Callander Square - Anne Perry [37]
She let her hand fall to the wood, and before Christina replied, she pushed the door open.
Christina was lying on the bed, looking pale and peaked, her features unusually sharp, her dark hair spread on the pillow around her.
Augusta felt a moment’s pity for her, then it passed and she forced her attention to preventing the far worse pain that threatened.
“Sick?” she asked simply.
Christina nodded her head.
Augusta came in and shut the door. There was no point in mincing words. She sat on the end of the bed and looked at her daughter.
“Is it an illness you have caught from Max?” she said, looking at Christina’s eyes.
Christina tried to look away, and failed. She was used to getting her own way, to charming or dominating everyone, but never since childhood had she succeeded with her mother.
“What—what do you mean, Mama?” she said stiltedly.
“There is no point in prevaricating, Christina. If you are with child, there is a great deal we have to do. I have no wish to frighten you unnecessarily, but I don’t think you have realized the seriousness of our predicament, if it is so.”
Christina opened her mouth, and closed it again.
Augusta waited.
“I don’t know,” Christina said very quietly. There was a shiver in her voice and she was having to struggle hard not to cry. It was only pride that prevented her, and the knowledge that her mother would not have cried.
Augusta asked the question she dreaded, but she would shirk nothing. She needed to know.
“Is this the first time?”
Christina stared, eyes enormous with indignant disbelief, and then horror as she realized what Augusta meant, what she was thinking. Her face was as bleached as the sheet.
“Oh, Mother! You can’t think I would—oh no!”
“Good. I did not think you would. But it is not what I think that matters, it is what the police think, or have enough cause to consider that they raise the possibility—”
“Mother—!”
“I shall deal with it. You will not see Max again. Until I have secured his silence, you will remain in bed. You have a chill. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Mama,” she was too shocked and too frightened to argue. “Do you think—the police—I mean—?”
“I intend that they shall not know anything to think one way or the other. And you will do exactly as I tell you, to that end.”
Christina nodded silently, and Augusta looked at her pale face, remembering how she had felt for the first few weeks when she had been with child, with Christina herself. What a lifetime ago that seemed. Brandy had been a small boy, still in skirts: and his father had been younger, his face less lean, his body a few pounds slimmer, but just as straight, shoulders as broad and stiff. How could a man change so little? His voice, his manners, even his thoughts seemed all the same.
“It will pass,” she said gently. “It will not be more than a few weeks, then you will feel better. I shall have cook make you a beef tea.”
“Thank you, Mama,” Christina whispered, and closed her eyes.
Augusta racked her brains and her imagination for a way to make sure of Max’s silence, without at the same time giving him a weapon for future use. But by the following morning she had achieved no more than the elimination of all the impossibilities, and was left with little else. She was in an ill temper to receive him when Pitt arrived at a quarter past ten.
When she first learned that it was Max who had shown him in, a moment of panic seized her, then she realized that Max’s ambition would never allow him to waste his valuable knowledge by giving it to Pitt, who would pay him nothing for it, instead of first offering it to Augusta, who might pay him in all sorts of ways, only beginning with money, and progressing through advancement to heaven knew what avaricious heights.
She found Pitt in the morning room, warming his hands in front of the fire. It was another bitter day, a hard east wind driving needles of sleet in from the North Sea, and she could hardly blame any living creature for availing itself of any warmth at all, yet she resented this policeman