Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [119]
8
WHEN PITT HAD LEFT the next morning, Charlotte went straight to her escritoire in the parlor and took out her pen, ink and paper. She wrote:
Dear Emily,
I hope you are feeling thoroughly well, and have no need of me at your forthcoming dinner party for that reason, nevertheless it is most important that I come. Thomas told me some extraordinarily serious things about his current case last evening, and I am determined to do all I can to help. I cannot remember having seen him so upset before in quite this way. He has nowhere else to turn, for the most wretched of reasons.
And I know you will already have arranged how your table is to be, but I would like you to change it so as to place me next to both Lord Byam and Mr. Addison Carswell. Believe me I have excellent reasons for asking this, and I do know how inconvenient it will be—but both are being blackmailed and are suspects for murder. You know I do not exaggerate in such matters nor say it lightly.
Naturally I shall tell you all you wish when I see you, however I think perhaps you had better burn this letter when you have read it. In the meantime I remain your loving sister,
Charlotte
She folded it, put it in an envelope, wrote Emily’s address on it, then she found a postage stamp which she licked and stuck on.
“Gracie,” she called out.
She heard Gracie’s feet scuttling down the passage and her head appeared around the door.
“Yes ma’am?”
“Will you take this letter and put it in the box for me, please? It is extremely urgent. I must go to Mrs. Radley’s dinner party tomorrow evening, and it is terribly important that if possible I sit next to particular people, because they may have committed murder—one of them, I mean, not both.”
Any other housemaid might have shrieked and fainted at this point, but Gracie was well used to such ideas and fully intended to help where she could. Her eyes widened in her thin little face and she stood more smartly to attention.
“Oh ma’am.”
Charlotte knew she was longing to help as well, but she could think of nothing for her to do, beyond posting the letter. Judges and politicians were completely outside Gracie’s knowledge, in fact she had probably never even seen such a person, let alone spoken to one.
“It was a moneylender who was killed,” she added, just so her instructions were not so bare.
“Good,” Gracie said instantly, then blushed. “Beggin’ yer pardon, ma’am. But they in’t nice people. Once they gets their ’ands on yer they don’t never let go. Don’t matter ’ow much as yer borrers, or ’ow little, yer never gets done payin’ ’em back.” She frowned, screwing up her face. “But ma’am, people what goes ter Mrs. Radley’s dinner parties don’t borrer from the likes o’ moneylenders, do they?”
“One would not think so,” Charlotte agreed. “But he was also a blackmailer, so one never knows. But you must keep all this to yourself, Gracie. It would be most dangerous to allow anyone else to think you know something. No careless words to the butcher’s boy, or the fishmonger.”
Gracie’s chin came up and her eyes blazed.
“I don’t speak to the errand boys or their likes, ’ceptin’ to tell ’em their business,” she said with heat. “I listens, ’cos that’s me job, I might learn summink, but I don’t never tell ’em nuffin’.”
Charlotte smiled in spite of herself. “I apologize,” she said humbly. “I really didn’t imagine you did, I was simply warning from habit.”
Gracie forgave her instantly, but with a little sniff as she took the letter, and a moment later Charlotte heard the front door open and close.
She also told Pitt that evening when he came home tired and hot and hungry. She made very light of it,