Cardington Crescent - Anne Perry [5]
Charlotte had contained herself long enough. “Are you going to find out who she was?”
“I doubt it,” he said, filling his mouth with food.
She stared at him solemnly. “Won’t somebody report her missing? Bloomsbury is quite a respectable area. People who have parlormaids notice if they’re gone.”
In spite of their six years of marriage and all the cases she had one way or another found herself involved in, she still carried with her remnants of the innocence in which she had grown up, protected from unpleasantness, imprisoned from the harshness and the excitement of the world, as young ladies of gentility should be. To begin with, Charlotte’s breeding had awed Pitt and, in her blinder moments, angered him. But mostly it disappeared in all the infinitely more important things they shared: laughter at life’s absurdities, tenderness, passion, and anger at the same injustices.
“Thomas?”
“My darling Charlotte, she doesn’t have to have come from Bloomsbury. And even if she did, how many maids do you suppose have been dismissed, for any number of reasons, from dishonesty to having been caught in the arms of the master of the house? Others will have eloped!—or been supposed to have—or lifted the family silver and disappeared into the night.”
“Parlormaids aren’t like that!” she protested. “Aren’t you even going to ask after her?”
“We have done,” he replied with a tired edge to his voice. Had she no idea how futile it was—and that he would already have done everything he could? Did she not know that much of him, after all this time?
She bent her head, looking down at the tablecloth. “I’m sorry. I suppose you’ll never know.”
“Probably not,” he agreed, picking up his cup. “Is that a letter from Emily on the mantelpiece?”
“Yes.” Emily was her younger sister, who had married as far above herself as Charlotte had descended. “She is staying with Great-aunt Vespasia in Cardington Crescent.”
“I thought Great-aunt Vespasia lived in Gadstone Park.”
“She does. They’re all staying with Uncle Eustace March.”
He grunted. There was nothing to say to that. He had a deep admiration for the elegant, waspish Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, but Eustace March he had never heard of, nor did he wish to.
“She sounds very unhappy,” Charlotte went on, looking at him anxiously.
“I’m sorry.” He did not meet her eyes but fished for another piece of bread and the chutney dish. “But there’s nothing we can do. I daresay she’s bored.” This time he did look up, fixing her with something approaching a glare. “And you will go nowhere near Bloomsbury, not even to visit some long lost friend, either of yours or of Emily’s. Is that understood, Charlotte?”
“Yes, Thomas,” she said with wide eyes. “I don’t think I know anybody in Bloomsbury, anyway.”
2
EMILY WAS INDEED profoundly unhappy, in spite of the fact that she looked magnificent in a shimmering aquamarine gown of daring and elegant cut and was sitting in the Marches’ private box at the Savoy. On stage, in all its delicious, lyrical charm, was Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Iolanthe, of which she was particularly fond. The very idea of a youth half human and half fairy, divided at the waist, normally appealed to her sense of the absurd. Tonight it passed her by.
The cause of her distress was that for several days now her husband, George, had taken no pains at all to hide the fact that he very evidently preferred Sybilla March’s company to Emily’s. He was perfectly civil, in an automatic kind of way, which was worse than rudeness. Rudeness would at least have meant he was sharply aware of her, not dimly, as of something blurred at the edge of his vision. It was Sybilla’s presence that brought the light to his face, it was she his eyes followed, she whose words held his attention, whose wit made him laugh.
Now he was sitting behind her, and to Emily she looked as gaudy as some overblown flower, in her flame-colored gown, with her white skin