No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [121]
“You forgive very easily, Reavley,” Thyer said coolly. “I wonder sometimes if you’ve ever had anything very much to forgive. Or are you too Christian to feel real anger?”
“You mean too anemic to feel anything with real passion,” Joseph corrected for him.
Thyer blushed. “I’m sorry. That was irredeemably rude. I do beg your pardon.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t weigh things so much before I speak,” Joseph said thoughtfully. “It makes me sound pompous, even a little cold. But I am too afraid of what I might say if I don’t.”
Thyer smiled, an expression of startling warmth.
Connie looked taken by surprise, and she turned away. “Please come in to dinner, Mr. Allard,” she invited Gerald, who was moving from one foot to the other and plainly at a total loss. “We will help no one by not eating. We shall need our strength, if only to support each other.”
Joseph spent a miserable night, twisting himself round and round in his bed, his thoughts preventing him from sleeping. Small recollections came back to his mind: Connie and Beecher laughing together over some trivial thing, but the sound of it so rich, so full of joy; Connie’s face as she had listened to him talking about some esoteric discovery in the Middle East; Beecher’s concern when she had a summer cold, his fear that it might be flu or even turn to pneumonia; other, more shadowy incidents that now seemed out of proportion to the casual friendship they claimed.
What had Sebastian known? Had he threatened Beecher openly, or simply allowed fear and guilt to play their part? Was it possible he had been innocent of anything more than a keener observation than others?
But Beecher had been with Connie and Thyer when the Reavleys had been killed—not that Joseph had ever suspected him of that. And Perth said he had been along the Backs when Sebastian was shot, so he could not be guilty.
What about Connie? He could not imagine Connie shooting Sebastian. She was generous, charming, quick to laugh, just as quick to see another’s need or loneliness, and to do all she could to answer it. But she was a woman of passion. She might love Beecher profoundly and be trapped by circumstance. If she was discovered in an affair with him and it were made public, he would lose his position, but she would lose everything. A woman divorced for adultery ceased to exist even to her friends, let alone to the rest of society.
Would Sebastian really have done that to her?
The young man Joseph knew would have found it a repulsive thought, cruel, dishonorable, destructive to the soul. But did that man exist outside Joseph’s imagination?
He fell asleep not sure of what was certain about anyone, even himself. He woke in the morning with his head pounding, and determined to learn beyond dispute, all the facts that he could. Everything he cared about was slithering out of his grasp; he needed something to hold on to.
It was barely six o’clock, but he would begin immediately. It was an excellent time to walk along the Backs himself and find Carter the boatman, who had apparently spoken with Beecher on the morning of Sebastian’s death. He shaved, washed, and dressed in a matter of minutes and set out in the cool clarity of the morning light.
The grass was still drenched with dew, giving it a pearly, almost turquoise sheen, and the motionless trees towered into the air in unbroken silence.
He found Carter down at the mooring, about a mile along the bank.
“Mornin’, Dr. Reavley,” Carter greeted him cheerfully. “Yer out early, sir.”
“Can’t sleep,” Joseph replied.
“Oi can’t these days neither,” Carter agreed. “Everybody’s frettin’. Newspapers flyin’ off the stands. Got to get ’em early to be sure o’ one. Never seen a toime loike it, ‘cepting when the old queen were ill.” He scratched his head. “Not even then, really.”
“It’s the best time of the morning,” Joseph said, glancing around him at the slow moving river shimmering in the sun.