Paragon Walk - Anne Perry [99]
“Don’t say anything,” Emily warned.
“I’m not going to!” Charlotte snapped back. “There isn’t anything to say.”
“I was afraid you might try to point out how wicked it is.”
“I presume that that is why they like it!” Charlotte picked up her skirts and swirled over toward Phoebe and Diggory Nash. Afton was standing just beyond them. Before she got there, she realized that, although he had his back to them, they were in the middle of a rather unpleasant conversation.
“—damn silly woman with an overheated mind,” Afton said waspishly. “Ought to stay at home and find something useful to do.”
“That’s easy to say when it isn’t you.” Diggory’s mouth turned down in contempt.
“It’s hardly likely to be me!” Afton’s eyebrows went up in a sarcastic arch. “It would be a clever rapist who tackled me!”
Diggory raked him with a look of infinite distaste.
“It would be a damn desperate one! Personally, I would sooner try the dog!”
“Then if the dog is raped, we shall know where to look,” Afton said coldly, but without apparent surprise. “You keep some peculiar company, Diggory. Your tastes are becoming depraved.”
“At least, I have tastes,” Diggory snapped back. “I sometimes think you are so withered up you have no passions left for anything. I wouldn’t find it hard to believe that all signs of life are repulsive to you, and anything that reminds you you have a body is unclean to your mind.”
Afton moved fractionally away from him.
“There is nothing unclean in my mind, nothing I need to look away from.”
“Then you’ve a stronger stomach than I have. What goes on in your brain terrifies me! Looking at you, I could believe in those fantasies of the ‘undead’ that are so popular these days, corpses that won’t stay buried.”
Afton held out his hands, palms up, as though weighing the sunlight.
“As usual you are not very thorough, Diggory. If I were one of your ‘undead,’ the sun would shrivel me.” He smiled with slow derision. “Or didn’t you read that far?”
“Don’t be so obvious,” Diggory’s voice was weary and irritated. “I was talking about your soul, not your flesh. I don’t know whether it was the sunlight that shriveled you, or just life. But, sure as hell waits, something did!” He moved away, heading toward a tray of peaches and sherbet. Phoebe dithered for a moment and then followed, leaving Afton to notice Charlotte at last. His cold eyes looked through her.
“Has your over-frank tongue placed you all by yourself again, Mrs. Pitt?” he inquired.
“Possibly,” she replied with equal chill. “But if so, no one else has been blunt enough to tell me so. But then to be alone is not always displeasing.”
“You seem to be visiting us in the Walk rather frequently. You did not bother with us before the rapist. Does it still hold some fascination for you, perhaps? A titillation, an extravagance, a wallowing in emotions, hot dreams of violence and surrender without guilt?” His eyes traveled from her bosom down to her thighs.
Charlotte shivered, as if his hands had touched her. She looked at him with total loathing.
“You seem to imagine that women like to be raped, Mr. Nash. It is a monstrous piece of arrogance, a delusion to feed your vanity and excuse your behavior, and it is quite untrue. Rapists are not magnificent. They are pathetic men who are reduced to taking by force that which others can win for themselves. If they did not hurt others so much, one could pity such a creature. It’s—it’s a kind of impotence!”
His face froze, but there was raw, scalding hatred in his eyes, as primal as birth and death. If they had not been in this civilized garden, with its ritual conversations, the chink of glasses, and polite laughter, she felt he would have torn her open, hacked at