The Cater Street Hangman - Anne Perry [4]
“Only for two months! It surely cannot have changed so much in that time?” The question was ironic, even a little sarcastic.
“How long does it take?” Mrs. Winchester gave a dramatic shudder and closed her eyes. “Oh! Poor Mrs. Abernathy. How can she bear to think of it? No wonder the poor soul is afraid to go to sleep.”
Now Susannah was totally confounded. She looked at Charlotte for help.
Charlotte decided to give it, and bear the consequences.
“Do you remember Mrs. Abernathy’s daughter, Chloe?” She did not wait for a reply. “She was murdered about six weeks ago, garotted, and her clothes ripped from her, her bosom wounded.”
“Charlotte!” Caroline glared at her daughter. “We will not discuss it!”
“We have been discussing it one way or another all afternoon,” Charlotte protested. Out of the corner of her vision she saw Emily stifle a giggle. “We have merely covered it in words.”
“It is better covered.”
Mrs. Winchester shuddered again.
“I can’t bear to think of it, the very memory makes me quite ill. She was found in the street, all huddled up on the footpath like a bundle of laundry. Her face was terrible, blue as—as—I don’t know what! And her eyes staring and her tongue poking out. Been lying in the rain for hours when they found her; all night, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“Don’t disturb yourself!” Grandmama said tersely, looking at Mrs. Winchester’s excited face.
Mrs. Winchester remembered quickly to be distressed.
“Oh, terrible!” she wailed, screwing up her features. “Please, my dear Mrs. Ellison, let us not speak of it again. The whole subject is quite unbearable. Poor dear Mrs. Abernathy. I just don’t know how she bears it!”
“What else can she do but bear it?” Charlotte said quietly. “It has happened. There isn’t anything anyone can do now.”
“I suppose there never was,” Susannah stared at the tea. “Some madman, a robber no one could have foreseen.” She looked up, frowning. “Surely she was not alone in the street after dark?”
“My dear Susannah,” Caroline remonstrated, “it is dark from four o’clock on in the middle of winter, most especially on a wet day. How can one guarantee to be indoors by four o’clock? That would mean one could not even visit neighbours for tea!”
“Is that where she was?”
“She was setting out to take some old clothes to the vicar, for the poor.” Caroline’s face pinched with a sudden very real sorrow. “Poor child, she was barely eighteen.”
Without warning it became real, no longer a scandal to be toyed with, a titillation, but the real death of a woman like themselves: footsteps behind, sudden agony in the throat, terror, the struggle for breath, bursting lungs, and darkness.
No one spoke.
It was Dora coming in from the hallway who broke the silence.
Charlotte was still feeling depressed when her father returned to the house a little after six. The sky had darkened outside and now it was spattering the first heavy drops of rain on the roadway as the carriage drew up. Edward Ellison worked with a merchant banking house in the city, which provided him with a very satisfactory income and a social standing of at least acceptable middle class. Charlotte had been brought up to think perhaps rather more.
Edward came in now, brushing the raindrops off his coat in the few seconds before Maddock came to relieve him of it, and put his top hat gently in its place.
“Good evening, Charlotte,” he said pleasantly.
“Good evening, Papa.”
“I trust you have had a profitable day?” he enquired, rubbing his hands together. “I fear the weather is distressingly seasonal. We may well be in for a storm. The air has that oppressive feeling.”
“Mrs. Winchester came to tea.” She answered his question about the afternoon by implication. He knew she disliked her.
“Oh dear,” he smiled faintly. There was some understanding between them, even though it did not show itself as often as she would have liked. “I thought Susannah was expected?”
“Oh, she came too, but Mrs. Winchester spent the entire time either questioning her about the Willises, or talking about Chloe Abernathy.”
Edward’s face darkened.