Death in the Devil's Acre - Anne Perry [31]
“Are we as shallow as that?” he said aloud.
“Defensive,” Brandy answered. “Self-preserving.”
Alan Ross ran his hand over his hair. “Most of us avoid looking at the unbearable,” he said so quietly they could only just hear him. “Especially when there is nothing we can do about it. You can’t blame a woman who doesn’t choose to know that her husband uses a prostitute—particularly if that prostitute is a child. To accept that the child is also a boy would force her to leave him. We all know that divorce ruins a woman. Even to quite moderate society she ceases to exist. She would be an object of intolerable pity, not to mention the obscene imaginations and suggestions of the less charitable. No.” He shook his head in a fierce little gesture. “Her only option is to connive at his secrecy, and never in any circumstances allow herself to kill the last precious doubt. There is nothing else she can afford to do.”
For once, Brandy was silenced.
Balantyne stared at the flames of a candelabra. He tried to imagine what it might be like, trapped in such a relationship, suspecting and yet knowing you dare not acknowledge such a truth. In fact, for your own survival, and perhaps the survival of your children, you must be the most ardent accomplice in hiding it. It had never occurred to him that Augusta was anything but a virtuous and satisfied wife. Was that insufferably complacent of him—blindly, stupidly insensitive? Or was it simply a measure of his trust in her, even perhaps a kind of happiness? He had never used a prostitute in his life, even in his early army days. There had been the occasional lapse, of course, before he was married—but for mutual pleasure, never for money. But after that he had not ever questioned his moral duty to abstinence when either he or Augusta were away from home or indisposed. Augusta was not a passionate woman; perhaps decency precluded it? And he had long ago disciplined himself to master his own body and its demands upon him; such control was part of the mind of a soldier. Exhaustion, pain, and loneliness must be governed.
Alan Ross sat back. “I’m sorry,” he said, running his hand over his hair again. “It was not a suitable subject to discuss. I have spoiled your dinner.”
“No.” Balantyne swallowed and dragged his thoughts back. “What you said is true,” he corrected quickly. “The situation is hideous. But you cannot blame people for not acknowledging what can only destroy them. God knows—a man who procures prostitutes is barely fit to live. But murder cannot be the answer. And this mutilation is barbaric.”
“Have you ever been to the Devil’s Acre, Papa?” Brandy spoke without fire now, his face somber. “Or any of our other slums?”
Balantyne knew what he was thinking. In the fight for survival in grinding, hopeless poverty, what else could people be but barbaric? Memories of army camps came back to him, of the Crimea, of Scutari, of sudden and violent death—of what men do in towns during the weeks and the nights waiting for battle. Any day their bodies could be mangled, faceless under the sun of Africa or frozen in the Himalayan snows. If he did not really know Brandy, neither did Brandy know him.
“I’ve been thirty years in the army, Brandy,” he replied. “I know what can happen to people. Is that an answer?”
“No.” Brandy drank the last of his port. “Only I don’t find it acceptable to avoid the question anymore.”
Balantyne stood up. “We had better rejoin the ladies in the withdrawing room before they realize we have been discussing this subject again.”
Alan Ross rose also. “I know a member of Parliament I’d like to see. Do you wish to come, Brandy? We might be of assistance to him. I hear he has some sort of bill to put before the House.”
“What about?” Brandy followed them.
“Child prostitution, of course,” Ross replied, opening the door. “But don’t mention it in front of Christina, if you don’t mind. I think the subject is one that distresses her.”
Balantyne was pleased. He had thought from her remarks that