Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [134]
Garnet Royce received her civilly enough, but his manner was distant and somewhat surprised. He had obviously forgotten her from her visit to Ametiryst following Lockwood Hamilton’s death, which was hardly surprising, and he now had no idea who she was. She did not waste time in niceties.
“I have come to see you, Sir Garnet, because I plan to write a book—about a certain religious movement, to which your wife Naomi Royce belonged, before she died.”
His face froze. “My wife was a member of the Church of England, ma’am. You have been misinformed.”
“Not according to her letters,” she replied, equally coldly. “She wrote several very personal, very tragic letters to a certain Lizzie Forrester, who was a member of the same movement. Miss Forrester emigrated to America, and the letters never reached her. They remained in this country, and have come into my hands.”
He remained stony-faced, his hand near the bell rope.
She must hurry before she was thrown out. She opened her reticule and pulled out the pages she had brought. She began to read, starting with Naomi’s account of her husband’s forbidding her to attend the church of her conviction and sending her to her room until she should comply with his wishes, and her vow that she would refuse to eat until he allowed her the freedom of her own conscience. When Charlotte came to the end she looked up at Royce. The contempt in his eyes was blistering, and his hands clenched in front of him in rage.
“I can only assume that you are threatening to make this a scandal if I do not pay you. Blackmail is an ugly and dangerous profession, and I would advise you to give me the letters and leave before you damn yourself by making threats.”
She saw the fear in him, and her own disgust hardened. She thought of Elsie Draper and a lifetime in Bedlam.
“I don’t want anything from you, Sir Garnet,” she said, her voice so grating it hurt her throat. “Except that you should know what you have done: you denied a woman the right to seek God in her own way and to follow her conscience in the manner of her belief. She would have obeyed you in all else! But you had to have everything, her mind and her soul. It would have been a scandal, wouldn’t it? ‘M.P.’s Wife Joins Extreme Religious Sect!’ Your political party would have dropped you, all your Society friends! So you locked her in her room until she should obey you. Only you had not realized how passionately she believed, how strong she was—that she would the rather than renounce the truth she believed—and she did die!
“Oh how you must have panicked then. You sent for your brother to write a death certificate calling it scarlet fever”—she would not let him interrupt when he tried, raising her voice to drown him out—“and he agreed to do it, to avoid a scandal. ‘M.P.’s Wife Commits Suicide in Locked Room! Did her husband drive her to it—or was she mad? Insanity in the family?’
“Only Elsie, loyal Elsie, wouldn’t agree; she wanted to tell the truth—so you had her committed to Bedlam! Seventeen years in a madhouse, seventeen years of living death. No wonder when she got out she came hunting for you with a razor! God help her! If she wasn’t mad when you put her in, she certainly was by the time she was allowed to leave!”
For many seconds of dreadful silence they stared at each other in mutual abhorrence. Then slowly his face changed. He caught a glimpse of what she meant, wild and heretical as it was to him, challenging all the rules he knew, overturning all order concerning the rights and obligations of the strong to protect the weak, to govern them for their own good—whatever their wishes. Then as he gazed at her those thoughts passed away; a conflict remained which Charlotte watched him wrestle with for several more minutes, while the clock on the mantelshelf ticked on, and far away someone dropped a tray in the kitchen.
“My wife was of fragile mind and disposition, madame. You did not know her. She was given to sudden fancies, and very easily prevailed upon by charlatans and people of feverish