Cardington Crescent - Anne Perry [63]
Charlotte had also worn a light veil, partly for decorum, but more to give her the opportunity to watch people without their being aware of it. Now she looked across the grass and the turned earth with its open hole at Jack Radley on the far side. He was standing with his hands folded, very sober, his face suitably grave. But his suit was fashionably cut, his tie elegant, and she imagined she could see the shadow of his eyelashes on his cheek as he lowered his gaze. Had he the monumental vanity to think he could kill George and then take his place? Had envy given way to temptation, and then a slow-forming plan, and had at last opportunity turned it into act?
She saw nothing on his face; he could have been a choirboy standing there. But then, if he were guilty of such a plan he was without conscience, and she should not expect to find any reflection of guilt in his face.
Eustace’s features were composed in pious rectitude and showed nothing but his sense of the occasion and his own part in it. Whatever else was in him, there was no guilt, and absolutely no fear. If he had committed murder it was without remorse. What could possibly, even to his mind, justify that?
That left the last, and the other most obvious, suspects: William and Sybilla. They stood side by side, and yet in only the barest and most literal sense were they together. William looked straight ahead of him over the grave, past Eustace and the figure of Beamish to the yew trees, perpetual guardians of death, skirting the burial yard from the living city, sheltering darkness in their needle leaves and dense, heavy wood. Nothing grew under them, and their fruit was poison.
Such knowledge could have been passing behind William’s silver-gray eyes as he stood listening. There was pain in his mouth, and the flesh of his cheeks was pinched. Charlotte felt pain watching him, as though his fair skin were a layer thinner than other people’s, and the wounds of nature reached the nerves beneath more readily. Perhaps that was necessary, to paint the shadows and the sweeping light in the sky as he did. All the skill in the world cannot interpret what has not first been felt.
Had that delicate, creative hand also stolen the digitalis and emptied it into the coffeepot for George to drink—and die? Why? The answer was glaring: because George had wooed Sybilla, and won her.
Automatically Charlotte’s gaze moved to Sybilla herself. She was a beautiful woman, and dressed in reliefless black she looked better than anyone else here. The white skin of her neck was perfect, almost luminous as pearl, her jaw slender. Her upper face was masked by her veil, and Charlotte had been watching her for several minutes, trying to read something into it, when she noticed the tears bright on her skin and the faint lines of strain, the tight muscles in her throat. She glanced downwards. The black-gloved hands were clenched and the lace was ripped off the handkerchief. Even as she looked the fingers unknotted, picking at the cambric, tearing fragments of the cotton off and letting them fall, little snowflakes of broken lace. Grief? Or guilt? For having seduced another woman’s husband, or for having murdered him when he tired of her?
Suddenly Charlotte felt a cold grip clutch at her, deep in the pit of her stomach. Was Sybilla’s guilt the belief that she had driven Emily to murder? How much had George loved her? There was only Emily’s word about the reconciliation. What had really happened that evening in her bedroom when George had come in? Was Emily now remembering the truth, or only what her pride and her pain told her to remember?
No! That was nonsense ... treacherous ... weak ... Get rid of the thought! Refuse to have it. But how do you refuse to have a thought? The more you try to reject it the stronger its hold on you, the more it consumes your mind.
“Aunt Vespasia!”
But Vespasia was unaware of her; her mind and heart were absorbed in a bright width of memory, nursery days and youth, old confidences and small pleasures shared,