Cardington Crescent - Anne Perry [60]
“No,” Charlotte admitted. “But I wasn’t thinking of love so much as lust. The most unlikely people can feel that, even pompous and unctuous middle-aged men like Eustace. And anyway, it doesn’t have to be recent. It could have been something that happened years ago, even when Tassie’s mother was alive. And there are other, even worse possibilities. People have the strangest obsessions, you know. Maybe she found that out.”
“You mean something truly disgusting?” Emily said slowly. “Like a child? Or another man? Do you suppose Olivia could have found out, and he killed her?”
“Oh ...” Charlotte let out her breath with a sigh. “Actually I hadn’t thought of anything quite like that. Rather, a servant, or a farm girl. I heard of a highly respectable man who only liked big, dirty scrubwomen.”
“That’s rubbish!” Emily scoffed, taking another slice of thin toast and biting into it without any enjoyment.
“No, it isn’t, and one wouldn’t want it known.”
“No one would believe it, would they? Not to the point where it was worth murdering to keep them quiet.”
“Maybe. And certainly, if he killed Olivia it would be.”
“But unless he did kill Olivia—and I don’t believe that—George wouldn’t have told anyone. He wouldn’t want it known any more than Eustace would. After all, Eustace is family.” She swallowed the toast like a lump in her throat. “And George was rather conventional about things like that.”
“That’s true,” Charlotte said more gently. “But perhaps he didn’t trust George not to tell his friends, as a joke. George did not always think before he spoke. Or he might even have brought pressure on him to stop.”
“He wouldn’t!”
“Maybe not, but perhaps Eustace could not be sure enough of it.” She shook her head. “But all I’m saying is that we don’t know. There could be all kinds of things.”
Emily sat still. “Well, we’d better find at least one piece of evidence about some of them for Constable Stripe—and soon.”
“I know.” Charlotte bit her lip. “I’m trying.”
The service was to be held in the local church, which had also been the last resting place of the Ashworths since the family had acquired its first town house in the parish, nearly two hundred years ago.
Naturally Emily had informed her own household. That had been the most difficult of all the letters to write, and the only one with which Charlotte could not help her. How does one say to a five-year-old son that his father has been murdered? She knew he could not read her letter now; it would be his nanny, large, comfortable Mrs. Stevenson, who would try to explain to him, help him to understand death and allow his mind to grasp it slowly through the confusion of great and terrible emotions round him. Emily knew, too, that the gentle woman would try to comfort him, so he did not feel betrayed because his father had left him so soon, nor guilty that in some indefinable way it was his fault.
Emily’s letter would be for later on, when he was older, something he would keep and reread in quieter moments. He would find by the time he was a young man that he knew it by heart. So she had written it only once, letting her own loss and wholehearted grief come through. Inelegance of style would matter little; insincerity would clang like a false note with louder and harsher echoes through the years.
Today, of course, Edward would be there, small, cold and frightened but performing the rites expected of him. He was now Lord Ashworth: he must sit in the church, upright and well-behaved, and follow his father’s coffin to its grave, and mourn as was seemly.
Edward would come from home with Mrs. Stevenson and afterwards return with her. Charlotte and Emily would return to Cardington Crescent; the peculiar circumstances of murder made that necessary. They rode with Aunt Vespasia and Eustace in the family carriage, for this occasion draped in black and pulled by black horses. The hearse, of course, was provided by the undertaker and was draped and plumed as always.
Mrs. March and Tassie came next in the second-best barouche. Both Charlotte and Emily stared at Tassie, but