Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [123]
He looked back at Pitt, his eyes direct and urgent. “He hated cant, and wasn’t afraid to show it for what it was. Dear God, how I’m going to miss him. He was the only man around here I could talk to for hours on end about any subject under the sun—new ideas in medicine, old ideas in art, political theory, social order and change.” He smiled suddenly, a luminous expression full of joy as fragile as sunlight. “A good wine or cheese, a beautiful woman, the opera, even a good horse—other religions, other people’s customs—and not be afraid to say exactly what I thought.”
He slid down a little in his chair and put his hands together, fingertips to fingertips. “Couldn’t do that with anyone else here. Clitheridge is such a complete fool he can’t express an opinion on anything.” He let his breath out in a snort. “He’s terrified of offending. Josiah has opinions on everything, mostly old Bishop Worlingham’s. He wanted to take the cloth, you know.” He looked at Pitt quizzically, to see what he made of the idea, whether he understood. “Studied under the old bastard, took everything he said as holy writ, adopted his entire philosophy, like a suit of clothes ready-made. I must say it fitted him to the quarter inch.” He pulled a face. “But he was the only son, and his father had a flourishing business and he demanded poor Josiah take it over when he fell ill. The mother and sisters were dependent; there was nothing else he could do.”
He sighed, still watching Pitt. “But he never lost the passion for the church. When he dies his ghost will come back to haunt us dressed in miter and robes, or perhaps a Dominican habit. He considers all argument heresy.
“Pascoe’s a nice enough old fossil, but his ideas are wrapped in the romance of the Middle Ages, or more accurately the age of King Arthur, Lancelot, the Song of Roland, and other beautiful but unlikely epics. Dalgetty’s full of ideas, but such a crusader for liberality of thought I find myself taking the opposing view simply to bring him back to some sort of moderation. Maude has more sense. Have you met her? Excellent woman.” His mouth twitched at the corners as if at last he had found something that truly pleased him, something without shadow. “She used to be an artist’s model, you know—in her youth. Magnificent body, and not coy about it. That was all before she met Dalgetty and became respectable—which I think her soul always was. But she’s never lost her sense of proportion or humor, or turned her nose up at her old friends. She still goes back to Mile End now and again, taking them gifts.”
Pitt was stunned, not only at the fact, but that Shaw should know, and now be telling him.
Shaw was watching him, laughing inwardly at the surprise in his face.
“Does Dalgetty know?” Pitt asked after a moment or two.
“Oh certainly. And he doesn’t care in the slightest, to his eternal credit. Of course he couldn’t spread it around, for her sake. She very much wants to be the respectable woman she appears. And if Highgate society knew they’d crucify her. Which would be their loss. She’s worth any ten of them. Funnily enough, Josiah, for all his narrow limits, knows that. He admires her as if she were a plaster saint. Some part of his judgment must be good after all.”
“And how did you find out about her modeling?” Pitt asked, his mind scrambling after explanations, trying to fit this new piece in to make sense of all the rest, and failing. Was it conceivable Dalgetty had tried to kill Shaw to keep this secret? He hardly seemed like a man who cared so desperately for social status—he did enough to jeopardize it quite deliberately with his liberal reviews. And yet that was fashionable in certain literary quarters—not the same thing as posing naked for young men to paint, and all the world to see. Could he love his wife so much