Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [148]
They were still standing facing each other when they heard the outside door open and the butler’s voice welcoming Lord Byam.
Eleanor closed her eyes for a moment as if she had been struck, then stepped back from Drummond and went to the door. She met his eyes for an instant, then turned the latch and went out into the hall, leaving the door ajar. Drummond heard her voice plainly.
“Good evening, Sholto.”
“Good evening, my dear.” The clarity of his tone, the immediacy of it, brought his presence to Drummond more sharply than he would have thought possible. They had been speaking about him and the reality of his being, his mind, his intelligence, his volition had almost receded into an impersonal problem. Hearing his voice brought him back with a vividness that was like a shock of icy water.
“Mr. Drummond is here to see you,” Eleanor went on. Perhaps they were simply the words anyone would have used, but they also sounded like a kind of warning, before he could say anything else, speak of his day, expose any anxieties or fears.
“Micah Drummond?” He sounded surprised. “Did he say what for?”
“No …”
“You hesitated.”
“Did I? It is because I fear it cannot be good. If he had arrested someone he would have told me.”
“Then I had better see him.” Was his voice as edgy as Drummond thought? Was there fear in it, or simply irritation that a man he knew so slightly should have called at such an inconvenient hour? “Where is he?”
“In the library.”
He made no answer that Drummond could hear. The next moment his footsteps sounded sharply across the flagged floor and the door swung open and he was there.
“I believe you called to see me.” He closed the door behind him. He did not offer any refreshment or exchange the usual trivialities. Either he assumed Eleanor had already done so, or else he considered them irrelevant.
Drummond looked at him. He was pale and there were dark smudges of sleeplessness under his eyes. He was immaculately dressed, as always, but there was an air of distraction about him and it was all too obvious that the tension Eleanor had spoken of was in him. Every movement was tight, awkward, his muscles stiff, his attention strained.
“Yes,” Drummond agreed, anger at the man evaporating, and now strongly mixed with pity. For the moment the fact that he was Eleanor’s husband, and therefore the man who stood irrevocably between him and the woman he now loved, was immaterial, so unimportant as to have vanished from his thoughts.
“Do I take it that there have been new events, or discoveries?” Byam came across the room and stood close to the mantel, where Eleanor had been so shortly before.
“There are new questions,” Drummond equivocated. He must not allow Byam to realize that Eleanor had confided in him. He could only view it as a kind of betrayal, even if he understood it as anxiety for him and a belief that she could help.
“Indeed?” Byam’s black brows rose. “Then you had better ask them, since it is what you have come for. Although I cannot think of anything I have not already told you.”
Drummond began with what he had intended to say before Eleanor had spoken to him.
“It regards that circle of which we are both members.”
Byam’s face tightened. “I hardly think this is the time, or the place, to discuss the business of the Circle—”
“You called me here in the name of the Circle,” Drummond interrupted. “Therefore they are already included in anything we do.”
Byam winced, as though what Drummond had said were in bad taste.
“I call on you as a brother in that circle to which we both belong, to help me in a certain matter.” Drummond’s own voice hardened and he saw Byam’s look of astonishment, then extraordinary relief. It was short-lived. As soon as Drummond continued it disappeared.
“In the matter of Horatio Osmar.”
“Horatio Osmar? I don’t know the man. He is not one of the