Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [36]
There was nothing to report to Micah Drummond, so Pitt went home to Charlotte and his clean, warm house where everything smelled sweet and he had no fear of the knock on the door. She would tell him all about the ball at Emily’s, the clothes, the food, the chatter. He could watch her face and hear the excitement in her voice, and imagine her playing the society hostess for one night and getting more pleasure out of it than all the duchesses put together, because it was a game, a fancy dress parade. She could come home to sanity at the end, to her children, comfort that had some sort of proportion with the lot of others, the ordinary, sane things like baking bread, mending the children’s clothes, taking the dead heads off the roses, sitting by the open window in the evening and watching the moths in the summer garden.
The following day he and Innes resumed working their way through the list, this time with the genteel poor, those who struggled to maintain the appearance of respectability and would rather sit in the cold all winter than forgo having a maid because quality always had a maid; people who would eat bread and gravy when they were alone, so that when callers came they could present better fare. These were people who had only one outfit of clothes that were not threadbare, out of fashion, boots that leaked and no coat, but they walked to church every Sunday with heads high and polite smiles and nods to neighbors, and made fantastic excuses why they did not accept invitations, because they could not return the hospitality. He ached for them also, and knew why the doors were answered with fear, and why he was offered tea which was served with shaking hands. He felt a hard, compulsive satisfaction when they could prove where they were when William Weems was shot. It was one advantage the poor had over Lord Byam; privacy was a luxury they tasted very seldom indeed. Almost all of them were crowded with others at that time in the evening, and all night. Few had any space alone, even to wash or to sleep. Many of the very poor shared a single room and they would not do more than dream of a time when they could do otherwise. One loan piled upon another, and the interest swallowed all they had, the capital was never paid off. Debt was a way of life.
Pitt heartily wished whoever had murdered Weems had destroyed all his records. Pitt hated him for that omission far more than for having blown the man’s brains out with half a dozen of his own gold coins.
On the fifth day Pitt took a hansom back to Bow Street to tell Micah Drummond that he had learned nothing so far either to implicate Lord Byam or to exonerate him. It was a little after five in the afternoon and the sun was still high and warm. The trees in the square were in full leaf, and music floated across from the band in Lincoln Inn Fields as he peered out of his cab. Children in bright clothes played with hoops and sticks painted like horses’ heads, and a solemn man with his sleeves rolled up flew a red kite for a small boy whose upturned face was full of wonder. A courting couple strolled by arm in arm, the girl giggling with pleasure, the man swaggering very slightly as if he had something worth showing off to the world. A nursemaid passed going in the opposite direction, wheeling a perambulator, her head high, her starched apron dazzling white in the sun. Two old gentlemen sat on a wooden seat in the sun, looking faintly dusty in the bright light, their faces benign.
By the time Pitt reached Bow Street he had almost forgotten the all-pervading want he had seen all day, tasting it in the air as if it were a kind of grit.
He paid the cabby and went