The Hyde Park Headsman - Anne Griffin Perry [105]
“Could it be something to do with the Inner Circle?” Drummond at him narrowly. “I know the bus conductor is unlikely, but not impossible.”
“A betrayal?” Pitt said with surprise. “You mean some sort of internal punishment? Isn’t it a bit …”
“Extreme?” Drummond finished for him. “Perhaps. But sometimes, Pitt, I don’t think you understand just how powerful they are—and certainly not how ruthless.”
“A kind of execution?” Pitt was still doubtful. He thought Drummond was letting his own entanglement crowd his vision out of proportion. “Isn’t it more in their line simply to ruin someone, have them blackballed from all the clubs, cancel their credit, call in all the debts and loans? That is extremely effective. Men have shot themselves over less.”
“Yes, I know,” Drummond said grimly. “Some men. But Winthrop was in the navy. Perhaps they couldn’t reach him.”
Pitt knew his disbelief was in his face and he could not conceal it.
“Listen to me, Pitt.” Drummond took a step forward, his expression tense, his eyes bleak. “I know a great deal more than you do about the Circle. You only know the lower rings, the men like me who were drawn in without realizing anything beyond the charities everyone can see, and a little of the superficial obligations. They are just the knights of the Green.”
Drummond blushed very faintly, but he was far too serious to allow embarrassment to tie his tongue. “That is what I was, a knight of the Green, someone bound but, in any real sense, untried. Next are the knights of the Scarlet. They are the ones who have proved themselves: blooded, if you like, committed beyond retreat. Beyond them are the Lords of the Silver. They have the power of punishment and reward. But Pitt, behind them is one man, the Lord of the Purple.” He saw Pitt’s face. “All right!” he said with a sudden edge of anger to his voice Pitt had never heard before. “You can smile. It has its absurdity. But there is nothing even faintly ridiculous about the power that man holds. It’s secret, and for those in the Circle it’s total. If he pronounced sentence of ruin, or death, it would be carried out. And believe me, Pitt, the perpetrators would go to the gallows without betraying him.”
In this gracious room with its Georgian simplicity, its simple warmth and familiar touches, such talk should have been no more than a fanciful and rather ghoulish entertainment. But looking at Drummond’s face, the tight muscles of his body, the horror in his eyes, it woke an answering fear in Pitt, and suddenly he felt chilled inside. The warmth no longer touched him.
Drummond saw that he had at last conveyed what he meant.
“It might not be,” he said quietly. “It might have nothing to do with the Circle at all. But remember what I say, Pitt Whoever he is, you have already crossed him once, when you exposed Lord Byam and Lord Anstiss. He won’t have forgotten. Walk carefully, and make friends as well as enemies.”
Pitt knew better than to wonder if Drummond were suggesting he retreat. It was not in his nature even to think of such a thing. He had sometimes thought Drummond stiff, a product of his army career and his aristocratic upbringing, even lacking in information and grasp of which poverty or despair might be. He had wondered if he were capable of real laughter or of consuming passion. But never for an instant had he doubted his courage or his honor. He was the sort of shy, sometimes inarticulate, painfully polite, easily embarrassed, elegant, dryly humorous sort of Englishman who will face impossible odds without complaint and die at his post, but never, ever, desert it even if he were the last man living.
“Thank you for your warning,” Pitt said soberly. “I shall not dismiss the possibility, even though in this case, I think it is unlikely.”
Drummond relaxed very slowly. He was about to speak on some other subject when there was a tap on the door and both men turned.
“Yes?” Drummond answered.
The door opened and Eleanor Drurnmond came in. Pitt had not