Silence in Hanover Close - Anne Perry [35]
“Do you suppose he was so infatuated with her that he lost his head, his morality, enough to do that?” she asked, not because she thought Jack could possibly know but because she wanted to test his opinion of Veronica. Did he see her as a woman who could inspire such a reckless passion?
The answer was the one she had feared.
“I don’t know Danver,” he answered seriously. “But if he was capable of it, then Veronica would be just the woman to waken such a feeling.”
“Oh.” Emily’s voice was tight, a little high. “Then we had better pursue the matter forthwith, for justice’s sake if nothing else.” She sounded businesslike, very crisp. “I shall write to Charlotte to follow up on the invitation to visit the winter exhibition, and you must do what you can to obtain an invitation for her to meet the rest of the people who might be involved.” Her frustration boiled up suddenly and erupted despite her intentions. “I wish I were not shut up here like a hermit! It’s damnable! I could do so much if only I were free to socialize—oh hellfire!”
He looked startled for a moment, but there was laughter in his eyes. “I don’t think you’re ready for the Honorable Mrs. Piers York’s withdrawing room yet, Emily,” he said wryly.
“On the contrary,” she snapped, her face hot. “I’m over-ready!”
But there was nothing she could do, and her choice lay between accepting it with a good grace or an ill one. After another few minutes of general chatter Jack took his leave with a commission to contrive the necessary invitation. Emily was left alone again to go over and over in her mind all that she had said, changing a word or two, an inflection here and there to make it more gracious, less revealing. She wished she could go back and conduct the whole meeting again, and this time be more casual, perhaps occasionally say something witty. Men liked women who amused them, as long as they were not too clever or too spiteful.
Could she possibly be in love with Jack? That would be indecent so soon after George’s death. Or was it just that she liked him, and she was bored, and so crushingly lonely?
It was six days later, past New Year’s and into January with all its bleak and desperate cold, snow lining the streets and freezing fog creeping up like a white presage of death, clogging the throat, devouring light, distorting sound, and isolating each person who ventured out into it, when Emily’s carriage called for Charlotte in the late afternoon. It took her to Emily’s house, where she changed into a royal blue silk dinner gown while Emily and her maid fussed over her. Then, wrapped in wool and fur, she rode in Jack’s carriage to the house of Garrard Danver and his family in Mayfair, at the farther end of Hanover Close.
The carriage moved slowly through the swirling fog, and Charlotte could barely see the faint luminescence of gas lamps above, one moment clear yellow and the next swathed and blinded with dirty white rags of vapor.
She was glad when they pulled up and it was time to begin being Elisabeth Barnaby again. It was easier to take the plunge into activity than to sit hunched up in the dark turning it over in her mind and worrying about all the things that might go wrong. If they were to catch her out, how could she possibly explain herself? It would be ghastly: she would be stuck there wriggling like a moth on a pin while everyone stared at her and thought how absurd and tasteless she was. She would have to say she had lost her wits—it was the only possible excuse.
And even if she were entirely successful in duping them, would she discover anything at all that could shed any light on Robert York’s death? Perhaps this whole attempt was nothing to do with Robert or Veronica York, but was merely a silly farce to take Emily’s mind off her