Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [103]
“You will think I intrude into my husband’s affairs,” she went on quickly, looking downward, abashed. “But I don’t. I was simply concerned in case he was ill. I went downstairs to see if there were anything I could do to help …” She stopped and raised her eyes slowly, her voice very soft. “I found him in his study, not working as I had thought, but pacing the floor back and forth.” She bit her lip. “He was angry when he saw me in the doorway, and he denied there was anything wrong. But I know him, Mr. Drummond. He will work late, if there is occasion to. I have seen him stay up till one or two in the morning often. But never before in the eighteen years we have been married has he gone to bed, and then risen at three o’clock to go down and pace the floor of the study, with no papers out, no books, just his thoughts, and all the lights blazing.”
“It would seem there is something that concerns him profoundly,” he said with a chill of fear inside him. He had refused to consider that Byam might actually be guilty. Maybe he was wrong. Perhaps Byam calling him before he was even suspected was a double bluff. Perhaps the letter and the note that Weems was supposed to have kept were only his excuse to call Drummond, and there was something far more damaging yet to come.
He was torn with a dreadful mixture of emotions: dread of discovering irrefutably that it was Byam who had murdered Weems, and sickness inside at having to tell Eleanor-she would feel so betrayed. He was the person she had come to for help. Embarrassment: how could he explain all this to Pitt? He would leave him in a wretched position. And a sudden ease of a gripping weight inside him: if Byam was guilty, then Eleanor would be free.
That was a shameful thought, and the blood burned hot up his face, hot right up to his hair. Free for what? If Byam was hanged she would be a widow. That would not necessarily stop her loving him, and it certainly would not free her from terrible, overwhelming grief.
He did not even think of fear for himself, or his own involvement with the Inner Circle.
“Please—don’t let us stand here,” he said quietly. “Sit, and let us talk of it and learn if there is anything we can do that will resolve this problem.”
She accepted and sank into the chair gratefully. He sat opposite on one of the Chippendales, perched forward on the edge and still staring at her.
“I presume you have asked him what it is that troubles him?”
“Of course, but he will not tell me. He said he simply found it hard to sleep, and came downstairs because he did not wish to disturb me.”
“And is it not possible that that is the truth?”
Her smile was faint and a little twisted. “No. Sholto is not normally troubled by sleeplessness, and if he were he would have found a book from the library and taken it to bed with him, not paced up and down the study. And he looked ashen.” Her eyes met Drummond’s. “No one looks as he did merely because they cannot sleep. His face was haggard—as though he had seen the worst thing he feared.”
He spoke quickly; a question to reach for the last hope, not a dismissal of her fears.
“You are sure it was not the lamplight playing tricks on the features of a man overtired, and perhaps woken from an ill dream?”
“Yes—I am quite sure.” Her voice was very low; there was certainty in it, and pain. “Something terrible has happened, and I do not know what, except it seems inevitable to me that it must have to do with the death of the usurer. Surely if it were anything else he would have told me. He is not ill. We have no family matters, no relatives who might cause us distress.” Her eyes shadowed. “We never had children.” She was speaking more and more rapidly as the tension mounted in her. “My parents are dead and so are his. My brother is quite well, Sholto’s brother is in India