Belgrave Square - Anne Perry [96]
He smiled and said nothing, but it did cross his mind to wonder what Emily thought of it, and indeed if she had had any hand in it. If Fitzherbert jilted his fiancée it would affect Jack not at all unfavorably. He forbore from saying it.
Charlotte took a deep breath.
“And Jack has struck up quite a friendship with Lord Anstiss,” she continued. “He is a most remarkable man, you know.” She recalled his comments about her social ambitions with a tolerant irony. It was no more than she expected. “I don’t think I have listened to anyone more interesting in such a wide variety of subjects. He has so many tales about people, and he recounts them with such a dry, clever wit. And Emily says nothing seems to bore him. Sometimes one might forget how important he is, until one looks at his face for a moment in repose. There is a great deal of power in him, you know.”
He listened in silence, watching her face, the animation, the play of light and shadow over her features and the intense vividness of her interest.
“He was telling Emily about the pre-Raphaelites and the beautiful pictures they have painted creating a whole new idealism, and about William Morris and his furniture. She said he was so interesting he made it all seem urgent and important, not just a collection of facts. And also she met that odd young man, Peter Valerius, who is so consumed with interest in international finance in Africa—of all the tedious subjects so utterly the opposite of Lord Anstiss who is absolutely never a bore.”
She continued about other people Emily had told her of, what they wore and to whom they spoke, but he did not listen with any great attention. Rather he allowed it to wash over him in a pleasant blur of sound. He was far more pleased just to see her face full of life and know that she was telling him not because it was important to her either, but because she was sharing it with him and that mattered intensely.
It was only another day before Innes reported on the unenviable task of following Urban. As a precaution he did not come to Bow Street, but sent a message that he had turned up something which he felt Pitt ought to know.
Accordingly Pitt left Bow Street, where he had been reporting to Drummond and sifting yet again through Urban’s records, and tracing the will of the uncle who had left him the house in Bloomsbury to see if there were also pictures in the legacy. If there were, or if there had been money, it would at least excuse Urban’s indulgence in such things. It took him some time to learn the uncle’s name and trace his will through probate. When he did he found it was quite simple. The house went to “my dear sister’s only son, Samuel Urban.” It included the contents thereof, which were duly listed. There were no modern pictures, indeed there were no pictures at all.
Pitt was immensely relieved to have an excuse to leave the task and at least for the length of the journey involve himself in some physical action, even if it was only a hansom ride to Clerkenwell. He felt the urgency of Innes’s message would allow that indulgence instead of the longer, more circuitous omnibus ride.
He was inside the hansom and bowling along High Holborn when he remembered that Innes had been following Urban, and his discovery was far more likely to concern him than one of the people on the first list. Those were being traced entirely from Clerkenwell, since they were almost all local inhabitants. Although even if Innes had found Weems’s murderer there and had him in custody with irrefutable evidence, that would give Pitt no pleasure. He dreaded seeing the defeat and the guilt in the face of whatever wretched person had finally turned out of his despair into violence, and precipitated himself into even deeper disaster. Cursing or silent, fighting or crushed, underneath it he would be deathly afraid, knowing Newgate and the hangman awaited him.
Pitt realized grimly that he did not really want to find out who had murdered William Weems. And yet the case