Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [31]
“No.” The word came from a dry throat, stiff lips.
Pitt wanted to believe him, and could not. The honesty which had been between them had vanished like the yellow in the sky over the rooftops. The lamplighter had passed unnoticed. The gaslit moons made bright intervals along the way back towards the Whitechapel Road and the route home.
“Can I help you with the cart?” Pitt said practically.
“No … thank you. I’m used to it, and it isn’t heavy,” Jago refused, moving at last and bending to pick up the handles.
They walked side by side up Coke Street and turned the corner towards St. Mary’s. Neither of them spoke again until they reached it and parted, then it was a simple farewell.
Pitt arrived home in Bloomsbury tired and unusually depressed. He ate the dinner which Charlotte had kept for him, then afterwards sat in the parlor with the French doors to the garden ajar, the warmth of the day fading rapidly and the smell of cut grass filling the air.
Charlotte sat under the lamp sewing. She had asked him about the case which had taken him out so early and kept him so late. He had told her only that it was a murder in Whitechapel and that the evidence implicated someone of importance and therefore was politically explosive.
He sat watching her now, the light on her hair, which was clean and bright, coiled on her head, shining like mahogany in the highlights, almost black in the shadows. Her skin was smooth, a faint blush in her cheek. She looked comfortable. Her gown was old rose, and became her as much as anything she owned. Her fingers worked, stitching and pulling, threading back into the cloth again, the needle catching silver as it moved. They were only a few miles from Whitechapel as the sparrow flew, yet it was a world so distant it was beyond imagination. Charlotte’s world was safe, clean, its values secure; honesty was easy, and chastity hardly a challenge. She was loved, and she could surely never have doubted it. She had no compromises to make, no judgments of value against survival, no weariness of soul, endless doubt and fear and self-disgust.
No wonder she smiled as she sat! What would Jago Jones think of her? Would he find her unendurably self-satisfied—unforgivably comfortable in her ignorance?
Charlotte pulled the needle in and out, watching because she could not work otherwise. She wanted to have something to do with her hands. It was easier. The day had been long. She had woken when Pitt did, and not really gone back to sleep again.
Her sister, Emily, had called in the middle of the morning. She had said little of any importance, but there was a restlessness in her which was uncharacteristic. It was not one of unused energy but rather of seeking something she could not find, or perhaps even name. She was critical, and had taken offense at several remarks which were not meant unkindly. That was unlike her.
Charlotte had wondered if it was the difficulty of having their grandmother resident in the house since their mother had remarried. Grandmama had refused to stay under the same roof with Caroline’s new husband. He was an actor, and several years Caroline’s junior. The fact that they were extremely happy only added to the offense.
But Emily’s dissatisfaction was not particular, and she left without explaining herself.
Now Pitt was sitting brooding silently, his brow furrowed, his mouth pulled down. She knew it was the case which troubled him. His silence had a particular quality she had grown used to over the years. He was sitting crookedly in his chair, one leg crossed over the other. When he was relaxed he put his feet on the fender, whatever the time of the year, and whether the fire was lit or not. On a summer evening like this, were he not absorbed in his thoughts, he would have walked to the end of the lawn, under the apple tree, and stood there breathing in the quiet, scented air. He would have expected her to go with him. If they had talked at all, it would have been of trivia.
Several times she had considered asking him about it, but his expression was closed in, and he had offered nothing.