Ashworth Hall - Anne Perry [67]
“Yes sir.” It was grudging. He hated it, but he saw no alternative. His hands clenched over the harness and his shoulders were tight.
“Were there others like Mrs. Easterwood?” Pitt asked again.
“A few.” He kept his eyes on Pitt’s. He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Mostly up Lunnon way. Never wi’ wives of a friend. He’d not take anything what’s theirs. Only take them as is willin’—” He stopped suddenly.
“And don’t count,” Pitt finished for him, remembering the tone of Malcolm Anders’s letter.
“There’s nobody what doesn’t count, Mr. Pitt.”
“Even whores?”
The coachman’s face reddened. “You got no place to go calling any woman a whore, Mr. Pitt, an’ I don’ care who you are, I won’t stand ’ere an’ listen to it.”
“Even girls like Kathleen O’Brien? Lie with anyone to better their chances and—” Pitt too stopped suddenly, seeing the rage and the hurt in the man’s eyes. He had gone too far. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. He meant it. He could picture the story. It would be one of a dozen variations on the old theme, a handsome maid, a master who was used to taking anything he wanted and did not think of servants as people like himself, with tenderness and dignity or honor to be hurt. The distinction would not even be intentional.
“She weren’t like that.” The coachman glared at him. “You’ve no place saying it!”
“I wanted to provoke you into honesty,” Pitt confessed. “What happened to Kathleen?”
The man was still angry. He reminded Pitt of the coachman where he grew up, taciturn, loyal, honest to the point of bluntness, but endlessly patient with animals or the young.
“She got dismissed for thievin’,” he said grudgingly. “But it were because she wouldn’t have no one touch ’er.”
Pitt found himself relaxing. He had not realized until that moment that he had been clenching his hands so hard the nails had scraped his palms, and his muscles ached.
“Did she go back to Ireland?”
“I dunno. We gave ’er what we could, me and Cook and Mr. Wheeler.”
“Good. But you are still loyal to Mr. Greville?”
“No sir,” he corrected. “I’m loyal to the mistress. I wouldn’t ’ave ’er know about them things. Some ladies know an’ can üve with it, others can’t. I reckon as she’s one as couldn’t. In’t nothing sour in her, or some would say realistic. You won’t go telling her, will you?”
“I won’t tell her anything I don’t have to,” Pitt answered, and he said it with regret, because he knew it did not mean a great deal. He wished he could have given the assurances the coachman sought.
They rode back through the gathering dusk, the light dying rapidly in the autumn evening, and Pitt was profoundly glad he was not trying to make his way along the hedgerows and through the woods alone. There was little wind, but even so the air was growing colder all the time, and the sharp prickle of frost stung his nose. Twigs snapped under his horse’s hooves and its breath was white against the gloom.
It was over an hour and a half before they saw the lights of Ashworth Hall and rode into the stable yard to dismount. In the past Pitt had always had to unsaddle his own horse, walk it cool, rub it down and feed and water it, sometimes Matthew’s horse as well. He felt remiss, uncaring, to hand it over to someone else and simply walk away. It was another reminder of how far he was from his origins. Piers, young and slender and full of pain, did it as casually as a man takes off his jacket in his own house.
Pitt followed him in through the side door, scraping his boots on the ornamental cast-iron grid set there for the purpose.
Inside the house was warm, even the hall seemed to embrace him after the sharpness