No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [124]
“Is that what you believe?” Matthew asked. “Somehow Sebastian was making a bid for freedom, and it went wrong?”
“I really don’t know,” Joseph admitted, looking away again, across the river. The girl with the bright hair was gone, as was the young man who had balanced with such grace. “But very little I’ve discovered fits the idea of him I had—which makes me wonder if I was almost as guilty as Mary Allard of building a prison for him to live in.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Matthew said gently. “He built his own image. It may have been in part an illusion, but he was the chief architect of it. You only helped. And believe me, he was happy to let you. But if he did see what happened on the Hauxton Road, why wouldn’t he say something?” His brow furrowed, his eyes shadowed and intense. “Do you think he was mad enough to try blackmail on someone he knew had already killed two people? Was he really such a complete fool?”
Put like that, it sounded not only extreme but dangerous beyond any possible profit. And surely he would have known the people concerned were Joseph’s parents—even if not at the time, then later.
“No,” he answered, but there was no conviction in his voice. Matthew would never have done such a thing, but he was accustomed to thinking in terms of danger. He was only a few years older than Sebastian, in fact, but in experience it was decades. To Sebastian, death was a concept, not a reality, and he had all the passionate, innocent belief in his own immortality that goes with youth.
Matthew was watching him.
“Be careful, Joe,” he warned. “Whatever the reason, someone in college killed him. Don’t go poking around in it, please! You aren’t equipped!” Anger and frustration flickered in his eyes, and fear. “You’re too hurt by it to see straight!”
“I have to try,” Joseph said, reasserting reason into its place. It was the one sanity to hold on to. “Suspicion is tearing the college to pieces,” he went on. “Everyone is doubting things, friendships are cracking, loyalties are twisted. I need to know for myself. It’s my world . . . I have to do something to protect it.”
He looked down. “And if Sebastian did see what happened on the Hauxton Road, there may be some way of finding out.” He met Matthew’s steady blue-gray eyes. “I have to try. Was he saying something to me that last evening on the Backs, and I wasn’t listening? The more I think of it, the more I realize he was far more distressed than I understood then. I should have been more sensitive, more available. If I’d known what it was, I might have saved him.”
Matthew clasped his hand over Joseph’s wrist for a moment, then let go again. “Possibly,” he said with doubt. “Or you might have been killed as well. You don’t know if it had anything to do with that at all. At least for this weekend, go and see Judith. She’s our world, too, and she needs someone, preferably you.” It was said gently, but it was a charge, not a suggestion.
Matthew offered to drive him, and no doubt Judith would have brought him back, but Joseph wanted the chance to be alone for the short while it would take him to ride there on his bicycle. He needed time to think before meeting Judith.
He thanked Matthew but declined. He walked briskly back to St. John’s to collect a few overnight things such as his razor and clean linen, then took his bicycle and set out.
As soon as he was beyond the town the quiet lanes enclosed him, wrapping him in the shadows of deep hedges, motionless in the twilight. The fields smelled of harvest, that familiar dry sweetness of dust, crushed stalks, and fallen grain. A few starlings were black dots against the blue of the sky, fading gray already to the east. The long light made the shadows of the hay stooks enormous across the stubble.
There was a hurt in the beauty of it, as if something were slipping out of his grip, and nothing he could do would prevent his losing it. Summer always drifted into autumn. It was as it should be. There would be the wild color, the falling of the leaves, the scarlet berries,