Rutland Place - Anne Perry [65]
He sat down and took off his wet boots. “What?”
“Don’t you believe me?” She had expected him to receive the news eagerly, and now he looked as if he were listening only to humor her.
He was too tired to be polite.
“I think your mother’s affaire is probably not as serious as you imagine. Plenty of people have a little flirtation, especially Society women who have little else to do. You should know that by now. I expect it’s all dropped handkerchiefs and bunches of flowers—about as real as a piece of embroidery. And I daresay if anyone was watching her, it was only out of boredom. You are making too much of it, Charlotte. If she were not your mother, you would take no notice.”
She restrained herself with great difficulty. For a moment she considered losing her temper, telling him that the outward show might be trivial but the feeling underneath was as real and as potentially violent as anything conducted in the back streets, or in less naturally restricted levels of Society. Then she realized how tired he was, how discouraged by Athelstan’s desire to hide or ignore what did not suit his ambition. Anger would communicate nothing.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she said instead, looking at his wet feet and the white skin of his hands where the cold had numbed the circulation. Without waiting for an answer, she topped up the kettle and moved it from the back of the stove onto the front.
After a few moments’ silence while he put on dry socks, he looked up.
“What are these two possibilities?”
She heated the teapot and measured out the tea.
“Theodora von Schenck has an income, lately acquired, which nobody can account for. Her husband left her nothing, nor did anyone else, apparently. When she came to Rutland Place, she had nothing but the house. Now she has coats with sable collars, and Mina perhaps put forward some very interesting speculations as to where they might have come from.”
“Like what?” he inquired.
She jiggled the teapot impatiently while the kettle blew faint halfhearted whiffs of steam, hot but not yet boiling.
“A brothel,” Charlotte answered. “Or a lover. Or blackmail? There are all sorts of things worth killing to hide, where money is concerned. Maybe Theodora was blackmailing people with Mina’s information and they had a fight over the money.”
He smiled sourly. “Indeed. Your Mina seems to have had a most uncharitable turn of imagination, and a tongue to go with it. Are you sure that is what she said, and not what you are thinking for her?”
“Alston remarked several times on how perceptive she was of other people’s characters, especially the less pleasant aspects of them. But he also said that she never spoke of them to anyone but him.” She reached for the kettle at last. “However, that is the less likely possibility of the two, I think. The other possibility I remember Mina mentioning myself, and with a kind of relish, as if she knew something.” She poured the water onto the tea and put on the lid, then brought the pot to the table and set it on the polished pewter stand. She let it brew while she went on: “It has to do with the death of Ottilie Charrington, which was sudden and unexplained. One week she was in perfect health, and the next the family returned from a holiday in the country and said she was dead. Just like that! No one ever said from what cause, no one was invited to any funeral, and she was never mentioned again. Mina apparently hinted that there was something very shameful about it—perhaps a badly done abortion?” She shivered and thought of Jemima asleep upstairs in her pink cot. “Or she was murdered by a lover, or in some unbearable place, like a brothel. Or possibly even she did something so terrible that her own family murdered her to keep it silent!