Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [55]
“Mr. Carlisle said she had an unusual passion and unselfishness about it,” she went on. “She was not looking for personal praise nor for a cause to occupy herself, but that she simply cared. I felt such a woman’s death should not go unsolved, nor people who would murder her in order to protect their miserable money remain unexposed—and perhaps scandal of that might even further her work. But your aunts tell me she was not involved in anything of that kind. So it seems I have the wrong Clemency Shaw.”
“No you have not.” Now his voice was very quiet and he moved at last, turning a little away from her towards the mantelpiece and the fire. “She did not choose to tell anyone else what she was doing. She had her reasons.”
“But you knew?”
“Oh yes. She trusted me. We had been”—he hesitated, choosing his word carefully—“friends … for a long time.”
She wondered why he chose the term. Did it mean they had been more than merely lovers—or something less—or both?
He turned back and looked directly at her, without bothering to disguise the grief in his face, nor its nature. She thought he did mean “friends,” and not more.
“She was a remarkable woman.” He used her own words. “I admired her very much. She had an extraordinary inner courage. She could know things, and face them squarely, that would have crushed most people.” He drew in his breath and let it out slowly. “There is a terrible empty space where she used to be, a goodness no longer here.”
She wanted to move forward and touch him, put her hand over his and convey her empathy in the simplest and most immediate way. But such a gesture would be bold, intrusively intimate between a man and a woman who had met only moments ago. All she could do was stand on the spot and repeat the words anyone would use.
“I’m sorry, truly I am sorry.”
He swung his hands out wide, then starting pacing the floor again. He did not bother to thank her; such trivialities could be taken for granted between them.
“I should be very glad if you learned anything.” Quite automatically he adjusted the heavy curtains to remove a crooked fold, then swung back to face her. “If I can help, tell me how, and I shall do it.”
“I will.”
His smile returned for an instant, full of warmth.
“Thank you. Now let us return and see if Josiah and the aunts have been totally scandalized—unless, of course, there is something else you wish to say?”
“No—not at all. I simply desired to know if I was mistaken in my beliefs, or if there were two people with such an unusual name.”
“Then we may leave the wild seductiveness of the bishop’s library”—he glanced around it with a rueful smile—“and return to the propriety of the withdrawing room. Really, you know, Mrs. Pitt, we should have conducted this interview in the conservatory. They have a magnificent one here, full of wrought iron stands with palms and ferns and potted flowers. It would have given them so much more to be shocked about.”
She regarded him with interest. “You enjoy shocking them, don’t you?”
His expression was a curious mixture of impatience and pity.
“I am a doctor, Mrs. Pitt; I see a great deal of real suffering. I get impatient with the unnecessary pain imposed by hypocrisy and idle imaginations which have nothing better to do than speculate unkindly and create pain where there need be none. Yes, I hate idiotic pretense and I blow it away where I can.”
“But what do your aunts know of your reality?”
“Nothing,” he admitted, pulling his face into a rueful smile. “They grew up here. They have neither of them ever left this house except to make social calls or to attend suitable functions and charitable meetings which never see the objects of their efforts. The old bishop kept them here after his wife died; Celeste to write his letters, read to him, look up reference works for his sermons and discourses and to keep him company when he wished to talk. She also plays the piano, loudly when she is in a temper, and rather badly, but he couldn’t tell. He liked the idea of music, but he was indifferent to its practice.”
Even standing