Bluegate Fields - Anne Perry [14]
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said briskly, coming to sit opposite him. “I’ve already been involved with all sorts of murders. My stomach is as strong as yours.”
He did not bother to argue. She had never even imagined most of the things he had seen in the rookery slums: filth and misery beyond the imagination of any sane person.
“Well?” She came back and sat down, looking at him expectantly.
He hesitated. He wanted her opinion, but he could not tell her the dilemma without the details. If the disease or the homosexuality was omitted, there would be no problem. Eventually he gave in to his need and told her.
“Oh,” she said when he finished. She sat without saying anything more for so long that he was afraid he had distressed her too deeply, perhaps confused or disgusted her.
He leaned forward and took her hand.
“Charlotte?”
She looked up. There was pain in her eyes, but it was the pain of pity, not confusion or withdrawal. He felt an overwhelming surge of relief, a desire to hold on to her, feel her in his arms. He wanted even just to touch her hair, to pull out its neat coils and thread his fingers through its softness. But it seemed inappropriate; she was thinking of a dead boy, hardly more than a child, and of the tragic compulsions that had driven someone to use him, and then destroy him.
“Charlotte?” he said again.
Her face was screwed up with doubt as she met his eyes.
“Why should ruffians put him down into the sewers?” she said slowly. “In a place like Bluegate Fields, what would it matter if he were found? Don’t you find bodies there anyway? I mean—wouldn’t ruffians have hit him over the head, or stabbed him? Kidnappers might drown him! But there’s no point in kidnapping someone if you don’t know who he is—because whom do you ask for a ransom?”
He stared at her. He knew what her answer was going to be long before she framed it in words herself.
“It had to be someone who knew him, Thomas. For it to have been strangers doesn’t make any sense! They’d have robbed him and left him there in the street, or in an alley. Maybe—” She frowned; she did not believe it herself. “Maybe it has nothing to do with whoever used him—but don’t you think it has? People don’t just suddenly stop having ‘relationships.’ ” She used a delicate word, but they both knew what she meant. “Not where there isn’t love. Whoever it is, he’ll find someone else now this boy is dead—won’t he?”
He sat back wearily. He had been deceiving himself because it would be easier, would avoid the unpleasantness and the pain.
“I expect so,” he admitted. “Yes, I suppose he will. I can’t take the chance. You’re right,” he sighed. “Damn.”
Charlotte could not put the boy’s death out of her mind. She did not speak of it again that evening to Pitt; he was already full of the knowledge of it and wanted to bar it from his thoughts, to have some hours to restore his emotions and revitalize.
But through the night she woke often. As she lay staring at the ceiling, Pitt silent beside her in the sleep of exhaustion, her mind compelled her to think over and over what sort of tragedy had finally ended in this dreadful manner.
Of course she did not know the Waybournes—they were hardly within her social circle—but her sister Emily might. Emily had married into the aristocracy and moved in high society now.
Then she remembered that Emily was away in the country, in Leicestershire, visiting a cousin of George’s. They were to go hunting, or something of the sort. She could picture Emily in immaculate riding habit as she sat perched on her sidesaddle, heart in her throat, wondering whether she could take the fences without falling off and making a fool of herself, yet determined not to admit defeat. There would be an enormous hunt breakfast: two hundred people or more, the master in glorious pink, hounds milling around the horses’ feet, chatter, shouts to order, the smell of frost—not, of course, that Charlotte had ever been to a hunt! But she had heard from those who had.
And neither could she turn to Great-Aunt Vespasia—she had gone to Paris