Funeral in Blue - Anne Perry [8]
“Thank you,” she accepted. “That’s most thoughtful.”
It was another ten minutes of polite trivia before the tray was brought and the clerk left, closing the door behind him. Charles invited Hester to pour, then at last he sat back and looked at her.
“Did you visit Imogen?” he asked.
“Yes, but not for very long.” She was acutely aware that his eyes were studying her face as if he were trying to read something deeper than her words. She wished she could tell him what he so desperately wanted to hear. “She was about to go out, and of course I had not told her I was coming.”
“I see.” He looked down at his cup as if the liquid in it were of profound interest.
Hester wondered if Imogen found him as difficult to talk to as she did. Had he always been this stilted about anything that touched his emotions, or had Imogen made him this way? What had he been like five or six years ago? She tried to remember. “Charles, I don’t know what else to do,” she said helplessly. “I can’t suddenly start visiting her every day, when I haven’t done so for months. She has no reason to confide in me, not only because we are no longer close, but I am your sister. She must know my first loyalty is to you.”
He was staring out of the window. Neither of them had touched their tea. “Just as I arrived home yesterday, I saw her leaving. She didn’t notice me. I . . . I stayed in the cab and told the driver to follow her.”
Hester was too startled to speak. And yet even as she was rejecting the thought, she knew that in his place she might have done the same thing, even if she had hated herself for it afterwards. “Where did she go?” she asked, gulping and struggling to keep her voice level.
“All over the place,” he answered, still looking out of the window, away from her. “First she went through a string of back streets to somewhere near Covent Garden. I thought at first she was shopping, although I can’t think what she would find there. But she went into a small building and came out without anything.” He seemed to be about to add something, then changed his mind, as if he thought better of saying it aloud.
“Was that all?” Hester asked.
“No.” He kept his back to her. She saw the rigid line of taut muscles pulling his coat tight. “No, she went to two other places, similar, and came out again within twenty minutes. Lastly she went to a street off the Gray’s Inn Road and paid her cabbie off.” At last he turned to face her, his eyes challenging. “It was a butcher’s shop. She looked . . . excited. Her cheeks were flushed and she ran across the pavement clutching her reticule . . . as if she were going to buy something terribly important. Hester, what could it mean? It doesn’t make any sense!”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. She would like to think Imogen was simply visiting a friend and had perhaps looked for an unusual gift to take to her, but Charles had said she appeared to carry nothing except her reticule. And why go in the evening just as Charles came home, albeit a trifle early, but without telling him?
“I’m . . . I’m afraid for her,” he said at last. “Not just for my own sake, but for what scandal she could bring upon herself if she is . . .” He could not say the words.
She did not leave him floundering. “I’ll call on her again,” she said gently. “We used to be friends. I shall see if I can gain her confidence sufficiently to find out something more.”
“Will you . . . will you please keep me . . .” He did not want to say “advised.” Sometimes he was aware of being pompous. At his best he could laugh at himself. This time he was afraid of being ridiculous, and of alienating her as well.
“Of course I will,” she said firmly. “I would rather be able to tell you simply that she had made a rather unlikely friend of whom she thought you might disapprove, and so she did not