• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Exactly,” he said quickly. “These are the fortunes of war. If you marry a soldier, it is the chance you take—all women do. He would say he grieved for her, but she was wickedly ungrateful to charge him with culpability in it all. Perhaps she had taken a little too much wine with dinner—a fault which she was apt to indulge rather often lately. I can imagine Basil’s face as he said it, and his expression of distaste.”

“She looked at Monk urgently.” That would be useless. Octavia knew her father and was the only one who had ever had the courage to defy him—and reap his revenge.

“But what defiance was left her? She had no allies. Cyprian was content to remain a prisoner in Queen Anne Street. To an extent he had a hostage to fortune in Romola, who obeyed her own instinct for survival, which would never include disobeying Basil. Fenella was uninterested in anyone but herself, Araminta seemed to be on her father’s side in apparently everything. Myles Kellard was an additional problem, hardly a solution. And he too would never override Basil’s wishes; certainly he would not do it for someone else!”

“Lady Moidore?” he prompted.

“She seemed driven, or else had retreated, to the periphery of things. She fought for Octavia’s marriage in the first place, but after that it seems her resources were spent. Septimus might have fought for her, but he had no weapons.”

“And Harry was dead.” He took up the thread. “Leaving a void in her life nothing else could begin to heal. She must have felt an overwhelming despair, grief, betrayal and a sense of being trapped that were almost beyond endurance, and she was without a weapon to fight back.”

“Almost?” she demanded. “Almost beyond endurance? Tired, stunned, confused and alone—what is ‘almost’ about it? And she did have a weapon, whether she intended it as such or not. Perhaps the thought had never entered her mind, but scandal would hurt Basil more than anything else—the fearful scandal of a suicide.” Her voice became harsh with the tragedy and the irony of it. His daughter, living in his home, under his care, so wretched, so comfortless, so un-Christian as to take her own life, not peacefully with laudanum, not even over the rejection of a lover, and it was too late to be the shock of Harry’s death, but deliberately and bloodily in her own bedroom. Or perhaps even in his study with the betraying letter in her hand.

“She would be buried in unhallowed ground, with other sinners beyond forgiveness. Can you imagine what people would say? The shame of it, the looks, the whispers, the sudden silences. The invitations that would no longer come, the people one calls upon who would be unaccountably not at home, in spite of the fact that their carriages were in the mews and all the lights blazing. And where there had been admiration and envy, now there would be contempt—and worst of all, derision.”

His face was very grave, the dark tragedy of it utterly apparent.

“If it had not been Annie who had found her, but someone else,” he said, one of the family, it would have been an easy thing to remove the knife, put her on the bed, tear her nightgown to make it seem as if there had been some struggle, however brief, then break the creeper outside the window and take a few ornaments and jewels. Then it would seem murder, appalling, grieving, but not shameful. There would be acute sympathy, no ostracism, no blame. It could happen to anyone.

“Then I seemed about to ruin it all by proving that no one had broken into the house, so a murderer must be found among the residents.”

“So that is the crime—not the stabbing of Octavia, but the slow, judicial murder of Percival. How hideous, how immeasurably worse,” she said slowly. “But how can we possibly prove it? They will go undiscovered and unpunished. They will get away with it! Whoever it is—”

“What a nightmare. But who? I still don’t know. The scandal would harm them all. It could have been Cyprian and Romola, or even Cyprian alone. He is a big man, quite strong enough to carry Octavia from