Southampton Row - Anne Perry [138]
“Who decided that it was what God wanted?” she asked.
He was startled. “It is what the church has done for the best part of two thousand years!” he retorted. “In fact, always!”
“I thought it was only meant to be the instrument of our growth,” she replied to him. “Not an end in itself.”
His brow creased with irritation. “Sometimes you talk the most arrant nonsense, Isadora. I am a bishop, ordained of God. Don’t try to tell me what the church is for. You make yourself ridiculous.”
“If you are ordained of God, then you should not doubt Him,” she snapped. “But if you are ordained of man, then perhaps you should be looking for what God wishes instead. It may not be the same at all.”
His face froze. He sat motionless for a moment, then leaned over and picked up the newspaper, holding it high enough to hide behind.
“Francis Wray committed suicide,” he said after a few moments. “It seems that damned policeman Pitt was hounding him over the murder of the spirit medium, imagining he knew something about it. Stupid man!”
She was horrified. She remembered Pitt; he had been one of Cornwallis’s men, one he was particularly fond of. Her first thought was for how it would hurt Cornwallis, for the injustice if it were not true, and for the disillusion, if by some terrible chance it were.
“Why on earth would he think that?” she said aloud.
“Heaven knows.” He sounded final, as if that closed the matter.
“Well, what do they say?” she demanded. “You’ve got it in front of you.”
He was irritated. “That was yesterday’s paper. There’s very little about it today.”
“What did they say?” she insisted. “What are they blaming Pitt for? Why would he think Francis Wray, of all people, would know anything about a spirit medium?”
“It really doesn’t matter,” he replied without lowering the paper. “And Pitt was quite wrong anyway. Wray had nothing to do with it, that has been proved.” And he refused to say anything further.
She poured a second cup of tea and drank it in silence.
Then she heard his suddenly indrawn breath and a gasp. The paper slid from his hands and fell in loose sheets in his lap and over his plate. His face was ashen.
“What is it?” she said with alarm, afraid he was having some kind of attack. “What’s happened? Have you pain? Reginald? Shall—“ She stopped. He was struggling to his feet.
“I . . . I have to go out,” he mumbled. He thrashed at the newspaper, sending the sheets slithering to the floor, rattling together.
“But you have the Reverend Williams coming in half an hour!” she protested. “He’s come all the way from Brighton!”
“Tell him to wait.” He flapped a hand at her.
“Where are you going?” She was on her feet also. “Reginald! Where are you going?”
“Not far,” he said from the doorway. “Tell him to wait!”
There was no use asking anymore. He was not going to tell her. It had to be something in the newspaper which had created such a panic of emotion in him. She bent and picked it up, starting her search on the second page, roughly where she guessed he had been reading.
She saw it almost immediately. It was an announcement by the police on the Maude Lamont case. There had been three clients at her house on Southampton Row for the last séance she had given. Two of them were named in her diary of engagements, the third had been represented by a little drawing, a pictograph or cartouche. It was like a small f hastily written, under a half circle. Or to Isadora’s eye, a bishop