Cain His Brother - Anne Perry [61]
“You do not always need a body to presume death,” he said carefully, watching her face. “Although it may be a good deal harder to prove murder—and Caleb’s guilt.”
“I don’t care about Caleb’s guilt.” Her eyes did not deviate from his face. “God will take care of him.”
“But not of you?” he asked. “I would have thought you a great deal more deserving … and more urgent.”
“I cannot wait for charity, Mr. Monk,” she answered with some asperity.
He smiled. “I apologize. Of course not. But I should like to deal with Caleb before waiting for God. I am doing all I can, and I am much closer than I was last time we spoke. I have found a witness who saw Angus in Limehouse, on the day of his disappearance, in a tavern where he might easily have met Caleb. I’ll find others. It takes time, but people will talk. It is just a matter of finding the right ones and persuading them to speak. I’ll get Caleb himself, in the end.”
“Will you …” She was on the edge of hope, but not allowing herself to grasp it. “I really don’t care if you cannot prove it was Caleb.” The shadow of a smile touched her mouth. “I don’t even know what Angus would want. Isn’t that absurd? For all that they were so utterly different, and Caleb hated him, he still loved Caleb. It seemed as if he would not forget the child he had been and the good times they had spent together before they quarreled. It hurt him every time he went to Limehouse after Caleb, yet he would not give up.”
She looked away. “Sometimes it would be weeks, especially after a particularly wretched visit, but then he would relent and go back again. On those times he’d be gone even longer, as if it were necessary to make up the difference. I suppose childhood bonds are very deep.”
“Did he tell you much of his visits to Caleb?” Monk asked. “Did he give you any indication of where they met, or where they might have been? If you can think of any description at all, it might help.”
“No,” she said with a slight frown, as though it puzzled her on recollection. “He never spoke of it at all. I think perhaps it was his silence which made me wonder if it was as much guilt as love which took him.”
“Guilt?”
There was a gentle pride in her face when she replied, a very slight, unconscious lift of her chin. “Angus had made a success of everything, his profession, his family and his place in society. Caleb had nothing. He was feared and hated where Angus was loved and respected. He lived from hand to mouth, never knowing where the next meal would come from. He had no home, no family, nothing in his whole life of which to be proud.”
It was a grim picture. Suddenly, with a jolt as if he had opened a door into a different, icy world, Monk perceived the loneliness of Caleb Stone, the failure that ate at his soul every time he saw his brother, the happy, smooth, successful mirror image of what he might have been. And Angus’s pity and his guilt would only make it worse.
And yet for Angus too, perhaps the memory of love and trust, the times when all things were equal for them and the divisions and griefs of the future still unknown, held a kind of sweetness that bound them together.
Why should it boil over into violence now? What had happened to change it? He looked at Genevieve. The strain was clearly marked in her face now. There were tiny lines in the skin around her mouth and eyes, visible even in the gaslight. Angus had been gone fifteen days. She was also using at least half her time nursing Enid Ravensbrook. No wonder she was tired and riven with fear.
“Have you someone in mind you can appoint to manage the business in Mr. Stonefield’s absence?” he asked. It was hardly relevant to him, and yet he found himself waiting for the answer, willing that she had not. It seemed so coldly practical for a woman not yet surely a widow.
“I thought Mr. Niven,” she answered frankly. “In spite of the error of judgment which brought him to his present state, he is of absolute honesty, and of unusual skill and knowledge in the business. I think he would not be so rash or so lenient in another’s cause.