No Graves as Yet_ A Novel - Anne Perry [79]
It was late on Sunday afternoon when Matthew drove to Haslingfield. Ivor Chetwin did not live in the magnificent manner of the Corcorans, but his home was still extremely agreeable. It was a Georgian manor a mile outside Haslingfield, and the long drive from the road swept around a gracious curve with a stand of silver birches, their leaves shimmering in the breeze, their white trunks leaning with exaggerated grace away from the prevailing wind.
A parlor maid welcomed Matthew, but Chetwin himself appeared almost immediately, an enthusiastic spaniel puppy at his heels.
“I’d have recognized you,” Chetwin said without hesitation, extending his hand to Matthew. His voice, unusually deep, still had the echo of music in it from his native Wales. “You resemble your father about the eyes.”
The loyalty hardened even more deeply inside Matthew, memory catching him again.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me at such short notice, sir,” he replied. “I’m just up for the weekend. I spend most of my time in London now.”
“I’m afraid I only get occasional weekends here myself at the moment,” Chetwin agreed. Then, followed by the puppy, he turned and led the way into a casual sitting room that opened onto a paved and graveled garden, largely shaded by overhanging trees. It was full of blossom from bushes and shrubs at the sides, and low-growing silvery-gray-leaved plants in clumps in the paving. The extraordinary thing about it was that every flower was white.
Chetwin noticed Matthew staring.
“My white garden,” he explained. “I find it very restful. Sit down. Oh, move the cat.” He gestured toward a black cat that had settled itself in the middle of the second chair and looked very disinclined to shift.
Matthew stroked the cat gently and felt rather than heard it begin to purr. He lifted it up, and when he had taken the seat, he put it down again on his lap. It rearranged itself slightly and went back to sleep.
“My father intended to come and see you,” he said smoothly as if it were true. “I never had the chance to ask him if he actually did.”
He watched Chetwin’s face. It was dark-eyed, with a strong, round jaw, black hair graying and receding from a high brow. He could read nothing in it. It was a face that could give away exactly what its owner wished it to. There was nothing naive or easily misled in Ivor Chetwin. He was full of imagination and subtlety. Matthew had been here only a few minutes, yet already he had a sense of Chetwin’s inner power.
“I’m sorry he didn’t,” Chetwin replied, and there was sadness in his voice. If he was acting, he was superb. But then Matthew had known men who betrayed their friends, even their families, and though they profoundly regretted what they saw as the necessity, it had not stopped them.
“He didn’t contact you at all?” Matthew pressed. He should not have been disappointed, and yet he was. He had hoped Chetwin would have an idea, a thread, however fine, that would lead somewhere. He realized now it was unreasonable. John Reavley would have come to Matthew first before trusting anyone else, even the far more experienced Chetwin.
“I wish he had.” Chetwin’s face still showed the same sadness. “I would have called on him, but I doubted he would see me.” A new bleakness shadowed his eyes. “That’s one of the deepest regrets of death: the things you thought of doing and put off, and then suddenly it’s too late.”
“Yes, I know,” Matthew agreed with more emotion than he had meant to expose. He felt as if he were laying a weapon down with the blade toward himself and the handle to a potential enemy. And yet had he shown less, Chetwin would have sensed it and known he was guarding himself.
“I think of something every day I would like to have said to him. I suppose that’s really why I called. You knew him during a time when I was so young I thought of him only as my father, not as a person who led any life beyond St. Giles.”
“A natural blindness of youth,” Chetwin said.