Cardington Crescent - Anne Perry [130]
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Unless George knew something about her.”
“Like what?”
He shook his head. “Something about the Marches? She’s choked up with family pride. I’m damned if I know why. They’ve plenty of money, but no breeding at all. It comes from trade.” Then he laughed at himself. “Not that I wouldn’t be glad of a little of it! My mother was a de Bohun, traces her family back to the Conquest. But you can’t even buy a good meal with that, let alone run a house.”
A wild series of thoughts clashed and jostled in her mind. Had he killed George hoping to marry her for the Ashworth money? But then, what about Tassie? Any man with sense would have chosen that marriage; it was infinitely safer, and his for the asking—or he must have thought so. He didn’t know about Mungo Hare. Or did he? Was he really so astounded by the news of Tassie’s midnight expeditions as he pretended to be? If Charlotte had followed her, so could he—at least, as far as seeing the young curate and realizing Tassie would never marry anyone else. Or perhaps Tassie had even told him herself? She was honest enough. She might have chosen not to delude him with false hope—not of love, but of money.
Emily shivered. She wanted to look at him—surely she had some ability of judgment left. And yet she also dreaded what she would see, and what she would reveal of herself. But as long as it remained undone it would crowd out all other thought from her mind. It was like vertigo, standing at the edge of a high balcony with the compulsive desire to look down, feeling the void pulling at you.
She looked up quickly and found his eyes worried, serious; she could see no deceit in them at all. It solved nothing. To find ugliness there might have freed her, let her believe the worst of him and kill the hope that—that what?
She refused to put it into words. It was too soon. But the thought stayed at the edge of her mind, something to move towards, beckoning her like a warm room at the end of a winter journey.
“Emily?”
She recalled her attention. They had been talking about the old woman. “She might have done something scandalous in her youth,” she offered. “Or maybe her husband did. Perhaps we should learn more of how the Marches got all their money—it could be something that would put an end to any idea of a peerage. Perhaps George knew of it. After all, it was her—” She swallowed. “Her medicine that was the poison.”
Memory of death came back sharp and cold, physically painful, and the tears stung in her eyes. She found she was clinging to his hand so hard she must be hurting him, but he did not pull away. Instead he put his arm round her and held her, touching her hair with his lips, whispering words that had no meaning, but whose gentleness she felt with an ease that made weeping not an ache but a release from pain, an undoing of the hard, frightened knots inside her.
She realized that she wanted the solution to the crime almost as much for him as for herself. She longed with an intense need to know that he was untouched, unmarked by it.
Charlotte also was happy to be alone, and spent some time in the dressing room which was her bedroom, repeating in her mind all that she had learned since the first news of George’s death right up to Pitt’s departure this morning.
It was half past three when she went downstairs with the small spark of an idea she wanted to disbelieve. It was ugly and sad, and yet it answered all the contradictions.
She was in the withdrawing room, almost at the curtains which half covered the French doors to the conservatory, when she heard the voices.
“How dare you say such a thing in front of everyone!” It was Eustace, loud and angry. His broad back was to the doors and beyond him she could just see the sunlight on William’s flaming hair. “I can forgive you a lot in your bereavement,” Eustace went on. “But that insinuation was appalling. You as good as said I was guilty of murder!”
“You were perfectly happy to see Emily blamed—or Jack,” William