Betrayal at Lisson Grove - Anne Perry [98]
Pitt did not grace the observation with a reply.
Two hours later, he was washed, shaved and dressed in a clean shirt, provided by Carlisle, as well as clean socks and underwear. Pitt alighted from the hansom cab outside Vespasia’s house and walked up to the front door. She was expecting him, and he was taken straight to her usual favourite sitting room, which looked onto the garden. There was a bowl of fresh narcissi on the table, their scent filling the air. Outside the breeze very gently stirred the new leaves on the trees.
Vespasia was dressed in silver grey, with the long ropes of pearls he was so accustomed to seeing her wear. She looked calm, as she always did, and her beauty still moved him with a certain awe. However, he knew her well enough to see the profound anxiety in her eyes. It alarmed him, and he was too tired to hide it.
She looked him up and down. ‘I see Somerset lent you a shirt and cravat,’ she observed with a faint smile.
‘Is it so obvious?’ he asked, standing in front of her.
‘Of course. You would never choose a shirt of that shade, or a cravat with a touch of wine in it. But it becomes you very well. Please sit down. It is uncomfortable craning my neck to look up at you.’
He would never have seated himself before she gave her permission, but he was glad to do so, in the chair opposite her.
The formalities were over and they would address the issues that burdened them both.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked. She gave no thought even to the possibility that he might consider it confidential from her. She knew more about the power and danger of secrets than most ministers of government.
‘In St Malo,’ he replied. He was embarrassed by his own failure to see through the subterfuge more rapidly. However, he did not avoid her eyes as he told her about himself and Gower chasing through the streets, their brief parting, then their meeting and almost instantly finding Wrexham crouched over the corpse of West, his neck slashed open and blood covering the stones.
Vespasia winced, but did not interrupt him.
He described their pursuit of Wrexham to the East End, and then in the train to Southampton, and on the ferry across to France. He found himself explaining too fully why they had not arrested Wrexham until it sounded miserably like excuses.
‘Thomas,’ she interrupted gently, ‘common sense justifies your actions, as seen at the time. You do not need to dot the i’s and cross the t’s for me. You were aware of a socialist conspiracy and you believed it to be more important than one grisly murder in London. What did you learn in St Malo?’
‘Very little,’ he replied. ‘We saw one or two known socialist agitators in the first couple of days . . . at least I think we did.’
‘You think?’
He explained to her that it was Gower who had made the identification, and he had accepted it.
‘I see. Who did he say they were?’
He was about to say that she would not know their names, then he remembered her own radical part in the revolutions of ’48, which had swept across every country in Western Europe except Britain. She had been in Italy, manning the barricades for that brief moment of hope in a new freedom. It was possible she had not lost all interest.
‘Jacob Meister and Pieter Linsky,’ he replied. ‘But they didn’t come back again.’
She frowned. The tension increased in the rigidity of her shoulders, the way her hands in her lap gripped each other.
‘You know of them?’ he concluded.
‘Of course,’ she said drily. ‘And many others. They are dangerous, Thomas. There is a new radicalism awakening in Europe. The next insurrections will not be like ’forty-eight. It is a different breed. There will be more violence: I think perhaps it will be much more. The Russian monarchy cannot last a lot longer unless it learns to change. The oppression is fearful. I have a few friends left who are able to write occasionally – old friends, who tell me the truth. There is desperate poverty. The Tsar has lost all sense of reality and is totally out of touch with his people