Traitors Gate - Anne Perry [125]
“I don’t know,” Pitt replied candidly. “At the moment I have no idea at all.”
“None?”
“What did you have in mind when you asked?”
“Don’t play games with me, Thomas,” Matthew said irritably. “I’m not one of your damned suspects!” Then a moment later he was struck with contrition. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I meant. I’m still plagued by Father’s death. Part of my mind is convinced he was murdered, and by the Inner Circle, both to keep him from saying anything more about them and as a warning to other would-be traitors to the oaths. Loyalty’s a hell of a thing, Thomas. How much loyalty can you demand of anyone? I’m not even sure I know what loyalty is. If you had asked me a year ago, or six months ago, I would have been quite convinced it was a stupid question, not even worth asking because the answer was so obvious. Now I can’t answer it.” He stood still on the grass, his face full of confusion, his eyes searching Pitt’s. “Can you?”
Pitt thought for a long time before he replied, and even then it was tentative.
“I suppose it is honoring your promises,” he said slowly. “But then it is also honoring your obligations, even if there have been no specific promises made.”
“Exactly,” Matthew agreed. “But who sets out what those obligations are, or to whom? Whose is the first claim? What when people assume you have some obligation to them, and you don’t assume it? They can, you know.”
“Sir Arthur and the Inner Circle?”
Matthew lifted his shoulders in a gesture of vague assent. “Anyone. Sometimes we take for granted things, and imagine that other people do too … and perhaps they don’t. I mean … how well do we know each other, how well do we even know ourselves, until we are tested? You imagine you will behave in a certain way if you are faced with a choice, but when the time comes, you find you don’t.”
Pitt was even surer that Matthew had something specific in mind. There was too much passion in his voice for it to be mere philosophizing. But equally obviously, he was not yet ready to speak of it openly. Pitt did not even know if it was actually to do with Sir Arthur, or if he had merely mentioned that as something they had in common from which to begin.
“You mean a division of loyalties?”
Matthew moved a step away. Pitt knew he had touched a nerve, and it was too soon.
Matthew waited a moment before he replied. The garden was silent. Somewhere beyond the hedges a dog barked. A tortoiseshell cat walked along the wall and dropped soundlessly into the orchard.
“Some of those men at the inquest genuinely felt as if he had betrayed a trust,” Matthew said at last. “A loyalty to their secret society, perhaps in a way to their class. Somebody in the Colonial Office is betraying their country, but perhaps they don’t see it like that.” He took a deep breath, his eyes on the wind in the apple leaves. “Father felt that to keep silent about the Inner Circle was to betray all that he felt most important in life, although he might never have thought to give it a name. I’m not sure I like giving things names. Does that sound like evasion? Once you give things a name and promise allegiance, you’ve given part of yourself away. I’m not prepared to do that.” He looked at Pitt with a frown. “Can you understand that, Thomas?”
“Most things don’t ask for an unlimited allegiance,” Pitt pointed out. “That is what is wrong with the Inner Circle; it asks men to promise loyalty in advance of knowing what will be asked of them.”
“A sacrifice of conscience, Father called it.”
“Then you have answered your own question,” Pitt pointed out. “You didn’t need to ask me, and you shouldn’t care what my answer would have been.”
Matthew flashed him a sudden, brilliant smile. “I don’t,” he confessed, putting his hands into his pockets.
“Then what still troubles you?” Pitt asked, because the shadow and the tension were still in Matthew, and the smile faded as quickly as it had come.
Matthew sighed, turning away from the orchard wall and beginning to walk slowly along it. “Yes, you and I can say that comfortably because we have