Farriers' Lane - Anne Perry [111]
“I hope you will call again, sir.”
He looked at her and saw in her set, tense expression that the words were not idle, not simply a very customary way of bidding farewell.
“Oh yes,” he said very firmly. “I shall certainly call again.”
Pitt had also found little satisfaction in the day. He had spent some considerable time further pursuing the relationship of Juniper Stafford and Adolphus Pryce, learning what he could about how it had deepened from a social acquaintance brought about by Pryce’s professional contact with Judge Stafford. It had been extremely difficult to do without at any time suggesting to those who did not know that it was now an immoral liaison and could have led to murder. The people he spoke to were agog for gossip and innuendo. Had they not been, they would have been of little use in his quest for facts, but their very sensitivity meant he had to be the more careful. As a result the picture he had gained was unclear, full of shadows and implications of passion, but without substance.
He came home tired and dispirited, feeling that he was pursuing something whose reality he would never know beyond doubt, and certainly never prove.
Charlotte had an excellent dinner ready: rich mutton stewed with potatoes and sweet white turnip, and flavored with rosemary. He ate slowly and with more satisfaction than he had felt all day. He had finished and was sitting in the parlor by the fire with his feet on the fender, sinking slowly farther and farther down in his chair, before he realized that she was preoccupied and looked now and then a little worried.
“What is it?” he asked reluctantly, wishing it would be nothing, some domestic triviality he would not have to bother with.
She bit her lip and turned from the work box where she had been sorting threads.
“The relationship between Mama and Joshua Fielding.”
“Is she going to be very upset if he is implicated in the Farriers” Lane murder?” he asked. He liked his mother-in-law, although he was more than a little in awe of her, and he certainly would not wish her to be hurt. However, being disappointed now and then was part of caring, and the only way to avoid it was to care about no one, which was a kind of death. “I don’t see why he should be,” he went on. “Everything I have found out indicates it was Aaron Godman, just as the original trial decided.”
She pulled a face. “I almost wish he were involved.”
“You aren’t making sense.” He was confused.
Her face screwed up even farther, and she closed her eyes. “Thomas, I think she is really in love with him. I know that’s absurd—but—but I think it’s true.”
“It is absurd,” he said, eager to dismiss it. He slid lower in the chair till his ankles were on the fender and his feet so close to the fire the soles of his slippers were hot. “She is a very respectable society widow, Charlotte. He is an actor, a Jew, and twenty years younger than she. You are exaggerating out of all proportion. She is probably bored, as Emily is half the time, and looking for something to become involved in. This is more colorful, and more dramatic, than tea parties and fashion. She will forget it once she has seen him cleared.”
“Do you think so?” Charlotte looked hopeful, her eyes wide and very dark.
Her expression, far from cheering him, suddenly made him consider the matter properly. He recalled Caroline’s face as she had looked at Joshua Fielding, the heightened color, the altered tone in her voice, the frequency with which she mentioned his name. And Charlotte was much more sensitive to such delicate changes than he was. Women understood