Southampton Row - Anne Perry [66]
She reached home and went upstairs to change into a suitable gown for dinner, even though she was not going out. She was in her own sitting room when Jack came in. His face was tired and there was a pale film of dust around the bottoms of his trousers, as if he had walked outside on the pavements for some distance.
She stood up to greet him with unaccustomed haste, as if he brought news, although she did not expect anything but the trivia of the campaign, much of which she could gain from the daily papers, had she considered it of sufficient importance.
“How is it progressing?” she asked him, searching his eyes, which were wide and gray with the remarkable lashes she had always admired. She saw in them pleasure at the sight of her, a warmth she had long known and held so dear it still startled her. But too close beneath it for safety she saw anxiety, deeper than before. She said quickly, “What’s happened?”
He was reluctant to answer. The words did not come readily to him, and usually they did so easily; that in itself chilled her.
“Aubrey?” she whispered, thinking of Vespasia’s warning. “He might lose, mightn’t he? Are you going to care very much?”
He smiled, but it was deliberate, a gesture to reassure her. “I like him,” he said honestly, sitting down in the chair opposite her, relaxing with his legs out. “And I think with a little more practicality he’d be a fine member. Anyway, we need a few dreamers.” He gave a slight shrug. “It would balance out the journeymen who want office only for what it can profit them.”
She knew he was hiding the real hurt it would be if Aubrey failed. It was Jack who had encouraged him in the beginning, even opened up much of the pathway for his nomination, and supported him after it. He had made it seem casual, as he did so many things, still keeping that instinctive manner of a man who took things lightly, who dabbled more than he worked, to whom nothing mattered so much as comfort, popularity, good food and good wine, and graciousness around him. He had always appreciated beauty and to flirt was as natural to him as drawing breath. The finality of marriage to a woman who would never turn the other way, or refuse to see what was uncomfortable to her, was the hardest decision he had ever made, and at times he also knew it was the best.
Emily had been careful never to tell him that she was very adept at seeing only what was prudent. She had done it with her first husband, George Ashworth, and when she had thought he had betrayed her, not simply physically but with love of the heart, it had wounded her more deeply than all her sophistication had led her to expect. She had no intention of allowing Jack to think he could do the same. She knew the strength in him and the hunger for a purpose as consuming as that which drove Pitt. It was the fear he would not match up to it which made him appear to treat it so lightly. She realized now with a startling pain that she would do anything in her power to protect him from failure.
“Rose was at the house of the spirit medium the night she was murdered,” she said guardedly. “Thomas went to question her. She’s terrified, Jack!”
His face darkened. This time he could not hide the tension tightening inside him. He straightened up in the chair, the ease gone. “Thomas! Why Thomas? He’s not in Bow Street anymore.”
It was not the response she had expected, but now that she heard it, it was the one she feared. The rest, the questions, the criticism for lack of thought, for selfishness, would come later.
“Emily?” His voice was harsher, afraid she knew something she was not telling him, and for once she did not.
“I don’t know!” she said, meeting his eyes squarely. “Charlotte won’t tell me. I have to suppose it’s political, otherwise Thomas wouldn’t be there.”
Jack put his hands up over his face, then ran his fingers through his hair, blinking slowly.
Emily waited,