The Silent Cry - Anne Perry [49]
Hester knew she meant not so much strangers as people from a different social order, as she must consider Evan to be. She would not know his father was a minister of the church, and he had chosen police work from a sense of dedication to justice, not because it was his natural place in society.
“Of course,” she agreed. “It is painful to admit, even to oneself, of a quarrel which cannot now be repaired. One has to set it amid the rest of the relationship and see it as merely a part, only by mischance the last part. It was probably far less important than it seems. Had Mr. Duff lived they would surely have made up their differences.” She did not leave it exactly a question.
Sylvestra sipped her fresh tea. “They were quite unlike each other. Rhys is the youngest. Leighton said I indulged him. Perhaps I did. I … I felt I understood him so well.” Her face puckered with hurt. “Now it looks as if I didn’t understand him at all. And my failure may have cost my husband his life.…” Her fingers gripped the cup so tightly Hester was afraid she would break it and spill the hot liquid over herself, even cut her hands on the shards.
“Don’t torture yourself with that, when you don’t know if it is true,” she urged. “Perhaps you can think of something which may help the police learn why they went to St. Giles. It may stem from something that happened some time before that evening. It is a fearful place. They must have had a very compelling reason. Could it have been on someone else’s account? A friend in trouble?”
Sylvestra looked up at her quickly, her eyes bright. “That would make some sense of it, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. Who are Rhys’s friends? Who might he care about sufficiently to go to such a place to help? Perhaps someone who had borrowed money. It can happen … a gambling debt a young man dared not tell his family about, or a girl of dubious reputation.”
Sylvestra smiled; the smile was full of fear, but there was self-mastery in it also. “That sounds like Rhys himself, I’m afraid. He tended to find respectable young ladies rather boring. That was the principal reason he quarreled with his father. He felt it unfair that Constance and Amalia were able to travel to India to have all manner of exotic experiences, and he was required to remain at home and study, and marry well and then go into the family business.”
“What was Mr. Duff’s business?” Hester felt considerable sympathy with Rhys. All his will and passion, all his dreams, seemed to lie in the Middle East, and he was required to remain in London while his elder sisters had the adventures not only of the mind, but of the body as well.
“He was in law,” Sylvestra replied. “Conveyancing, property. He was the senior partner. He had offices in Birmingham and Manchester as well as the City.”
Highly respectable, Hester thought, but hardly the stuff of dreams. At least the family would presumably still have some means. Finances would not be an additional cause for anxiety. She imagined Rhys had been expected to go to university and then follow in his father’s footsteps in the company, probably a junior partnership to begin with, leading to rapid promotion. His whole future was built ahead of him, and rigidly defined. Naturally, it required that he make at the very least a suitable marriage, at best a fortunate one. She could feel the net drawing tight, as if it had been around her also. It was a life tens of thousands would have been only too grateful for.
She tried to imagine Leighton Duff and his hopes for his son, his anger and frustration that Rhys was ungrateful, blind to his good fortune.
“He must have been a very talented man,” she said, again to fill the silence.
“He was,” Sylvestra agreed with a distant smile. “He was immensely respected. The number of people who regarded his opinion was extraordinary. He could