Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [100]
“How do you do, Mr. Carfax,” Zenobia answered, regarding him without disguising her interest. His clothes were beautifully cut, his shirts of silk, the signet ring on his hand in perfect taste. Even his boots were handmade and, she guessed, of imported leather. Someone was making him a handsome allowance, and it was not Lady Mary, unless she had changed out of all character! She would give a little at a time, Zenobia knew, carefully, watching how each penny was spent: it was her form of power. “You are very gracious,” Zenobia said aloud. It was habit, not any liking for him that prompted her words.
He gestured towards Helen. “May I present my wife.”
“How do you do, Miss Gunne,” Helen said dutifully. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance.”
“And I yours, Mrs. Carfax.” Zenobia smiled very slightly, as one would to a woman one had only just met. “May I offer my deepest sympathy on your recent bereavement. Everyone of sensibility must feel for you.”
Helen looked almost taken aback; her mind had been on something else. “Thank you,” she muttered. “Most kind of you ...” Apparently she had already forgotten Zenobia’s name.
The next thirty minutes passed in desultory conversation. James and his mother were obviously close, socially, if not emotionally. Zenobia watched them with intense interest, making occasional remarks to Helen sufficient to be civil, and now and again searching her face when she was watching her husband. From those trivial words, the exchanges of polite society, the pauses between, the flicker of resentments, suppressed pain, habits of manner so deeply ingrained as to be unconsciously adhered to, and the edge of fear unheard or ignored by others, Zenobia guessed at a whole history of hungers unmet.
She knew Mary Carfax and was not surprised that she both spoiled and dominated her only son, flattering him, indulging his vanity and his appetites, and at the same time kept the purse strings tightly in her own jewel-encrusted fingers. His carefully well-mannered resentment was inevitable, his shifts between gratitude and rancor, his habit of dependence, his underlying knowledge that she thought him a fine man, the best, and his own whispering doubt that he had never justified such esteem and almost certainly never would. If it had been Mary Carfax who had been murdered, Zenobia would have known where to look immediately.
But it was Etheridge. The money leapt to mind, massive, lavish, all that even James Carfax could need to gain his precious freedom. But from whom? Only from Mary—it would tie him to Helen, now that the Married Women’s Property Acts had been passed.
Or would it? One had only to glance at Helen’s pale face, her eyes on James’s or staring blindly through the window at the sky, to see she loved her husband far more than he did her. She praised him, she protected him, a faint flush of pleasure touched her cheeks when he spoke gently to her, her pain showed naked when he was patronizing or used her as the butt of his swift, light jokes, distasteful in their subtle cruelty. She would give him whatever he wanted in an attempt to purchase his love, and Zenobia’s heart ached for her, knowing her pain would never cease. She was seeking something which he did not possess to give. Changes unimaginable would have to be wrought in James Carfax before he had the depth or the power within him from which to draw generous or untainted love. Zenobia had loved weak men herself, when she was alone in Africa, and old memories resurfaced, and old hungers. She had woken to the slow, scalding pain that her love would never be returned. You can draw little from a shallow vessel; the quality of feeling reflects the quality of the man—or woman.