Half Moon Street - Anne Perry [122]
“Nor do I, Miss Antrim,” he replied, digging his hands into his coat pockets. “But I know that whoever it was saw a particular photograph of you which is not available to most people, and it mattered to him very much.”
She was intrigued, and the smile on her mouth was too filled with amusement for him to believe she had any idea what he was going to show her. The laughter went all the way to her clear, sky-blue eyes.
“There are scores of photographs of me, Superintendent. My career is longer than I wish to admit. I couldn’t begin to tell you who has seen which.” She did not say he was naive, but her voice carried the implication quite plainly, and it entertained her.
He did not like what he had to do next. He pulled out the postcard with the Ophelia travesty and held it out.
Her eyes widened. “Good God! Where did you get that?” She looked up at him. “You are quite right . . . that is one of Delbert’s. You are never going to say he was killed for that. That’s preposterous. You can probably buy them from half a dozen back street shops. I certainly hope so. It will have been a lot of discomfort for nothing if you can’t. The wet velvet was revolting on the skin, and abysmally cold.”
Pitt was stunned. For a moment he could think of nothing to say.
“But it is effective, don’t you think?”
“Effective.” He repeated the word as if it was in an unfamiliar language. He looked at her vivid face with its fine, delicate mouth and wonderful bones. “Yes, Miss Antrim, I have never known a picture to have more effect.”
She heard the emotion in his voice.
“You disapprove, Superintendent. That may be just as well. At least you will remember it, and it might make you think. The image that has no power to disturb probably has no power to change either.”
“To change?” he asked, his voice a little hoarse. “To change what, Miss Antrim?”
She looked at him very steadily. “To change the way people think, Superintendent. What else is worth changing?” Her expression filled with disgust. “If the Lord Chamberlain had not taken off the play you came to, then Freddie Warriner might not have lost his nerve, and we would have started a bill to make the divorce laws more equal. We wouldn’t have succeeded this time, but maybe the next, or the one after. You must begin by making people care!”
He drew in breath to make a dozen replies, then saw her smile, and understood what she meant.
“If you can change thought, you can change the world,” she said softly.
He pushed his hands farther into his pockets, his fists clenched tight. “And what thought was it you intended to change with this picture, Miss Antrim?”
She seemed faintly amused. He saw the flicker in her eyes.
“The thought that women are content with a passive role in love,” she replied. “We are imprisoned in other people’s ideas of who we are and what we feel, what makes us happy . . . or what hurts. We allow it to happen. To be chained by your own beliefs is bad enough, heaven knows; but to be chained by other people’s is monstrous.” Her face was alight as she spoke. There was a kind of luminous beauty in her, as if she could see far beyond the physically jarring image on the paper to the spiritual freedom she was seeking, not for herself so much as for others. If it was a lonely crusade, she was prepared for it and her courage was more than equal to it.
“Don’t you understand?” she said urgently to his silence. “Nobody has the right to decide what other people want or feel! And we do it all the time, because it’s what we need them to want.” She was close to him. He could feel the warmth of her, see the faint down on her cheek. “We feel more comfortable, it feeds our preconceptions, our ideas about who we are,” she went on fiercely. “Or else it is what we can give them, so we decide it is what they want. They should be grateful. It is for their good. It is for somebody