Cain His Brother - Anne Perry [60]
“I don’t know!” She leaned forward and her full skirts touched and spilled over the fender. She seemed not to notice. “Perhaps it would be better than selling. Then all our present employees could remain. There is that to consider.” She was ardent to convince him. “And it would be a continued source of security for us … something for my sons to inherit. That is better than a sum of money which can disappear alarmingly quickly. A piece of misguided advice, a young man willful, unwilling to be counseled by those who are older and he considers staid and unimaginative. I have heard of it happening.”
He bent over and moved her skirt, in case a coal should fall or spark and set it alight.
She barely noticed.
“Aren’t you looking rather far ahead?” he said a little coolly.
“I have to, Mr. Monk. There is no one to take care of me but myself. I have five children. They must be provided for.”
“There is Lord Ravensbrook,” he reminded her. “He has both means and influence, and seems more than willing to be of every assistance. I think your anxiety is greater than it need be, Mrs. Stonefield.” He hated it, but his suspicions were wakened. Perhaps the relationship between herself and her husband was not as ideal as she had said. Possibly it was she whose affections had wandered elsewhere, not he? She was an extremely attractive woman. There was in her an element of passion and daring far deeper than mere physical charm. He found himself drawn to her, watching her with fascination, even while his mind was weighing and judging facts.
“And I have already tried to explain, Mr. Monk, that I do not wish to forfeit my freedom and become dependent upon the goodwill of Lord Ravensbrook,” she went on, her voice thick with emotion she could not hide. “I won’t have that, Mr. Monk, as long as I have any way at all of preventing it. I am growing more afraid day by day, but I am not yet beyond my wits’ end. And whether you believe it or not, I am doing what my husband would have wished. I knew him well, for all that you may think perhaps I did not.”
“I don’t doubt you did, Mrs. Stonefield.” It was quite out of character for him to lie. He barely knew why he did it, except some need to comfort her. He could hardly touch her and he had no instinct to. It did not come to him naturally to express himself by touch. Whether it ever had, he could not know.
“Yes you do,” she said with a pinched smile, a bitter humor of knowledge. “You have explored every other possibility than the one that Caleb killed him, because you think it more likely.” She leaned back in her chair again, and finally became aware of her skirt near the fender and almost automatically tweaked it away. “And I suppose I cannot blame you. Every day I daresay some man deserts his wife and children, either for money or another woman. But I knew Angus. He was a man to whom dishonor was not only abhorrent, it was frightening. He avoided it as another might have the touch of leprosy or the plague.” Her voice at last lost its steadiness and cracked with the effort of control. “He was a truly good man, Mr. Monk, a man who knew evil for the ugliness and the ruin it is. It had no disguise of charm for him.”
His intelligence told him it was a bereaved woman speaking with the hindsight of love, and his instinct told him it was the truth. This is how he had always looked in her eyes, and although she admired it wholeheartedly, it also exasperated or oppressed her at times.
“Now so many days have passed,” she said very quietly, “I fear it may be beyond anyone’s ability to prove what has happened to him.”
He felt guilty, which was unreasonable. Even if he had followed Angus on the very day he disappeared, he might still not have been able to prove murder against Caleb. There were enough ways of disposing of a body in Limehouse. The river was deep there, with its ebb tide to carry flotsam out and its cargo boats coming and going. At the moment there were also the common graves for the victims of typhoid, to name only a few.
He put half a dozen