Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [110]
Was it some grotesque, lunatic mistake? Or was the murderer totally sane in its purpose, and there a key to it which he had not even guessed at yet?
He watched the players as they sat in outward devotion through the tedious service. He noticed Somerset Carlisle, and remembered his strange, passionate morality which had held to such bizarre behavior when they had first met, years ago. He saw the widow and felt churlish to question her grief. He watched Jasper and Garnet Royce, and Amethyst Hamilton. He saw Barclay Hamilton deliberately sit as far from them as he could without drawing attention to himself by asking others to move.
When the service was over he did not follow them to the graveside. He would be too conspicuous; no one would take him for family or associate. It would be a pointless intrusion.
Instead he hung back near the entrance to the vestry and watched. He saw Charlotte return and then look in her reticule and hurry back again out into the rain.
Micah Drummond stepped in a moment later, shaking the water off his hat and coat. He looked cold, and there was an increasing anxiety stamped in his face. Pitt could imagine the accusing stares his superior had endured from Members of Parliament, the asides from those in the Cabinet, the comments on police inefficiency.
Pitt caught his eye and smiled bleakly. They were no further forward, and they both knew it.
There was no time to talk, and to do so would compromise Pitt’s “invisibility” as an apparent usher. A moment later Garnet Royce came in, heedless of the rain running down his face and dripping from the skirts of his coat onto the floor. He did not observe Pitt in the shadows but immediately approached Micah Drummond, his brow furrowed in earnestness.
“Poor Sheridan,” he said briefly. “Tragedy—for everyone. Dreadful for his widow. Such a—a violent way to die. My sister is still suffering very much over poor Hamilton. Natural.”
“Of course,” Drummond agreed, his voice strained with the guilt he felt over his helplessness to do anything about it, to show that the investigation had taken a single step forward. He could offer nothing, and he would not lie.
It was not difficult for Royce to ask the next question. The silence invited it.
“Do you really think it is anarchists and revolutionaries? God knows, there are enough of them around! I have never heard so many rumors and whisperings of the collapse of the throne, and of new orders of violence. I know Her Majesty is not young and has undoubtedly taken her widowhood hard, but the people expect certain duties of a sovereign regardless of personal misfortune. And the Prince of Wales’s behavior scarcely adds to the luster of the crown! And now the Duke of Clarence is causing gossip with his dissipation and irresponsibility. It seems everything we have taken half a millennium to build is in jeopardy, and we seem unable to stop wild murders in the heart of our capital city!” He looked frightened, not the panic of a hysterical or cowardly man, but the realization of one who sees clearly and is resolved to fight, knowing his anger immense and the prospect of victory uncertain.
Micah Drummond gave the only reply he could, but there was no pleasure in his thin face as he spoke. “We have investigated all the known sources of unrest, the insurrectionists and would-be revolutionaries of one sort and another, and we do have our agents and informers. But there is not a whisper that any of them ally themselves to the Westminster Cutthroat—in fact they seem little pleased by it! They want to win the common people, the little man whom society rejects or abuses, the man oppressed too far by overwork or underpayment. These lunatic murders improve no one’s cause, not even the Fenians’.”
Royce’s face tightened as if some bleak fear had become