Death in the Devil's Acre - Anne Perry [87]
“One does not hate someone so passionately over a gambling debt.” He went back to the subject because he had not yet exorcised it.
“Perhaps they are mad?” She shrugged. “Who knows what it was? Really, it is a most unpleasant affair, Papa. Must we discuss it?”
An apology was on his tongue, and then he changed his mind. “Do you find you can dismiss it?” he asked instead. “I cannot.”
“Apparently.” She had an excellent shadow of Augusta’s cold scorn. “Yes, I can. I do not find the goings-on of the denizens of the slums as fascinating as you do. I greatly prefer the society in which I was brought up.”
“I thought you found it tedious.” He was surprised how sharp his own tongue had become. “I have frequently heard you say so.”
She lifted her chin a little and moved away. “Do you suggest I should look in the Devil’s Acre for a little variety then, Papa?” Her voice was brittle. “I don’t think Alan would care for that! And Mama would be appalled.” She walked over to the bell and pulled it. “I am afraid that, like most other women, I shall just have to put up with a certain tedium and a great deal of trivia in daily life. But I find your moralizing insufferably pompous. You have not the faintest idea what caused these murders, and I can’t think why you want to go on talking about them, unless it is to make yourself feel superior. I don’t care to discuss it anymore. As Mama says, it is unbelievably sordid.”
The bell was answered by the footman.
“Please call my carriage, Stride,” she said coolly. “I am ready to return home.”
Balantyne was filled with a mixture of relief and a sense of loss as he watched her go. Was it the difference between men and women, or one generation and another that set the gulf between their understanding? It seemed these days there were fewer and fewer people he could talk to with ease, and feel that they were discussing something significant, not merely exchanging conventional words that one neither believed in nor cared about.
Why had he wanted to talk about the murders with Christina? Or with anybody? There were a thousand other things to discuss, all pleasant or interesting—even amusing. Why the Devil’s Acre? ... Because in remembering some of the things Brandy had spoken of, the poverty and the pain, he could understand the hatred that might drive someone to kill a creature like Max—even if the savage mutilation was beyond his understanding. He would have executed the man, simply, with a shot through the brain. But perhaps, after all, if it were his wife or his daughter Max had used in his whorehouse, he might have felt the need not only to kill but to destroy the offender’s manhood, the means of his power and the symbol of his abuse. There was a kind of justice in it.
He could not put it from his mind. And there was no one with whom he could discuss it without arousing anger or being accused of fatuity and empty moralizing. Was that how his family, the women he loved, saw him? An insensitive man, pompous, obsessed with a series of sordid killings in an area that he knew nothing about?
Surely Charlotte did not see him like that. She had seemed so interested. Could it have been only kindness? He remembered the letters from Wellington’s soldier in Spain, she had affected to find them so exciting. Could that light in her face have been just a politeness? The thought was abhorrent.
He stood up and walked smartly out of the room and across the hallway to the library. He pulled out paper and wrote a letter to Emily Ashworth. She was Charlotte’s sister; she would pass on the message tactfully that the soldier’s letters were available if Charlotte cared to read them for herself. He sent it off with the footman before he had time to reconsider whether he was being foolish.
The following afternoon, at the earliest hour acceptable for calling, the parlormaid came in with a message that Miss Ellison was in the morning room, and did the general wish to receive her?
He felt