Highgate Rise - Anne Perry [96]
“Worse?” Charlotte said slowly. “But he should make this—this fit to live in. You should have water at least, and drainage. No wonder your mother is ill—”
“She’ll get better—jus’ let ’er sleep a bit. We’re all right, miss. Just leave us be.”
“But if—”
“That’s wot ’appened ter Bessie Jones. She complained, an’ now she’s gorn ter live in St. Giles, an’ she ain’t got no more’n a corner o’ the room to ’erself. You let be—please miss.”
Her fear was so palpable that Charlotte could do no more than promise to say nothing, to swear it in front of Matthew Oliphant, and leave shivering and by now aware of a rising nausea in her stomach, and an anger so tight it made all the muscles in her body ache.
“Tomorrow I’ll take you to St. Giles,” Oliphant said quietly when they were out in the main street again. “If you want to go.”
“I want to go.” Charlotte said the words without hesitation—if she had thought for even a moment she might have lost her resolve.
“Did you go there with Clemency also?” she asked more gently, trying to imagine the journey she was copying, thinking of Clemency’s distress as she must have seen sights just like these. “I expect she was very moved?”
He turned to her. His face was curiously luminous with memory that for all its bleakness held some beauty for him that still shone in his mind and warmed him till he was temporarily oblivious of the street or the cold.
“Yes—we came here,” he answered with sweetness in his voice. “And then to St. Giles, and from there eastwards into Mile End and Whitechapel—” He might have been speaking of the pillared ruins of Isfahan, or the Golden Road to Samarkand, so did his tongue caress the words.
Charlotte hesitated only a moment before plunging on, ignoring what was suddenly so obvious to her.
“Then could you tell me where she went last?”
“If I could, Mrs. Pitt, I would have offered,” he said gravely, his cheeks pink. “I only knew the general direction, because I was not with her when she found Bessie Jones. I only know that she did, because she told me afterwards. Would to God I had been.” He strove to master his anguish, and almost succeeded. “Maybe I could have saved her.” His voice cracked and finished husky and almost inaudible.
Charlotte could not argue, although perhaps by then Clemency had already frightened those landlords and owners whose greed had eaten into them until they had destroyed her.
Oliphant turned away, struggling for control. “But if you wish to go there, I shall try to take you—as long as you understand the risk. If we find the same place, then—” He stopped; the conclusion was not needed.
“You are not afraid?” she asked, not as a challenge but because she was certain that he was not. He was harrowed by feelings, almost laid naked by them, and yet fear was not among them—anger, pity, indignation, loss, but not fear.
He turned back to her, his face for a moment almost beautiful with the power of his caring.
“You wish to continue Clemency’s work, Mrs. Pitt—and I think perhaps even more than that, you wish to learn who killed her, and expose them. So do I.”
She did not answer; it was hardly necessary. She caught a sudden glimpse of how much he had cared for Clemency. He would never have spoken; she was a married woman, older than he and of higher social station. Anything more than friendship was impossible. But that had not altered his feeling, nor taken anything from his loss.
She smiled at him, politely, as if she had seen no more than anyone else, and thanked him for his help. She and Gracie would be most obliged.
Naturally she explained to Pitt what she was doing, and to what end. She might have evaded it had not Vespasia taken the children to Caroline, but their absence had to be explained and she was in no mood to equivocate.
She did not tell him what manner of place she would be going to because nothing in her experience could have foreseen where the following two days would take her. She, Oliphant and Gracie were driven by Percival from street to street, forever narrower, darker and more foul, following