No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [100]
“Everything makes it worse,” Connie answered him. “It’s Elwyn I’m sorriest for. Mr. Allard is old enough to look after himself.”
“No, he isn’t.” Beecher contradicted her quietly. “No one is ever old enough to hurt alone. A little tenderness would help him face it, and then begin to recover enough to start again with something like normality.”
Connie smiled at him, the warmth filling her eyes, her face. “I don’t think Mary is going to see that for a long time. It’s a pity. In grieving for what she has lost, she risks forfeiting what she still has.”
Beecher’s face tightened.
Connie saw it, blushed a little, and looked away.
Joseph heard Thyer draw in his breath, and glanced across at him, but his face was expressionless.
Connie plunged into the silence, talking to Joseph. “We’ll do what we can, but I don’t think we’re going to make much difference. I’ve tried to reassure Elwyn, but I know a word or two from you now and then would matter to him more.”
“He’s in an impossible situation,” Thyer added. “Neither of them seems to give a damn about him.”
Connie put her glass down. “Sometimes what people are is so much woven into their nature and their lives that no outside force, however great, can change them. They were like this long before Sebastian was killed.”
It was later the same afternoon that Joseph caught up with Edgar Morel walking on the path along the river.
The conversation began badly.
“I suppose you think I killed him over Abigail!” he challenged Joseph as soon as he caught up with him.
Joseph felt pressed to find the truth before it did any more damage. “I hadn’t thought it,” he replied.
Morel’s face was hard and defensive. “Of course if Sebastian was killed, it has to have been because he knew something foul about someone else, doesn’t it?” he said bitterly. “It has to be envy of his brilliance, or his charm or some bloody thing! It couldn’t be that he was cheating someone, or stealing, or anything so grubby!” The sarcasm was too overwrought to be truly cutting. “He’s far too good for that.” Unconsciously he was mimicking Mary Allard’s voice. “Nothing’s ever his fault. To listen to his mother you’d think he’d been martyred in some holy cause and the rest of us were heretics dancing on his grave.”
“Try to have patience with her,” Joseph urged. “She has no means of coming to terms with her loss.”
“No one has,” Morel said with sudden fury. “My mother died last year, just about the time Abigail dumped me for Sebastian. I didn’t go around saying everybody else was heartless because they didn’t care! The world doesn’t stop for anyone’s death! And it doesn’t excuse making yourself a pain in the arse to everybody else!”
“Morel!” Joseph said sharply, putting out his hand to steady him.
Morel misunderstood the gesture and swung his arm back and let fly with a punch. It caught Joseph glancingly on the cheek, but it knocked him off balance, at least as much with surprise as from the weight of it. He staggered backward and just saved himself from falling.
Morel stood aghast.
Joseph straightened up, feeling painfully foolish. He hoped no one else had seen. He did not wish to pursue the matter, but it would be the end of his authority, and of Morel’s respect for him, if he simply let it go. Then the answer came to him instinctively. He took a step forward, and to Morel’s total stupefaction, he hit the young man back. Not very hard, but sufficiently to make Morel stagger. He was surprised by the skill he showed; a little more weight and he would have knocked him over.
“Don’t do that again,” he said as levelly as his pounding heart would allow. “And pull yourself together. Somebody shot Sebastian, and we need to keep our heads and find out who it was, not run around