in the shadows by the wall. There was a single lamp burning. Piers must have lit it before he answered the door.
Justine glanced at Charlotte once, then she began.
“Piers, we don’t know who killed your father by breaking his neck. I imagine it was one of the Irishmen, but I don’t know which.” Her voice was very nearly steady. Her effort of will must have been immense. “But it was I who hit him over the head with the jar of bath salts and pushed him under the water—” She stopped abruptly, waiting.
There was utter silence but for the faint hiss of the gas.
Twice Piers opened his mouth as if to speak, then realized he did not know what to say. It was left to Justine to continue. Her voice was harsh with pain. Charlotte knew from the tightness of her back, the rigidity of her shoulders, that she had kept some kind of hope until this moment, and now she had at last let it go. She was speaking from despair.
“I meant to kill him,” she went on flatly. “I didn’t actually, only because he was already dead. I had been his mistress … for money … and he was going to tell you.” She smiled with a bitter mockery at herself. “I thought I couldn’t bear that. I still love you, and I wanted you to love me more than I wanted anything else in the world. It would have been much easier to bear than this … having to tell you myself, and not only tell you what I was but what I have done as well. I’m sorry … I’m sorry I did this to you. You will never be able to understand how sorry ….”
He stared at her as if he had not seen her before.
She looked back in silence, without evasion, almost without blinking.
Charlotte was locked immobile. She would have felt intrusive if she had thought either of them had the slightest awareness of her.
“Why?” he said at last, his face almost bruised with shock and incomprehension at what he had heard. “Why did you live that … that kind of … life?”
This time Justine did not use the word whore. If she were tempted to make excuses, she resisted it. Charlotte would never know if it was her presence there which accomplished that.
“At first it was to survive,” Justine answered, her voice low, expressionless, as though the feeling in it were too great to be allowed through. “My father was killed at sea, and my mother and I had nothing. She was ostracized because she had married a foreigner. Her family would do nothing for us. Later I got used to the things it could buy me, the safety, the warmth, and in time the beauty, the freedom from worrying every day where the next week’s food and rent would come from.”
She took a deep breath and went on. “I knew it wouldn’t last. Women get old, then no one wants them. You can’t earn much past thirty, even less past thirty-five. I wanted to save so I could buy a business of some sort. I kept meaning to get out, but it was too easy to stay in. Until I met you at the theater. I came to love you, and I realized what I had paid for my safety. I stopped from that day on.” She did not make any protestations that it was the truth.
Again he sat silent, only shivering a little, as from physical shock.
Minutes passed by—five, ten, a quarter of an hour. Neither of them moved or made a sound.
Charlotte was getting stiff and, in spite of her gown, thoroughly chilled. But she must not interrupt. Justine had not looked at her. She would, if she wanted her to take any part.
At last Piers drew in a breath and let it out in a long