Farriers' Lane - Anne Perry [154]
When they rose to leave, Adah grasped Charlotte by the arm and drew her aside, her face tense, her eyes full of pain.
“My dear Miss Pitt, I do not know how to put this to you without seeming intrusive in what is your most private affair, but I cannot stand by and say nothing. Your mother is in a most vulnerable situation, bereaved of her husband, alone in the world, and quite naturally wishing to move into society again. But really—an actor!”
Charlotte agreed with her intensely, and at the same time instinctively rushed to defend Caroline. “He is very agreeable,” she said with a gulp. “And a pillar of his profession.”
“That is immaterial!” Adah’s voice was fierce, her grasp on Charlotte’s arm painful. “He is a Jew! You cannot possibly allow your mother to have—to have anything but—how can I say this with the remotest delicacy? For love of heaven, my dear, you cannot allow her to have relations with him!”
Charlotte felt herself blushing hotly. The idea was repellent to her, not because of anything to do with Joshua Fielding, but because she could not imagine her mother in such a situation. It was profoundly … distressing, offensive.
“I can see you had not thought of it,” Adah went on, misreading her reaction entirely, thinking only of the word Jew. “Of course not. You are innocent. But my dear, it is not impossible—and then your mother would be ruined! Of course it is not as if she were still of childbearing age, so it would not contaminate her, but all the same.”
“Contaminate?” Charlotte was confused.
“Naturally.” Adah’s face was twisted with pain, pity, memory of something too ugly for her to speak of. “Having”—she hesitated on the word—“union—with a Jew—will leave a person … different. It is not something one can explain to a maiden lady of any sensibility at all. But you must believe me!”
Charlotte was speechless.
Adah mistook her silence for doubt.
“It is perfectly true,” she said urgently. “I swear it. God forgive me, I should know!” Her voice was raw with shame and misery. “My husband, like many men, satisfied his appetites beyond the walls of his own home, only he did it with a Jewess. I was with child at the time. That is why poor Prosper is deformed.” She caught her breath on the word as though the act of forcing it through her lips was a further wound to her. “And why I never had another child.”
Suddenly Charlotte saw the barren years, the shame, the sense of betrayal, of being unclean, which had lasted even until now. She felt a pity so intense she longed to reach out and put some kind of balm on the wound. And yet she was also revolted. It was alien to all her beliefs to imagine that there was a kind of human being who was so different that union with them was unclean, not because of immorality or disease, but simply by the nature of their race.
She did not know what to say, but Adah’s passionate face demanded some reply.
“Oh.” She felt idiotically inadequate. “I am sure—I am sure my mother is unaware of that.” It was the only thing she could think of to say, and at least that much was true.
“Then if you have any care for her at all, you must tell her,” Adah urged intensely. “Never mind her age in life,” she went on. “It is the beginning of downfall. Who knows what may be next? Now we must join the others, or they will wonder what is amiss. Come!”
The day after the trip to the museum, Charlotte accompanied Caroline, at Caroline’s invitation, to visit Joshua Fielding and Tamar Macaulay at the theater, after rehearsal and before the evening performance. Charlotte felt acutely uncomfortable. It was one of the least enjoyable times she had ever spent in her mother’s company. She longed to be able to tell her that Pitt knew Aaron Godman had been innocent, but she had promised Pitt she would not, and she knew his reasons for demanding such a thing were excellent. But still she felt deceitful, and she doubted Caroline would understand, even when she knew the full truth.
She was also horribly afraid that perhaps Joshua Fielding was the one who had murdered and crucified Kingsley