The Whitechapel Conspiracy - Anne Perry [119]
With the thought of power and corruption, a chill touched her that the warmth of the evening could not ease; even the echoes of memory were not strong enough to loose its grip.
She thought of the dark alleys of Whitechapel, of women waiting alone, hearing the rumble of carriage wheels behind them, perhaps even turning to see its denser blackness outlined against the gloom, then the door opening, the sight of a face for a moment, and the pain.
She thought of poor Eddy, a pawn moved one way and then the other, his emotions used and disregarded in a world he only half heard, perhaps half understood. And she thought of his mother, deaf also, pitied and often ignored, and how she must have grieved for him, and been helpless to move even to comfort him, let alone to save him.
They were approaching Covent Garden. There was a small girl standing on the corner and holding out a bunch of wilted flowers.
Mario stopped the coach, to the anger and inconvenience of the traffic around them in both directions. He climbed out and walked over to the girl. He bought the flowers and returned with them, smiling. They were dusty, their stalks bent and petals drooping.
“A little past their best,” he said wryly. “And I gave rather too much for them.” There was laughter in his eyes, and sadness.
She took them. “How very appropriate,” she answered, smiling back, a ridiculous lump in her throat.
The carriage moved on again, amid considerable abuse.
“I’m sorry it’s Wagner,” he remarked, resettling himself into his seat. “I can never take it all with the right degree of seriousness. The men who cannot laugh at themselves frighten me even more than those who laugh at everything.”
She looked at him and knew how profoundly he meant it. There was an edge to his voice like that she remembered in the hot, dreadful days of the siege before the end. They had realized, during those nights alone, when all the work they could do was past and there was nothing else but to wait, that in the end they would not win. The Pope would return and sooner or later all the old corruptions would come back too, bland-faced, pitiless, impersonal.
But they had had a passion inside and a loyalty that gave more than it ever cost, even at the very last. The men who beat them were stronger, richer and sadder.
“They mock because they don’t understand,” she said, thinking of those who had derided their aspirations so long ago.
He was looking at her as he always had, as if there were no one else.
“Sometimes,” he agreed. “It is far worse when they do it because they do understand but they hate what they cannot have.” He smiled. “I remember my grandfather telling me that if I desired wealth or fame there would always be those who would hate me for it because both are earned at someone else’s cost. But if I wished only to be good, no one would begrudge me that. I did not argue with him, partly because he was my grandfather, but mostly because I did not realize then how wrong he was.” His mouth tightened and there was a terrible sadness in his eyes. “There is no hatred on earth like that for someone who possesses a virtue you do not have, or want. It is the mirror that shows you what you are, and obliges you to see it.”
Without thinking she reached out her hand and laid it on his. His fingers closed over hers immediately, warm and strong.
“Who are you thinking of?” she asked, knowing it was not simply memory speaking, dear as that was.
He turned to her, his eyes grave. They were nearly there and it would be time to alight in a moment, join the throng gathering on the opera house steps, women in laces and silk, jewels winking in the lights, men in shirts so white they gleamed.
“Not a man, my dear, so much as a time.” He looked