Buckingham Palace Gardens - Anne Perry [124]
Liliane looked back at her, her face softer, almost as if she felt a moment’s pity. “Minnie must have spoken to her father,” she said quietly. “Who else would have told him that she was asking all these questions? It must have been what she was hinting about at the dinner table the night she was killed. She was taunting him, you must have seen that.”
“What for?” Now Elsa’s mind raced from one wild, half-formed idea to another. Had Minnie learned it was Julius? Or, fearing that her father’s hatred of him would tempt him to blame Julius and even alter the evidence, she had told him that she would defend her husband, whether she loved him or not? She was the only one who was never afraid of Cahoon. Perhaps that was what he loved in her the most.
Had she loved Julius after all? Was the whole affair with Simnel only a way of trying to stir Julius to some response, a jealousy if not a love? Poor Minnie: too proud and too full of passion to plead, too lonely to confide in anyone, and perhaps wounded too deeply by what might have been the only rejection in her life that mattered to her. Nothing before that had prepared her for it; she might have had no inner dreams to strengthen her.
And Elsa had offered her nothing but rivalry. How miserable, how small and utterly selfish of her. She was ashamed of that now that it was too late.
Liliane was watching her, her beautiful eyes concentrating, seeing beyond the need for answers into the reasons for it.
It was Elsa who looked away. Part of the turmoil inside her was jealousy. She recognized the taste of it with a kind of bitter amusement at herself. Julius had courted Liliane and lost her to Hamilton Quase. Had that always been at the heart of it? He had never fallen out of love with her. Minnie knew it, and it was only Elsa who didn’t.
“You can’t do anything,” Liliane said quite gently. “Nothing can be changed now, except to make it worse.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Elsa conceded, although she was lying even as she said it. She would rather pursue the truth, even if she found that Julius was guilty, than surrender without knowing, and betray her dreams by cowardice. Deliberately she changed the subject to something else, utterly trivial.
Liliane seemed relieved.
THEY ALL RETIRED early. There was nothing to say. Even the men no longer had the heart to talk of Africa, and yet conversation about anything else was stilted and eventually absurd. The absence of Julius and Minnie was like a gaping hole that everyone tiptoed around, terrified of falling into, and yet was drawn to by a sort of emotional vertigo.
When Elsa excused herself she was uncomfortably aware that Cahoon followed her immediately, almost treading on the hem of her dress as she went into her bedroom. Bartle was waiting for her and Cahoon ordered her out, closing the door behind her.
Elsa felt a quick flutter of fear. She backed away from him, and was furious with herself for it. She stopped, too close to the bed. He could knock her onto it easily, but if she moved sideways it would of necessity be toward him. She refused to speak first. It was what he was waiting for: the sign of yielding, the impulse to placate him.
“You are making a fool of yourself, Elsa,” he said coldly. “If you want to ruin your own reputation, I don’t care. But you are still my wife, and I won’t have you behave hysterically once we leave here. If you can’t control your imagination and have some dignity, then you will have to be looked after, perhaps in some appropriate establishment where you will not damage either of us.”
He meant it. It was not just an expression of temper, it was a threat. She saw it hard and real in his eyes. She found her knees were shaking, and it cost her an effort to remain standing straight and looking at him.
“You mean a madhouse, like Julius,” she murmured. “That would be convenient for you. Then you can have an