Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [78]
“What time did you retire this evening, Mr. Hatch?” he began.
“Ugh?” Hatch recalled himself to the present with difficulty. “Oh—late—I did not look at the clock. I was in deep contemplation of what I had been reading.”
“I heard you come up the stairs at about quarter to two,” Prudence put in very quietly, looking first at her husband and then at Pitt.
He turned a blank face towards her. “I disturbed you? I’m sorry, that was the last thing I intended.”
“Oh no, my dear! I had been roused by one of the children. Elizabeth had a nightmare. I had merely not yet gone back to sleep.”
“Is she well this morning?”
Prudence’s face relaxed into the ghost of a smile. “Of course. It was simply an ill dream. Children do have them, you know—quite often. All she required was a little reassurance.”
“Could not one of the older children have given her that without disturbing you?” He frowned, seizing on the matter as if it were important. “Nan is fifteen! In another few years she may have children of her own.”
“There is a world of difference between fifteen and twenty, Josiah. I can remember when I was fifteen.” The tiny smile returned again, soft and sad. “I knew nothing—and I imagined I knew everything. There were entire regions—continents of experience of which I had not the faintest conception.”
Pitt wondered what particular ignorances were in her mind. He thought perhaps those of marriage, the responsibility after the romance had cooled, the obedience, and perhaps the bearing of children—but he could have been wrong. It might have been worldly things, quite outside the home, other struggles or tragedies she had seen and coped with.
Hatch apparently did not know what she referred to either. He frowned at her in incomprehension for a few moments longer, then turned to Pitt again.
“I saw nothing of any import.” He answered the question before it was asked. “I was in my study, reading from the work of St. Augustine.” The muscles in his jaw and neck tightened and some inner dream took hold of him. “The words of men who have sought after God in other ages are a great enlightenment to us—and comfort. There has always been powerful evil in the world, and will be as long as the soul of man is as weak and beset by temptations as it is.” He looked at Pitt again. “But I am afraid I can be of no assistance to you. My mind and my senses were totally absorbed in contemplation and study.”
“How terrible,” Prudence said to no one in particular, “that you were awake in your study, reading of the very essence of the conflict between good and evil.” She shivered and held her arms close around herself. “And only a few hundred yards away, someone was setting a fire that murdered poor Mr. Lindsay—and but for a stroke of good fortune, would have murdered poor Stephen as well.”
“There are mighty forces of evil here in Highgate.” He stared straight ahead of him again, as if he could see the pattern in the space between the jardiniere with its gold chrysanthemums and the stitched sampler on the wall with the words of the Twenty-third Psalm, “Wickedness has been entertained, and invited to take up its abode with us,” he went on.
“Do you know by whom, Mr. Hatch?” It was surely a futile question, and yet Pitt felt impelled to ask it. Murdo behind him, silent until now, shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
Hatch looked around in surprise. “God forgive him and give him peace, by Lindsay himself. He spread dark ideas of revolution and anarchy, overthrow of the order of things as they are. He wanted some new society where individual ownership of property was done away and men were no longer rewarded according to their ability and effort but given a common wage regardless. It would do away with self-reliance, diligence, industry and responsibility—all the virtues which have made the Empire great and the nation the envy of all the Christian world.” His face was pinched with anger at the distortion, and grief