Bedford Square - Anne Perry [122]
How often do we perceive the world and those we love not as they are but only as we want them to be?
He wished he could offer her any comfort at all, but there was none.
“Would you like me to call Vespasia for you?” he asked her.
“What? Oh.” She remained silent for a few moments, struggling within herself. Then she seemed to reach some inner conviction. “No … thank you. Not yet. She will find this very difficult. She was—” Her voice cracked. “She was fond of Leo. She thought well of him. Please wait until I am more composed. Until I have a better idea of what happened so that I can tell her.”
“Would you like me to tell her?” he offered. “I can go to her home. Otherwise she will read it in the newspapers.”
The very last vestige of blood drained from her face, and for a moment he was afraid she was going to collapse. She struggled for breath.
Instinctively, ignoring conventions, he moved forward to kneel on the floor beside her, holding her hands where they were knotted iron hard on her lap. He put his other arm around her. “Slowly!” he commanded. “Breathe slowly. Don’t gasp.”
She obeyed, but even so it was several minutes before she regained physical control of herself.
“I am sorry,” she apologized. “I beg your pardon. I had barely thought of the newspapers.”
“I’ll call on Vespasia as I leave here,” he said decisively. “I am sure she will wish to be with you. It will be easier for her to face this if she is not alone.”
She looked at him, and there was a warmth of gratitude momentarily in her eyes. She did not question his decision. Perhaps she was glad to have any step taken for her, anything that relieved a bit of the weight she must bear alone from now on.
“Thank you,” she accepted.
There was nothing else to ask her. He rose to his feet. She could summon the maid if she wished. She might prefer just at the moment to be alone, perhaps to weep, although that would probably come later.
He was at the door when she spoke.
“Mr. Pitt … my husband did not kill himself … he was murdered. I don’t know how, or by whom, except that I have to presume it was the blackmailer. If you stop now, he will get away with it.” The last sentence was said with sudden, choking anger, and her eyes blazed a challenge to him, on the brink of blame.
He did not know what to say. There were no grounds for her charge except loyalty, pain and despair.
“I won’t take anything for granted, Mrs. Cadell,” he promised. “I shall look for proof of every detail before I accept it.”
He and Tellman questioned all the household staff, but there had been no break-in; no strangers had been seen. The delivery boys at the back door had not gone through the wooden gate in the wall to the garden; indeed, they had been too busy flirting with the scullery maid and the lady’s maid, respectively, to leave the step at all. They had barely succeeded in doing the duty they were employed for.
No one had come through the house, and the only person to go through the garden door was the gardener’s boy delivering ties and doing a little work on the old white climbing rose which was in bloom and in need of holding up.
No one knew anything about the gun. Cadell must have had it for some time. There were a pair of pistols in a case locked into the corner cupboard in the study, but this was not one of them. Theodosia said she had never seen it before, but admitted that she hated guns and would not recognize one from another.
The staff were not permitted to touch them or have anything to do with them, so they could offer no information at all. It seemed that where Cadell had obtained it or how long he had owned it would remain a mystery, like much else to do with his whole