Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [130]
But this was entirely different. Why had he joined the secret brotherhood of the Inner Circle? He could remember Pitt’s face as exactly as if he had only just left him, standing in his office looking tired, deep lines of strain around his mouth, and his eyes unhappy. Drummond had realized immediately that Pitt’s distress was more than merely professional, but he had still been totally unprepared for what had followed. Pitt had not merely told him of corruption on the force, officers who were members of the Inner Circle and had been pressed by that secret brotherhood to use their professional power in the interests of members, but he had quietly but relentlessly asked him of his own concern with the brotherhood, and if he had been aware what hostage he was to their commands, and the penalties for disobedience. He had been civil, even gentle, but the train of doubt he had started in Drummond’s mind was beyond evasion, as he had known it must be.
He could answer Pitt with innocence. No, he had never made any decision of even the slightest degree to comply with the brotherhood’s wishes. But would that always be so? Was it so now? He had answered Byam’s summons because Byam was a brother. He had interfered with the course of investigation in Clerkenwell, and put Pitt onto the case of William Weems’s death, to suit the brotherhood. What else might he have done, unrealizing from whence the request originated? He racked his brain, and could not remember or decide.
And what might he yet do, if he discovered evidence that Byam was guilty, if not of Weems’s murder, then of complicity in it, or of sheltering whoever had done it, or merely of concealing evidence? What would the brotherhood do if he did not comply? He remembered with a bitter chill the secret initiation, which he had simply thought colorful and a trifle absurd at the time. But looking back now, it had contained some very dark threats to those who betrayed a brother or revealed any of the group’s secrets. He had thought them in a rather adolescent way romantic until now, insomuch as he had thought of them at all: the sorts of things boys got up to in the long holidays out of school when there was little to occupy the imagination but summer days and stories of adventure.
Now it seemed from Pitt as if the Inner Circle exercised a very real discipline on its errant members, and punishment was swift and extremely unpleasant. Would it be visited on him? Of course. Why not, if he failed in his duty to his oaths?
Even more unpleasant to him would be if he were asked to administer punishment upon another. Would he do it?
No!
Regina Cars well passed close to him, hesitated in her step as if to speak, then saw his face more closely and continued on her way. A sensitive woman.
But why would he not carry out such a punishment? He knew the answer before he was prepared to admit it.
Because a man must be free to follow his own conscience. No society of any sort, whatever its aims, however noble, must be allowed to dictate what a man believes to be right or wrong.
But that is not what the oath had said. And now that he saw it in plainer light, that was where he had made the mistake upon which all the others depended. He had sworn allegiance to people, not to an ideal, to something unknown which might change from what he believed to what he did not—and he had allowed himself no avenue of redress. That was what Pitt had pointed out to him.
He could see Byam and Lord Anstiss talking together, Anstiss standing square, a glass in his hand, his stocky body at ease, but not elegant. Beside him Byam stood a little sideways, his weight asymmetrically balanced, with a curious kind of grace, but there was a tension in him that showed in the angle of his head, his tight fingers around his goblet.
He was not close enough