Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [120]
We are going to the opera tonight. It should be great fun. Everyone will be dressed in the latest fashion. It’s just like London, the very best courtesans parade at the back and pick up custom, only of course I’m not supposed to know that!
All this is marvelous to watch, but nothing on earth could persuade me to live this way permanently. It is the best thing of all to know that I shall be home in a few days, and with you all again.
I don’t suppose you have heard from Gracie? I don’t think she is sure enough of her writing yet, and of course Daniel and Jemima wouldn’t think to write. I hope they are building sand castles, finding crabs and little fish in the rock pools, eating sweets, getting wet and dirty and having an unforgettable time.
I imagine you are working hard. The case you describe sounds macabre. There must be a tragedy behind it. I hope you are eating properly, and finding where I put everything you will need. Is the house horribly silent without us all? Or wonderfully peaceful? I trust you are not neglecting Archie and Angus? I don’t imagine they will allow you to.
I miss you, and shall be happy to be home soon,
Yours always,
Charlotte
He read it again carefully, not that he had missed any part of it but that it gave him a sense of her nearness. He could almost hear her quick footsteps down the passage and half expected her to push the door open and come in.
It also finally solved the question of what had happened to Henri Bonnard. He found himself smiling at that. It was a pleasant thought, among the other miseries, that he had gone for the most generous of reasons. He hoped the ambassador in London viewed Bonnard’s loyalty to his friend as a quality far outweighing the indiscretion of having attended a nightclub of exceedingly dubious reputation. Even if it was as sordid as gossip would have, it was still the sort of thing young men did, even if largely out of curiosity and a certain bravado.
Was that what he and Orlando Antrim had quarreled about? Orlando had been trying to persuade him to go? It seemed finally he had acquiesced.
Pitt finished the last of his tea, grimacing at its coldness—he liked his tea as hot as he could bear it—and stood up, forgetting that Archie was on his lap.
“Sorry,” he apologized absently. “Here, Archie, have some more breakfast. I hope you realize you’ll go back to rations when your mistress comes home? There’ll be no extras then. And you’ll have to go back to your own bed as well . . . you and Angus!”
Archie wound around his legs, purring, leaving white and ginger hairs on his trousers.
Pitt had no alternative but to confront Cecily Antrim with the photographs. He would have liked to avoid it so he could keep his illusions about her and imagine in his mind that she could produce an explanation which would make it understandable and somehow not her fault. She had been blackmailed into it to save someone else, anything that would not mean she was a willing participant. That was not a great leap of the imagination. Some of the other photographs had certainly been blackmail material, had any of the people in them gone on to a more respectable position or career. And the money so obtained would explain Cathcart’s style of life, and Lily Monderell’s.
But he could not so easily imagine Cecily Antrim as anyone’s victim. She was too vibrant, too courageous, too willing to follow her own beliefs even to destruction.
He found her in the early afternoon in the theatre rehearsing for Hamlet. Tellman was with him, reluctant to the last step.
“Shakespeare!” he said between set teeth. He made no further remark, but the expression on his face was eloquent.
As before they were allowed in grudgingly