Shoulder the Sky_ A Novel - Anne Perry [21]
Was he a man who wanted to change the world—into an Anglo-German hegemony?
“It isn’t the change that matters,” Matthew answered, feeling his heart beat high in his throat. He must not give himself away. A clumsy word now would be enough. “It’s the means they propose to use to bring it about,” he finished.
“Sebastian was persistently against war,” Thyer said with certainty. “He admired German science and culture, particularly music. But that does not make him unusual. Find me a civilized man anywhere who doesn’t.”
They were moving around and around each other like a medieval dance, never touching. Matthew was learning nothing, except the extraordinary power over minds that the master of a college could exert, which he knew already. Thyer was simply reminding him. Intentionally? Did it amuse him to play?
“You spoke to Sebastian the day before he killed my parents,” he said aloud.
Thyer was jolted at last. It showed only in the flicker of his eyes. “How did you know that?” he asked quietly.
“You took no trouble to conceal it,” Matthew replied. “Was it meant to be secret?”
Thyer relaxed deliberately, the faintest touch of humor at the corners of his mouth. “No. Not at all.” His face was almost without expression. “I called to remind him of his promise to give me a few quotes for a dinner with some friends. He could be forgetful. They were Greek scholars who could appreciate his translations of heroic verse.”
It was another world, a year ago, and a different lifetime. “And had he forgotten?” Matthew asked. Heroic verse! And the next day he had murdered John and Alys Reavley.
“No,” Thyer replied. “He had prepared for it and was quite willing. As it happened, I canceled the dinner. It no longer seemed appropriate. Joseph would have been one of the guests, and in the circumstances none of us felt like proceeding.” Thyer bit his lip and leaned forward very slightly. “I am quite aware of what you are seeking, Matthew. I find it almost impossible to believe that Sebastian was planning murder then,” he said earnestly. “He sounded exactly like the young man we all knew: intense, charming, exasperating, brilliant, at times sublimely funny. And of course fickle.”
Matthew was surprised. “Fickle?”
Thyer’s face softened unexpectedly with a deep sadness. “He was very handsome. He had all life before him. He had a keen appetite for its pleasures, and he wanted to taste them all. I was unaware of his fiancée until she came here after his death, but I knew perfectly well of his dalliance with the girl in the pub along by the millpond, and others as well. He was fairly discreet about seeing her, but Cambridge is not such a big place, and he was easy to recognize also.”
“I didn’t know about others.” Matthew was surprised, and disconcerted. “Who were they?”
“I have no idea,” Thyer confessed. “I imagine he did not wish any of his—girls—to know about the rest.”
“But you knew!” Matthew pointed out.
Thyer smiled very slightly. “A great deal is told to me that does not become general knowledge. As long as his behavior is within certain bounds, a student’s love affairs are not my concern. I may not approve, but I do not interfere.”
It still left a faintly disturbing taste. Sebastian had taken some trouble to deceive at least three women. It could not have been easy, it required planning, evasion, sometimes lies. Deeper than that, it required a degree of lying to himself. To his fiancée he had proposed marriage, or at the least, allowed it to be understood. To Flora in the pub along the river he had offered a deep and possibly intimate friendship, and now it seemed he had given time and at least a degree of affection also to other women. He had committed something of himself to each of them, and yet all of them would have supposed themselves to be unique.