Paragon Walk - Anne Perry [101]
Above them there was a slow crackle of thunder, and the first drops of rain fell huge and wet through their dresses to the skin.
Charlotte wanted to ask her why she had done that. The words were quite clear inside her head, but her voice remained silent.
“You didn’t even know him!” Jessamyn said between her teeth. “How dare you come here with flowers? You are an intruder. Get out!”
Thoughts whirled in Charlotte’s mind, wild and amazing like flashes of light. She looked at the lilies on the ground and remembered that Emily had said Jessamyn never gave anything away, even when she did not want it anymore herself. If she was finished with it, she destroyed it, but she never let anyone else have it. Emily had been speaking of dresses.
“What difference does it make to you if I put flowers on his grave?” she asked as levelly as she could. “He’s dead.”
“That doesn’t give you any rights,” Jessamyn’s face was getting whiter, and she did not even seem aware of the heavy drops now falling. “You don’t belong in the Walk. Go back to your own Society, whatever that is. Don’t try to force yourself in here.”
But the thoughts were hardening, clearing in Charlotte’s brain. All kinds of questions were at last falling into order, finding answers. The knife, why Pitt had found no blood on the road, Hallam’s confusion, Fulbert, everything at last made a pattern, even the love letters Hallam had kept.
“They weren’t from his wife, were they?” she said aloud. “She didn’t sign them because she didn’t write them. You did!”
Jessamyn’s eyebrows rose in perfect arches.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“The love letters, the love letters to Hallam that the police found. They were yours! You and Hallam used to be lovers. You must have had a key to the garden gate. That’s how you went to him, and that’s how you got in the day Fulbert was killed. Of course, no one saw you!”
Jessamyn’s lip curled.
“That’s idiotic! Why should I want to kill Fulbert? He was a miserable little wretch, but that’s not worth killing for.”
“Hallam admitted raping Fanny—”
Jessamyn winced, almost as if she had been struck a physical blow.
Charlotte saw it.
“You can’t bear that, can you, that Hallam wanted another woman so much he took her by force, least of all innocent, ordinary little Fanny?” She was guessing now, but she believed it. “You sucked him dry with your possessiveness, and when he wanted to let go, you clung onto him, driving him to escape in drink!” She took a deep breath. “Of course, he didn’t remember killing Fanny, and there was no knife and no blood on the road! He didn’t kill her. You did. When she stumbled into your withdrawing room and told you what had happened, your rage and jealousy all spilled over. You had been put aside, rejected for your own insipid little sister-in-law. You took the knife—maybe as easy as the knife from the fruit plate on the sideboard—and you killed her, right there in your own room. The blood was all over your clothes, but you could explain that! And you just washed the knife and put it back in the fruit. No one even looked at that. So simple.
“And when Fulbert knew you too well, with his prying eyes, you had to get rid of him too. Perhaps he threatened you, and you told him to go to Hallam, if he dared, knowing you could go there along the back path and surprise him. Did you even know Hallam was out that day? You must have.
“What a surprise you must have had when no one found the body. You knew Hallam must have hidden it, and you watched him come apart, tormented by fear of his own insanity.”
Jessamyn’s face was as white as the lilies on the grave, and they were both wet with the rain, their floating muslins clinging to them like shrouds.
“You’re very clever,” Jessamyn said slowly. “But you can’t prove any of it. If you tell the police that, I’ll just say you are jealous over Paul Alaric. You don’t belong in the Walk.” Her face narrowed. “And I know you don’t. For all your airs, your dresses are made over ones of Emily’s! You are trying to crash your way in here. You are saying these things out of revenge,