No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [67]
Joseph was startled. “No, I wouldn’t!” The hot anger still welled up inside him at the thought of Sebastian’s vitality and dreams obliterated. “I don’t know anything.” He looked at Beecher earnestly. “But I feel I need to. I’ve gone over everything I can remember of the last few days I saw Sebastian, but I was away, because of my parents’ death, for a good while right before he was killed. I couldn’t have seen anything.”
“You think it was foreseeable?” There was surprise and curiosity sharp in Beecher’s eyes. He ignored his unfinished drink.
“I don’t know,” Joseph admitted. “It can’t have happened without some cause that built up over a while. Unless it was an accident—which would be the best possible answer, of course! But I can’t imagine how that could happen, can you?”
“No,” Beecher said with quiet regret. The evening light through the long windows picked out the tiny lines around his eyes and mouth. He looked more tired than he was admitting, and perhaps a lot more deeply worried. “No, I’m afraid that’s a fool’s paradise,” Beecher said with quiet regret. “Someone killed him because they meant to.” He reached out and picked up his drink again, sipping it and rolling it around his mouth, but it obviously gave him no pleasure. “Certainly his work was falling off over the last few weeks. And to be honest”—he looked up at Joseph apologetically—“I’ve seen a certain harder edge to it, and a lack of delicacy lately. I thought it might be a rather uncomfortable transition from one style to another, made without his usual grace.” That was half a question.
“But?” Joseph prompted. He knew Beecher did not like Sebastian, and he didn’t relish what his friend would say.
“But on looking back, it was more than just his work,” Beecher said. “His temper was fragile, far more than it used to be. I don’t think he was sleeping well, and I know of at least a couple of rather stupid quarrels he got involved in.”
“Quarrels about what? With whom?”
Beecher’s lips pulled tight in the mockery of a smile. “About war and nationalism, false ideas of honor. And with several people, anyone fool enough to get involved in the subject.”
“Why didn’t you mention it?” Joseph was startled. He had not seen anything of the sort. Had he been blind? Or had Sebastian hidden it from him deliberately? Why? Kindness, a desire not to concern him? Self-protection, because he wanted to preserve the image of him Joseph had, keep one person seeing only the good? Or had he simply not trusted him, and it was only Joseph’s imagination and vanity that they had been friends?
“I assumed that Sebastian confided in you,” Beecher said. “I realized only the other day that he hadn’t. I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t say anything at the time,” Joseph pointed out. “You noticed something was wrong with him, but you didn’t ask if I had seen it also, and if I knew what it was. Perhaps together we could have done something to help.”
“I didn’t like Sebastian nearly as much as you did,” Beecher said slowly. “I saw his charm, but I also saw how he used it. I considered asking you if you knew what was causing him such distress, and I believe it was profound. Actually, I did approach it once, but you didn’t take me up. We were interrupted by something, and I didn’t go back to it. I didn’t want to quarrel with you.” He raised his eyes, bright and troubled, and for once the humor in him was totally absent.
Joseph was stunned. He had been expecting pain, but this blow hurt far more than anything he had foreseen. Beecher had tried to protect him because he thought Joseph was not strong enough to accept or deal with the truth. He had thought that he would turn aside from a friend rather than look at it honestly.
How could he? What had Joseph ever said or done that even Beecher believed him not only so blind, but such a moral coward?
Was that why Sebastian had not told him? He had spoken of the fear of war and its destruction of the beauty he loved, but surely that was hardly sufficient to disturb him the way Beecher had implied. And it had obviously started weeks