Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [54]
“Not a room to put you at your ease, is it?” Shaw met her eyes very directly. “But then that was never the intention.” A smile curled the corners of his mouth. “Are you impressed?”
“That was the intention?” She smiled back.
“Oh assuredly. And are you?”
“I’m impressed with how much money he must have had.” She was perfectly frank without even considering it. He was a man whose honesty demanded from her exactly the same. “All these leather-bound books. There must be a hundred pounds’ worth in every case. The contents of the whole room would keep an average family for at least two years—food, gaslight, a new outfit for every season, coal enough to keep them thoroughly warm, roast beef every Sunday and goose for Christmas, and pay a housemaid to boot.”
“Indeed it is, but the good bishop did not see it that way. Books are not only the source of knowledge, but the display of them is the symbol of it.” He made a slight gesture of distaste with his shoulders, and paced over to the mantel, and back again, straightening the bronze as he passed it.
“You were not fond of him,” she said with a half smile.
Again his face was unwaveringly direct. In any other man she might have felt it bold, but it was so obviously part of his nature only the most conceited woman would have interpreted it so.
“I disagreed with him about almost everything.” He waved his hands. “Not, of course, that that is the same thing. I do not mean to equivocate. I apologize. No, I was not fond of him. Some beliefs are fundamental, and color everything that a man is.”
“Or a woman,” she added.
His smile was sudden and illuminated his entire face. “Of course. Again, I apologize. It is very avant-garde to suppose that women think at all; I am surprised you mention it. You must keep most unusual company. Are you related to the policeman Pitt who is investigating the fire?”
She noticed that he did not say “Clemency’s death,” and the flicker of pain in his moment of hesitation was not lost on her. He might mask the hurt, but the second’s glimpse of it showed a side of him that she liked even better.
“Yes—he is my husband.” It was the only time she had admitted it when she was involving herself in a case. Every other time she had used her anonymity to gain an advantage. And also, the wives of policemen were not received in society, any more than would be the tradesmen’s wives. Commerce was considered vulgar; trade was beneath mention. In fact the very necessity of earning money at all was not spoken of in the best circles. One simply presumed it came from lands or investments. Labor was honest and good for the soul, and the morals; but the more leisure one had, the greater status one possessed.
He stood perfectly still for a moment, and the very unnaturalness of it in him spoke a kind of pain.
“Is that why you came—to learn more information about us? And brought your mother and grandmother too!”
The only possible answer was the truth. Any alternatives, however laced with honesty, would jar on his ear and degrade them both.
“I think curiosity may well be why Grandmama came. Mama, I think, came with her to try to make it a little less—awful.” She stood facing him across the table with its rampant bronze lion. “I came because I heard from Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, and Mr. Somerset Carlisle, that Mrs. Shaw was a most remarkable person who had given much time to fighting against the power of slum landlords, that she wished to change the law to make them more accessible to public awareness.”
They were standing barely a yard from each other and she was acutely aware