Rutland Place - Anne Perry [40]
“Then you do not think it could have been an accident?” she asked. Caroline was beside her now, and she was acutely conscious of her, of the tight muscles of her body, of her eyes fixed on Alaric’s face.
There was gentleness in him, and something like a light of bitter humor, as if for a second her candor had aroused some other emotion in him.
“No, Mrs. Pitt,” he said. “I wish I could. But one does not take a dose of medicine that has not been prescribed for one, nor drink from an unlabeled bottle, unless one is very foolish, and Mrs. Spencer-Brown was not foolish in the least. She was an extremely practical woman. Do you not think so, Mrs. Ellison?” He turned toward Caroline and his face softened into a smile.
The color rose up Caroline’s cheeks. “Yes, yes, indeed I do. In fact, I cannot recall ever knowing of Mina doing anything—ill-considered.”
Charlotte was surprised; she had not received the impression that Mina was especially intelligent. Indeed, the conversation they had had, as she recalled it, had been mostly trivial, concerned with things of the utmost unimportance.
“Really?” she said with rather more skepticism than she had intended. She did not wish to be rude. “Perhaps I did not know her well enough. But I would have thought it quite possible her mind could have been occupied with some other concern, and she might have made an error.”
“You are confusing intelligence with common sense, Charlotte,” Caroline said spiritedly. “Mina was not fond of study, nor did she concern herself with some of the very odd affairs that you do.” She was too discreet to name them, but a slight lowering of her eyelids and a sidelong glance made Charlotte decide that she was referring to her political convictions with regard to Reform Bills in Parliament, Poor Laws and the like. “But she was well aware of her own skills,” Caroline continued, “and how best to use them. And she had far too much native wit to make mistakes—of any sort. Do you not think so, Monsieur Alaric?”
He glanced down the street over their shoulders into some distance they could not see before turning to face Charlotte.
“We are looking for a genteel way of saying that Mrs. Spencer-Brown had a very fine instinct for survival, Mrs. Pitt,” he replied. “She knew the rules, she knew what could be said and what could not—what could be done. She was never careless, never moved by passion before sense. She did appear trivial on occasion, because that is the socially acceptable way. To talk intelligently of serious subjects is not considered attractive in a woman.” He smiled fleetingly; Caroline could not know they had talked before. “At least not by most men. But underneath the prattle Mina was a skilled and prudent woman, who knew precisely what she wanted and what she could have.”
Charlotte stared at him, trying to control her thoughts.
“You make that sound a little sinister,” she said slowly. “Calculating?”
Caroline took her arm. “Nonsense. One has to use some sense in order to survive! Monsieur Alaric means only that she was not flighty, the sort of silly creature who does not take any care what she is doing. Is that not so?” She looked at him, her face glowing in the cool air, her eyes bright. Charlotte was surprised— and jarringly afraid—to see how lovely she still was. The color, the brilliance, the blood under the skin had nothing to do with the March wind; it was the presence of this man, with his dark head and strong, straight back, standing in the road talking gently about death, and his pity for the tragedy around it.
“Then I fear it may have been suicide!” Charlotte said suddenly and rather loudly. “Perhaps the poor woman got herself into an affaire of the heart, became involved with someone other than her husband, and the situation was unbearable to her. I can see very easily how that could happen.” She did not have the boldness to look at either of them, and there was absolute silence in the street, not even the sound of a bird or of distant hooves.
“Such adventures very often end in disaster,” she continued after a harsh