Ashworth Hall - Anne Perry [65]
He handed the letters back to Piers.
“I can see why he felt the threats were probably irrelevant,” he said matter-of-factly. “They could be from anyone at all, and seem to come from Nationalist Catholic and Protestant Unionist alike. It doesn’t help us at all. Still, we’ll take them.”
“Just … the threats?” Piers said quickly.
“Yes, of course. Lock the others back in the drawer. You can destroy them later if we find they have nothing to do with the case.”
“They can’t have.” Piers still held them in his hand. “There’s nothing political about them. It’s simply a sordid affair … well, two. But both of them are over … were over … before this. Can’t you just burn them, and keep quiet? My mother has enough to bear without having to know about this.”
“Lock them up again,” Pitt instructed. “And keep the keys yourself. When the case is over you can come in here and sort anything you want to, and destroy what is better kept discreet. Now, let me look through the rest of the drawers.”
The butler returned, looking haggard, bringing the promised hot toddy. He seemed on the brink of enquiring as to their success, then changed his mind and left.
They searched the rest of the library but found nothing more of interest to the case. The books and papers shed more light on Greville’s character. He was obviously a man of high intelligence and wide interests. There was the first draft of a monograph on ancient Roman medicine, and Pitt could happily have taken the time to read it, had he had any excuse. It was vividly written. On the shelves there were books on subjects as diverse as early Renaissance painting in Tuscany and the native birds of North America.
Pitt wondered if Eudora had any place in the room, if he had shared some of his interests with her, or if their worlds of the mind had been entirely separate, as was the case in some marriages. All that many held in common were a home, children, a social life and status, and economic circumstance. The imagination, the humor, the great voyages of the heart and intellect, were all made alone. Even the searching of the spirit was unshared.
How much would Eudora really miss him? Had she any idea of the reality of her home, or did she see what she wished to see? Many people did that as a way to place armor around their vulnerability and preserve what they had for survival. He could not blame her if she were one of those.
Luncheon was brought to them in the library and they ate by the fire, saying little. Piers had already learned more about his father in the last two hours than in the preceding ten years, and it complicated the picture he held of him. There was too much to admire and to despise, too much that tore open the emotions and made grief a far more complex thing than simply a sudden loneliness.
Pitt did not intrude with speech.
After they had finished Pitt went out to find the coach driver and question him about the incident on the road. That had been a serious and genuine attempt at murder.
He found the man in the stables polishing a harness. The smell of leather and saddle soap jerked him back in memory to his youth and the estate where his father had been gamekeeper and he had grown up. He could have been a boy again, scrounging winter apples, sitting silently in the corner listening to the grooms and coachmen talking of the horses and dogs, swapping gossip. He could imagine going back to supper in the gamekeeper’s cottage, and to bed in his tiny room under the eaves. Or later, after his father’s disgrace, after the anger and the rage of injustice had passed, to his room at the top of the big house, when Sir Arthur had taken in his mother and himself.
Now he would ride back to Ashworth Hall and sleep beside Charlotte in one of the great guest bedrooms with its four-poster bed and embroidered linen and a fire in the grate. He would not douse himself quickly in the icy water from