Cardington Crescent - Anne Perry [57]
“Was that what you wished to say to me, Mr. March?” she asked.
“Ah, no, er ...” He seemed thrown off balance and blinked rapidly; he had lost the thread of his thought entirely, and she gave him no assistance.
“I merely wished to make sure that you were comfortable,” he said at last. “We must present a united face to the world. You are one of us, my dear, through poor Emily. We must do what is best for the family. It is not a time for selfishness. I am sure you understand that.”
“Oh, absolutely, Mr. March,” she agreed, staring solemnly at him. “I shall not forget my family loyalties, you may be assured.”
He smiled with a gust of relief, apparently forgetting that Thomas Pitt was her most immediate relative. “Excellent. Of course you will not. Now I must leave you time to change for dinner, and perhaps to visit poor Emily. I am sure you will be an enormous help to her. Ha!”
After dinner the ladies withdrew from the dining room, to be followed quite soon by the gentlemen. Conversation was stilted, because Emily had joined them for the first time since George’s death and no one knew what to say. To speak of the murder seemed needlessly cruel, and yet to converse as if it had not happened deformed all other subjects into such artificiality as to be grotesque. Consequently Charlotte rose at a little after nine and excused herself, saying she wished to retire early and was sure they would understand. Emily went with her, much to everyone’s relief. Charlotte imagined she could hear the sigh of exhaled breath as she closed the door behind them, and people sank a little more easily into their chairs.
She woke in the night, thinking she had heard Emily moving about next door, and she was anxious in case her sister was too distressed to sleep. Perhaps she should go to her.
She sat up and was about to reach for a shawl when she realized the noise was from a different direction, more towards the stairs. Why should Emily go downstairs at this time of night?
She slipped out of bed and, without fumbling for slippers, went to the door, opened it, and crept out and along to the main landing. She had put her head round the corner before she saw what it was in the gaslight at the head of the stairs; she froze as if the breath had been snatched from her and her skin doused in cold water.
Tassie March was coming up the stairs, her face calm and weary, but with a serenity unlike anything Charlotte had seen in her before. The restlessness was gone, all the tension released. Her hands were held out in front of her, sleeves crumpled, smears of blood on the cuffs, and a dark stain near the hem of her skirt.
She reached the top of the stairs just as Charlotte realized her own position and shrank back into the shadows. Tassie passed on tiptoe less than a yard away from her, still with that unhurried smile, leaving a heavy, sickly, and quite unmistakable odor behind her. No one who had smelled fresh blood could ever forget it.
Charlotte went back to her room, shivering uncontrollably, and was sick.
7
EMILY WOKE EARLY the next morning. It was the day of George’s funeral. She felt cold immediately, and the white light on the ceiling was bleak, without warmth or color in it. She was filled with the kind of misery that is edged with anger and intolerable loneliness. This would make it all final. Not, of course, that it was not final anyway. George was dead, there was no going back or recapturing anything of the past warmth, except in memory. But a funeral, a burial,