Bluegate Fields - Anne Perry [43]
“Oh, no!” she lied instantly. She had not yet forgotten that ladies of good society would not do such a thing. Reading the newspaper overheated the blood; it was considered bad for the health to excite the mind too much, not to mention bad for the morals. The pages of social events might be read, perhaps, but certainly not murders! A far better answer occurred to her. “I have a friend who also has had dealings with Mr. Jerome.”
“Oh, God, yes!” he said wearily. “Poor devil!”
Charlotte was confused. Could he possibly mean Jerome? Surely whatever sympathy he felt could only be for Arthur Waybourne.
“Tragic,” she agreed, lowering her voice suitably. “And so very young. The destruction of innocence is always terrible.” It sounded sententious, but she was concerned with drawing him out and perhaps learning something, not with creating a good impression upon him herself.
His wide mouth twisted very slightly.
“Would you consider the very discourteous to disagree with you, Miss Ellison? I find total innocence the most unutterable bore, and it is inevitably lost at one point or another, unless one abdicates from life altogether and withdraws to a convent. I daresay even there the same eternal jealousies and malice still intrude. The thing to desire is that innocence should be replaced with humor and a little style. Fortunately, Arthur possessed both of those.” He raised his eyebrows slightly. “Jerome, on the other hand, has neither. And of course Arthur was charming, whereas Jerome is a complete ass, poor sod. He has neither lightness of touch nor even the most basic sense of social survival.”
Dominic glared at him, but obviously could find no satisfactory words to answer such frankness.
“Oh.” Vanderley smiled at Charlotte with candid charm. “I beg your pardon. My language is inexcusable. I have only just learned that the wretched man also forced his attentions upon my younger nephew and a cousin’s boy. Arthur was dreadful enough, but that he should have involved himself with Godfrey and Titus I still find staggering. Put my appalling manners down to shock, if you will be so generous?”
“Of course,” she said quickly, not out of courtesy but because she truly meant it. “He must be a totally depraved man, and to discover that he has been teaching one’s family for years is enough to horrify anybody out of all thought of polite conversation. It was clumsy of me to have mentioned it at all.” She hoped he would not take her at her word and let the subject fall. Was she being too discreet? “Let us hope that the whole matter will be proved beyond question, and the man hanged,” she added, watching his face closely.
The long eyelids lowered in a movement that seemed to reflect pain and a need for privacy. Perhaps she should not have spoken of hanging. It was the last thing she wished herself—for Jerome, or anyone else.
“What I mean,” she hastened on, “is that the trial should be brief, and there be no question left in anyone’s conscience that he is guilty!”
Vanderley regarded her with a flash of honesty that was oddly out of place in this room of games and masquerades. His eyes were very clear.
“A clean kill, Miss Ellison? Yes, I hope so, too. Far better to bury all the squalid little details. Who needs to strip naked the pain? We use the excuse of the love for truth to inquire into a labyrinth of things that are none of our affair. Arthur is dead anyway. Let the wretched tutor be convicted without all his lesser sins paraded for a prurient public to feed its self-righteousness on.”
She felt suddenly guilty, a raging hypocrite. She was trying to do precisely what he condemned and by silence she was agreeing with: the turning over of every private weakness in an endless search for truth. Did she really believe Jerome was innocent, or was she merely being inquisitive, like the rest?
She shut her eyes for a moment. That was immaterial! Thomas did not believe it—at least he had