Funeral in Blue - Anne Perry [111]
His face pinched a little. “I think so. I’m sorry. I know you admire him a great deal. But . . .” He hesitated, obviously uncertain how to say what he was thinking, perhaps even if he should say it at all. And yet it was equally plainly something he believed to be true.
She helped him. “You are trying to tell me he might be guilty, and I must be prepared for that.”
“No, actually I was thinking that one can never know another person as well as one thinks one does,” he replied gently. “Perhaps one cannot even know oneself.”
“Are you being kind to me?” she asked. “Or are you equivocating the way you always do?”
He looked a little taken aback. “I was saying what I thought. Do you think I always equivocate?” There was a thread of hurt in the question.
“I’m sorry,” she answered quickly, ashamed of herself. “No, you are just careful not to overstate things.”
“You mean I am unemotional?” he pressed.
She could hear Imogen’s accusation in that, and unreasonably it angered her. She would not have been happy married to a man as careful and as guarded of his inner life as Charles was, but he was her brother, and to defend him was as instinctive as recoiling when you are struck. If she sensed capacity to be hurt, she tried to shield it. If she sensed failure, and she hardly admitted even the word, then she lashed out to deny it, and to cover it from anyone else’s sight.
“Being self-controlled is not the same thing as having no emotions,” she said with something approaching anger, as if she were speaking through him to Imogen.
“No . . . no.” He was watching her closely. “Hester . . . don’t . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I wish I could help, but . . .”
She smiled at him. “I know. There is nothing. But thank you for coming.”
He leaned forward and gave her a quick peck on the cheek, then suddenly put his arms around her and hugged her properly, holding her closely for a moment before letting her go, coughing to clear his throat, and muttering good-bye before he turned to leave.
Sitting alone at the breakfast table, Callandra also was deeply shaken by the picture of Elissa in the newspaper. Her first thought was not how it might affect the jury in the court, but her own amazement that Elissa should look so vulnerable. She had found it difficult enough when Hester had told her that she was beautiful, and then that her actions in Vienna had been passionate and brave. Callandra had created in her mind the picture of a hard and brittle loveliness, something dazzling, but a matter of perfect bones and skin, dramatic coloring, perhaps handsome eyes. She was not prepared for a face where the heart showed through, where the dreams were naked and the pain of disillusion clear for anyone to see. How could Kristian have stopped loving her?
Why do people stop loving? Could it be anything but a weakness within themselves, an incapacity to give and go on giving, somewhere a selfishness? Her mind raced back over all she could remember of Kristian, every time they had met in the hospital, and before that the long hours they had spent during the typhoid outbreak in Limehouse. Every picture, every conversation, seemed to her tirelessly generous. She could see, as if it were before her now, his face in the flickering lights of the makeshift ward, exhausted, lined with anxiety, his eyes dark and shadowed around the sockets. But he had never lost his temper or his hope. He had tried to ease the distress of the dying, not only their physical pain but their fear and grief.
Or was she recalling it as she