Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [109]
Charlotte realized with irritation that she had dropped her handkerchief, which she had taken out and held to her eyes from time to time so that she might observe Garnet Royce undetected. It was one of the few lace-edged ones she had left and far too precious to lose simply for the sake of keeping dry. She excused herself from Aunt Vespasia and turned to retrace her steps back round the corner of the church and along the track towards the grave.
She had just rounded the corner and was coming up behind a large rococo gravestone when she saw two figures standing facing each other as if they had met unexpectedly the instant before. The man was Barclay Hamilton, his skin ashen and wet with rain, his hair plastered to his head. In the harsh daylight the pain in him was startlingly clear; he looked like a man suffering a long illness.
The woman was Amethyst. She blushed darkly, then the blood fled from her face and left her as white as he. She moved her hands almost as if to ward him off, a futile, fluttering gesture that died before it became anything. She did not look at him.
“I ... I felt I ought to come,” she said weakly.
“Of course,” he agreed. “It is a respect one owes.”
“Yes, I—” She bit her lip and stared at the middle button of his coat. “I don’t suppose it helps, but I ...”
“It might.” He watched her face, absorbing every fleeting expression, staring as if he would mark it indelibly in his mind. “Perhaps in time she may feel ... that it was good that people came.”
“Yes.” She made no move to leave. “I—I think I am glad people came to—to—” She was very close to weeping. The tears stood out in her eyes, and she swallowed hard. “To Lockwood’s funeral.” She took a deep breath and at last raised her face to meet his eyes. “I loved him, you know.”
“Of course I know,” he said so gently it was little more than a whisper. “Did you think I ever doubted it?”
“No.” She gulped helplessly as emotion and years of pent-up pain overtook her. “No!” And her body shook with sobs.
With a tenderness so profound it tugged at Charlotte’s heart to watch them, he took her in his arms and held her while she wept, his cheek against her hair, then his lips, for a moment, brief and immeasurably private.
Charlotte shrank behind the gravestone and crept away in the rain. At last she understood the icy politeness, the tension between them, and the honor which kept them apart, their terrible loyalty to the man who had been her husband and his father. And his death had brought no freedom to them, the ban on such a love was not dissolved—it was forever.
Pitt attended the funeral without hope that he would learn anything of value. During the service he stood at the back and watched each person arrive. He saw Charlotte with Vespasia and a woman of striking appearance and much more fashionable than Charlotte had led him to expect, but he presumed she must be Zenobia Gunne. Perhaps he was more ignorant of the niceties of fichus and sleeves and bustles than he had thought.
Then he saw Lady Mary Carfax sweep in in a gown so nearly identical as to look like a copy, and he knew he had been right the first time.
He also saw the new, inner calmness in Helen Carfax, and the self-assurance that had deserted James, and recalled what Charlotte had told him about Zenobia’s visit. One day, if it were possible without social awkwardness, he would like to meet Zenobia Gunne.
He had noticed Charles Verdun as one of the first to arrive, and remembered how much he had liked him. Yet a business rivalry between Verdun and Hamilton was not impossible. Heaven knew, nothing yet made any real pattern; there were only isolated elements, passions, injustices, terrible loss and hatred, possibilities of error in the dark, and always in the background the murmur of anarchy in the ugly, teeming back streets beyond Limehouse and Whitechapel and St. Giles. Or madness—which could be anywhere.
Hamilton and Etheridge were physically similar, of the same height and general build under an evening coat, both with longish, pale,