Resurrection Row - Anne Perry [49]
“Not the only case?” She was startled now. “You mean you think Mr. Porteous’s grave robbing is connected to those others everyone is talking about? You ought to be ashamed, allowing such things to happen here in London, to respectable people! Why aren’t you doing your job, I should like to know?”
“I don’t know whether there is a connection, ma’am,” he said patiently. “That is what I am trying to establish.”
“It’s a lunatic,” she said firmly. “And if the police can’t catch a lunatic, I don’t know what the world is coming to! Mr. Porteous was a very respectable man, never mixed with fast society, every penny he had was earned, and he never put a wager in his life.”
“Perhaps there is no connection, apart from the time he died,” Pitt said wearily. “Lord Augustus was a respectable man, too.”
“That’s as may be,” she said darkly. “They didn’t find Mr. Porteous in that Gadstone Park, did they?”
“No, ma’am, he was sitting on a bench in St. Bartholomew’s Green.”
Her face paled. “Nonsense!” she said sharply. “Mr. Porteous would never be in such a place! I cannot believe it, you know what kind of people frequent it. You must be mistaken.”
He did not bother to argue; if it mattered to her to cling onto the distinction, even after death, then allow her to. It was a curious divergence. He remembered the rather worn clothes with the corpse. He had been buried very much in his second best. Perhaps at the last moment she had felt the best black all such men kept for Sundays to be too good to consign to the oblivion of the tomb. At least at that time she would expect it to be oblivion.
He stood up. “Thank you, ma’am. If I need to ask anything else, I shall call on you.”
“I shall make arrangements to have Mr. Porteous put away again.” She rang the bell for the maid to show him out.
“Not yet, ma’am.” He wanted to apologize because he knew the outrage before it came. “I’m afraid we shall have to do some more investigation before we can allow that.”
Her face mottled with horror, and she half rose in her chair.
“First you allow his grave to be desecrated and his body to be left in a park where public—‘women’—offer themselves, and now you want to investigate him! It is monstrous! Decent people are no longer safe in this city. You are a disgrace to your—” She had wanted to say “uniform”; then she looked at Pitt’s jumble of colors—hat still dripping in his hands, muffler end trailing down his front—and gave up. “You are a disgrace!” she finished lamely.
“I’m sorry.” He was apologizing not for himself but for the whole city, for the entire order that had left her with nothing but need and the trimmings of being respectable.
He spoke to the doctor and discovered that Porteous had died of cirrhosis of the liver, and had most assuredly visited the benches of St. Bartholomew’s Green before some grotesque chance had placed his corpse under its shade to be solicited by a prostitute to whom even the dead were no horror or surprise.
He left, wondering what had been the stuff of lives that ended like this: what failures; what bolstered-up loneliness, what constant small retreats.
Dominic put Somerset Carlisle and the disgraceful luncheon from his mind. He was looking forward to seeing Alicia again. The reinterment was over, and from now on, provided decent mourning was observed, at least outwardly, they could begin to think of the future. He would not wish to offend her sensibilities by speaking too quickly or cause her any embarrassment, but he could certainly call to pay his respects and spend a little time in her company. And in a few weeks she could afford to be seen out, not at theatres or parties, but at church with the family or during a carriage ride to take the air. He did not mind if Verity came also, for appearances; in fact, he liked her very well for her own sake. She was easy to talk to,