Bluegate Fields - Anne Perry [35]
He was received with extreme disfavor.
“We have already been through this exceedingly painful matter in every detail!” Waybourne said sharply. “I refuse to discuss it any further! Hasn’t there been enough—enough obscenity?”
“It would be an obscenity, Sir Anstey, if a man were hanged for a crime we believe he committed but are too afraid of our own distaste to make sure!” Pitt replied very quietly. “It’s a crime of irresponsibility I am not prepared to commit. Are you?”
“You are damned impertinent, sir!” Waybourne snapped. “It is not my duty to see that justice is done. That is what people like you are paid for! You attend to your job, and remember who you are in my house.”
“Yes, sir,” Pitt said stiffly. “Now may I see Master Godfrey, please?”
Waybourne hesitated, his eyes hot, pink-rimmed, looking Pitt up and down. For several moments both men were silent.
“If you must,” he said at last. “But I shall remain here, I warn you.”
“I must,” Pitt insisted.
They stood in mutual discomfort, avoiding each other’s eyes, while Godfrey was sent for. Pitt was aware that his anger was born of confusion within himself, of a growing fear that he would never prove Jerome’s guilt and thereby wipe away the memory of Eugenie’s face, a face that reflected her conviction of the world as she knew it, and of the man whose life she shared in that world.
Waybourne’s hostility was even easier to read. His family had already been mutilated—he was now defending it against any unnecessary turning of the knife in the wounds. Had it been his family, Pitt would have done the same.
Godfrey came in. Then, when he saw Pitt, his face colored and his body suddenly became awkward.
Pitt felt a stab of guilt.
“Yes, sir?” Godfrey stood with his back to his father, close, as if he were a wall, something against which he could retreat.
Pitt ignored the fact that he had not been invited, and sat down in the leather-covered armchair. His position made him look up slightly at the boy, instead of obliging Godfrey to crane up at him.
“Godfrey, we don’t know Mr. Jerome very well,” he began, in what he hoped was a conversational tone. “It is important that we learn everything we can. He was your tutor for nearly four years. You must know him well.”
“Yes, sir—but I never knew he was doing anything wrong.” The boy’s clear eyes were defiant. His narrow shoulders were high and Pitt could imagine the muscles hunched underneath the flannel of his jacket.
“Of course not,” Waybourne said quickly, putting his hand on the boy’s arm. “No one imagines you knew about it, boy.”
Pitt restrained himself. He must learn, fact by fact, small impressions that built a believable picture of a man who had lost years of cold control in a sudden insane hunger—insane because it defied reality, because it could never have achieved anything but the most transient, ephemeral of pleasures while destroying everything else he valued.
Slowly, Pitt asked questions about their studies, about Jerome’s manner, the subjects he taught well and those that appeared to bore him. He questioned whether the tutor’s discipline was good, his temper, his enthusiasms. Waybourne grew more and more impatient, almost contemptuous of Pitt, as if he were being foolish, evading the real issue in a plethora of trivialities. But Godfrey became more confident in his answers.
A picture emerged so close to the man Pitt had imagined that it gave him no comfort at all. There was nothing new to grasp, no new perspective to try on all the fragments he already possessed. Jerome was a good teacher, a disciplinarian with little humor. And what humor he had was far too dry, too measured through years of self-control, to be understandable to a thirteen-year-old born and bred in privilege. Ambition that to Jerome was unachievable was to Godfrey an expected part of the adult life he was being groomed for. He was unaware of any injustice in the relationship