Southampton Row - Anne Perry [84]
Pitt stood up slowly. “I’ll go and see this Mr. Wray,” he said. “Teddington! I suppose Maude Lamont was good enough to bring someone all the way from Teddington to Southampton Row?”
Tellman did not answer.
Pitt wasted no time thinking about how to approach the Reverend Francis Wray when he should find him. It was going to be wretched no matter what he said. It was best to do it before apprehension made him clumsier and even more artificial.
He made his way to the railway station and enquired about the best route to Teddington, and was told that he would have to change trains, but that the next train to begin his journey was due to leave in eleven minutes. He purchased a through ticket, thanked the man, and went to get a newspaper from the vendor at the entrance. Most of the space was taken up with election issues and the usual virulent cartoons. He did notice an advertisement for the upcoming exhibition of costermongers’ ponies and donkeys to be held at the People’s Palace in Mile-End Road in a couple of weeks’ time.
On the platform with him were two elderly women and a family obviously on a day out. The children were excited, hopping up and down and unable to stop chattering. He wondered how Daniel, Jemima and Edward were enjoying Devon, if they liked the country, or if they found it strange, if they missed their usual friends. Did they miss him? Or was it all too full of adventure? And of course Charlotte was with them.
He had been away from them too often lately, first in Whitechapel, and now this! He had hardly spoken to either Daniel or Jemima in a couple of months, not with time to reach towards the more difficult subjects, to listen to what was unsaid as well as the surface words. When this matter of Voisey was over, whether they knew who had killed Maude Lamont or not, he must make sure he took a day or two every so often just to spend with them. Narraway owed him at least that much, and he could not live the rest of his life running away from Voisey. That would be giving him victory without even the effort of a fight.
He dared not even think too closely of Charlotte; missing her left an ache in him too big to fill with thought or action. Even dreams left an ache that hurt too much.
The train came in in a roar of steam and the clatter of iron wheels on iron rails, with flying smuts, the smell and heat of power, and the moment of parting with her was as sharp as if she had left barely a moment ago. He had to force himself into the present, to open the carriage door and hold it for two elderly women, then follow them up the step and inside and find a seat.
It was not a long journey. Forty minutes and he was in Teddington. As Tellman had told him, Udney Road was only a block away from the station, and a few minutes’ walk took him to the neat gate of number four. He stared at it in the sun for several moments, breathing in the scents of a dozen flowers and the sweet, clean odor of hot earth newly watered. It was so full of memory, so domestic, that for an instant it overwhelmed him.
At a glance the garden looked random, almost overgrown, but he knew the years of care that had gone into its nurture and upkeep. There were no dead heads, nothing out of place, no weeds. It was a blaze of color, new with long familiar, exotic and indigenous side by side. Simply staring at it told him much of the man who had planted it. Was it Francis Wray himself, or an outdoor servant paid for the task? If it were the latter, whatever he earned, his real reward was in his art.
Pitt unfastened the gate and went in, closing it behind him, and walked up the path. A black cat lay stretched on the windowsill in the sun, a tortoiseshell strolled through the dappled shade of late crimson snapdragons. Pitt prayed he was here on a fool’s errand.
He knocked on the front door, and was admitted by a girl in a maid’s uniform, but who could not have been more than fifteen years old.
“Is this the home of Mr. Francis Wray?” Pitt enquired.
“Yes sir.” She was obviously concerned because he was someone she did not know. Perhaps Wray was usually