Long Spoon Lane - Anne Perry [125]
“Yes,” Pitt answered. “A little black thing he named Mite. It can’t have been more than a few weeks old. Not had its eyes open long.”
“He must have been lying to you, Thomas. All the Landsboroughs are sensitive to cats.”
“It seems a pointless lie,” Pitt said thoughtfully. “It made no difference to anything. Are you sure?”
“I…” she began, about to say that she was, and then realized that she had assumed it, knowing that Sheridan and Enid both were. It had seemed that their father had been also, and so was Piers. Perhaps Magnus had escaped it. He resembled his mother more in some respects—the dark coloring for instance. With build, it was impossible to tell. Both Sheridan and Cordelia were fairly tall. He had remained spare, she had put on a little extra flesh. Magnus had not looked particularly like the Landsborough side when she had last seen him a few years ago. His coloring was different, the bones of his face. She remembered his smile, the strong teeth.
Then she remembered where once, very briefly, she had seen a smile that reminded her of Magnus, and a dozen impressions collided in her mind. One new, revelatory one emerged that replaced the passions she had felt below the surface of every encounter she had witnessed in the Landsborough house: Enid’s hatred, Cordelia’s fury, Sheridan’s indifference. If that were true, it made hideous sense, even of the kitten.
Pitt was watching her, waiting.
She felt dazed, and overwhelmed with sorrow far from untouched by guilt of her own. She had liked Sheridan so much, found a companionship with him, a comfortable laughter, a friendship that had nothing of duty in it, nothing of expectation or advantage for either of them. It was a shared loneliness, an understanding of beauty missed, of infinite small pleasures that could not be fully savored alone. She had not even guessed at that love or loss. When had Sheridan known?
“What is it?” Pitt had to ask. The answer might be one he could not ignore.
She looked up at him. It surprised her how easy it was to tell him. Vespasia was an earl’s daughter and Pitt’s mother a domestic servant whose husband had been transported to Australia for poaching his master’s game. There was an irony to it, and a value truer than most men would grasp.
“I believe Cordelia had an affair,” she told him. “Magnus is not sensitive to cats because Sheridan Landsborough is not his father, Edward Denoon is. That is why Enid hates her husband, and her sister-in-law. It is why Sheridan has no feeling for his wife, and his indifference is the greatest insult she could imagine. It explains everything I’ve half-seen, half-understood before.”
He said nothing. She could see in his face that he was weighing it, thinking of all the other things it meant, and how much it bore upon the murder, if it did at all. Had Piers Denoon known that it was not his cousin but his half-brother that he had been forced into killing? Had Wetron known, or cared? Probably not. It was just another, parallel tragedy.
“What will you do?” she asked him.
He looked tired. “I don’t know. We have to arrest Piers Denoon and charge him, but Tanqueray’s bill is more important at the moment.” His face was tight, his skin pale and shadowed around the eyes. “At the moment Voisey is winning. He still has the proof of Simbister’s guilt in the Scarborough Street bombing, and his connection with Wetron. That is, if he was telling me the truth about it, and I dare not assume he wasn’t.”
“No.” Vespasia felt oddly empty inside. She had expected Voisey to betray Pitt if he could. One needed a very long spoon indeed to dine with the devil. Pitt was a man who had seen tragedy and all kinds of human selfishness, arrogance, and hatred, but he still encountered evil with surprise. He saw humanity where simpler and less generous men would have seen only the crime. There was no point in telling him that he should have been less trusting. He probably knew it. And anyway, she did not wish him to lose that