Seven Dials - Anne Perry [89]
“For goodness’ sake, Saville!” she said tartly. “I am not a fool! Of course you moved the wretched man’s body. Thomas Pitt is my great-nephew . . . at least he is by virtue of several marriages. I possibly know more of the affair than you do.” She was gratified to see him look genuinely startled.
“Whose marriages, in God’s name?” he asked.
“His, of course, you fool!” she retorted. “It would hardly be mine.”
His face relaxed in a smile, even his shoulders eased a little. “You cannot help me, Vespasia, but you certainly bring light to the gloom, and I thank you for that.” He moved his hand as if to reach across the table between them and touch her, then changed his mind and withdrew it.
“I am gratified,” she responded. “But it is incidental. I would like to do something far more practical, and of greater duration. Thomas has gone to Alexandria to see what he can learn of Ayesha Zakhari before she came here, and of Edwin Lovat—if there is anything to learn.” She saw him tense again. “Saville, are you afraid of the truth?”
“No!” he said instantly, almost before she had let the last word drop.
“Good!” she continued. “Then let us discuss this without games of words and evasions of what is less than pleasing. Where did you meet Miss Zakhari?”
“What?” He was startled.
“Saville!” she said impatiently. “You are a senior government minister in your middle fifties; she is an Egyptian woman of what . . . thirty-five? Your worlds do not meet, let alone cross. You are a Member of Parliament for Manchester, a cotton-spinning county. She is from a cotton-growing area of Egypt. Do not pretend to be a fool!”
He sighed and ran his hand through his heavy hair. “Of course she sought me out because of the cotton,” he said wearily. “And of course she tried to persuade me to scale down the industry in Manchester and invest in Egypt’s spinning and weaving its own cotton. What would you expect of an Egyptian patriot?” Now his eyes were clear and challenging, as burningly dark as if he were Egyptian himself.
She smiled. “I have no quarrel with patriots, Saville, or with their arguments to be fair to their own people. Were I in her place I hope I would have the passion and the courage to do the same. But no matter how good the cause, there are acts that may not justifiably be committed in its furtherance.”
“She did not kill Lovat.” He made it a simple statement.
“Do you believe that, or know it?” she asked.
He met her eyes, calm and silver-gray, and his flickered first. “But I do believe it, Vespasia. She swore it to me, and if I doubt her then I doubt everything I love and treasure, and which makes life precious to me.”
She drew in her breath to say something, then realized she had nothing that would help or answer his need. He was an ardent man who had denied his nature for a long time, and now he was deeply in love. The dam gates had burst. “Then who did?” she asked instead. “And why?”
“I have no idea,” he admitted quietly. “But before you suggest it was done to involve me and bring me to disgrace and loss of office, that would hardly benefit the cotton industry in Egypt. Any minister following me would be less likely than I to be of help to them. No single man has the power to change an entire industry, whether he wishes to or not. Ayesha knows that now, even if she imagined in the beginning that she could persuade me to begin such a movement for reform.”
“Then why was she still here in London?” Vespasia had no alternative but to be brutal if she was to serve any purpose at all beyond comfort that would last only as long as she was in the