Bethlehem Road - Anne Perry [55]
“What about?”
“Anything.”
He was tired and his imagination exhausted by struggling with the murders of Etheridge and Hamilton. “Shall I read to you?” he suggested hopefully.
She looked at him with reproach. “Papa, I can read to myself! Tell me about great ladies—princesses!”
“I don’t know anything about princesses.”
“Oh.” Disappointment filled her eyes.
“Well,” he amended hastily, “only about one.”
She brightened. Obviously one would do.
“Once upon a time there was a princess ...” And he told her what he could remember of the great Queen Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII, who despite much danger and many tribulations finally became monarch of all England. He got so involved in it he did not notice Charlotte standing in the doorway.
Finally, having recalled all he could, he looked at Jemima’s rapt face.
“What next?” she prompted.
“That’s all I know,” he admitted.
Her eyes widened in wonder. “Was she real, Papa?”
“Oh yes, as real as you are.”
She was very impressed. “Oh!”
Charlotte came in. “And it’s really bedtime,” she said.
Jemima put her arms round Pitt’s neck and kissed him. “Thank you, Papa. Good night.”
“Good night, sweetheart.”
Charlotte met his eyes for a moment, smiling. Then she picked up Jemima and carried her out of the room, and as Pitt watched them go, he suddenly thought again of Florence Ivory and the child she had loved, and had had taken from her.
Would any judge consider Charlotte a “suitable” person? She had married beneath her, regularly meddled in the detection of crimes, had gone careering round music halls and mortuaries, had disguised herself as a missing courtesan, and had driven after a murderess in a carriage chase that had ended up in a fight on a bawdy house floor. And certainly she had campaigned in her own way for reform!
He could not think clearly of what he might feel if any law could visit him and take away his children if his social circumstances were deemed inadequate. The pain of it drenched even his imagination.
And the thought that inevitably followed it was that he could well believe Florence Ivory might have hated Etheridge enough to cut his throat, and Africa Dowell with her, had she known and loved the child too, and seen the grief. It was a conclusion he could not escape, deeply as he wanted to.
He said nothing of it to Charlotte that night, but in the morning when the post came, he noticed the letter in Emily’s hand with its Venetian postmark and knew it would be full of news, excitement, and romance. Emily might have debated whether to talk of all the glamor she was enjoying or to temper it, in view of the fact that Charlotte would never see such things, but knowing Emily, he believed she would not patronize Charlotte with such an evasion. And he guessed the mixture of happiness and envy, and the sense of being left out, that Charlotte would feel.
She would say nothing, he knew that. She had not shown him the first letter, nor would she show him this one, because she wanted him to think she cared only that Emily was happy, not about all the things Emily had, and indeed in her heart that was what mattered to her.
He chose this moment to tell her of his involvement in the Westminster murders, both to take her mind from Emily’s new and glittering world and to ease a certain loneliness he felt in not so far having shared with her his feelings, his frustration, confusion, and deep awareness of pain.
He sat at the breakfast table eating toast and Charlotte’s sharp, pungent marmalade.
“Yesterday I spoke to a woman who may have cut the throats of two men on Westminster Bridge,” he said with his mouth full.
Charlotte stopped with her cup halfway to her mouth. “You didn’t tell me you were working on that case!” she exclaimed.
He smiled. “There hasn’t been much opportunity, what with Emily’s wedding. Then I suppose I became involved in the routine, rather sad questions. It doesn’t concern anyone you know.”
She pulled