Paragon Walk - Anne Perry [3]
He pulled a face. “Perhaps it has nothing to do with it. Please continue with your account of yesterday evening.”
She took a breath to speak, then apparently changed her mind. She crossed over to the mantel shelf, piled with photographs, and began again in the same flat voice.
“She had spent a perfectly usual day. She had no household affairs to attend to, of course—I do all that. She wrote letters in the morning, consulted her diary, and kept an appointment with her dressmaker. She lunched here at home, and then in the afternoon she took the carriage and went calling. She did tell me upon whom, but I forget. It is always the same sort of people, and as long as one remembers oneself, it really hardly matters. I dare say you can find out from the coachman, if you wish. We dined at home. Lady Pomeroy called, a most tiresome person, but a family obligation—you wouldn’t understand.”
Pitt controlled his face and regarded her with continued polite interest.
“Fanny left early,” she went on. “She has very little social ability, as yet. Sometimes I think she is too young for a Season! I have tried to teach her, but she is very artless. She seems to lack any natural ability to invent. Even the simplest prevarication is a trial to her. She went on some small errand, a book for Lady Cumming-Gould. At least, that is what she said.”
“And you do not think it was so?” he inquired.
A slight flicker crossed her face, but Pitt did not understand it. Charlotte might have interpreted it for him, but she was not here to ask.
“I should think it was precisely so,” Jessamyn replied. “As I have tried to explain to you, Mr.—er—” She waved her hand irritably. “Poor Fanny had no art to deceive. She was a guileless as a child.”
Pitt had seldom found children guileless; tactless perhaps—but most he could remember were possessed of the natural cunning of a stoat and the toughness in a bargain of a moneylender, although certainly some were blessed with the blandest of countenances. It was the third time Jessamyn had referred to Fanny’s immaturity.
“Well, I can ask Lady Cumming-Gould,” he replied with what he hoped was a smile as guileless as Fanny’s.
She turned away from him sharply, lifting one slender shoulder, as if his face had somehow reminded her who he was and that he must be recalled to his proper position.
“Lady Pomeroy had gone and I was alone when—” her voice wavered, and for the first time she seemed to lose her composure, “—when Fanny came back.” She made an effort not to gulp, and failed. She was obliged to fumble for a handkerchief, and the clumsiness of it brought her back. “Fanny came in and collapsed in my arms. I don’t know how the poor child had had the strength to come so far. It was amazing. She died but a moment afterward.”
“I am sorry.”
She looked at him, her face devoid of expression, almost as if she were asleep. Then she moved one hand to brush at her heavy taffeta skirt, perhaps in memory of the blood on her the night before.
“Did she speak at all?” he asked quietly. “Anything?”
“No, Mr. Pitt. She was nearly dead by the time she got so far.”
He turned slightly to look at the French doors. “She came in through there?” It was the only possible way without having passed the footman, and yet it seemed natural to ask.
She shivered minutely.
“Yes.”
He walked over toward them and looked out. The lawn was small, a mere patch, surrounded by laurel bushes and a herbaceous walk beyond. There was a wall between this garden and the next. No doubt, by the time he had closed this case, he would know every view and corner of all these houses—unless there was some pathetic, easy answer, but none presented itself yet. He turned back to her.
“Is there any way your garden connects with the others along the Walk, a gate or door in that wall?”
Her face looked blank. “Yes, but it is hardly the way she would choose to come. She was at Lady Cumming-Gould’s.”
He must send Forbes to all the gardens to see if there was any sign of blood. A wound such as that must have left some stain.