Traitors Gate - Anne Perry [8]
“Would you like to stay here overnight, Mr. Desmond? It will be no inconvenience whatever. In fact you would be our first guest since moving here, and we should like that very much. If there is anything you need, and have not with you, Thomas could lend it to you.”
He did not need to consider it. “Thank you,” he said immediately. “I would far rather that than return to my rooms.”
“Thomas will show you upstairs and have Gracie prepare the bedroom for you. Supper will be served in ten minutes.” And she turned, with only a glance at Pitt, and retreated towards the kitchen.
Matthew stood for a moment in the hallway looking at Pitt. All sorts of half thoughts were plain in his face: surprise, understanding, memories of the past, of long talks and even longer dreams when they were boys, and some of all the distance between then and now. No explanations were necessary.
Supper was a light meal anyway: cold roast chicken and vegetables, and a fruit sorbet afterwards. It was hardly a time when it mattered, but Pitt was glad Matthew had come after his promotion, and it had not been during the time when mutton stew and potatoes, or whiting and bread and butter, were all they could have offered.
They spoke little, and that merely of unemotional subjects such as plans for the garden, what they hoped to grow in the future, whether all the fruit trees were likely to bear, or how badly they were in need of pruning. It was only to fill the silence, not any attempt to pretend that all was well. Charlotte knew as well as Pitt that grief must be allowed its time. To prevent it by constant diversion only increased the pain, like a denial of the importance of the event, as if the loss did not matter.
Matthew retired early, leaving Charlotte in the green-and-white sitting room with Pitt. To have called it a withdrawing room would have been pretentious, but it had all the charm and cool ease that would serve such a purpose.
“What did he mean?” she asked as soon as Matthew had had time to be up the stairs beyond hearing. “What was wrong with Sir Arthur’s death?”
Slowly, finding words harder than he had expected to, he told her all that Matthew had said about Sir Arthur and the Inner Circle, the warnings he felt they had given him, and finally his death from laudanum at the Morton Club.
She listened without taking her eyes from his, and without interruption. He wondered if she could see in his face, as transparently as he felt them, both his grief and his sense of guilt. He was not even sure if he wanted her to know it. It was a bitterly lonely thing to hide, and yet he did not wish her to see him as the thoughtless man he felt, careless of so many years of past kindness that he had not been back, and now all he could do was repay a fraction of the debt by trying to redeem Sir Arthur’s name from a dishonor he knew it did not deserve.
If she perceived it in him, she did not say so. Charlotte could be the most wildly tactless of people at times. And yet when she loved someone, her commitment was such that she could keep any secret, and refrain from judgment in a way few people matched.
“He is the last man to have taken laudanum at all,” he said earnestly. “But even if he had, for some reason we know nothing of, I can’t let them say he was senile. It’s—it’s an indignity.”
“I know.” She reached out her hand and took his. “You don’t speak of him often, but I do know you feel very deeply for him. But regardless of that, it is an injustice one should not let by for anyone at all.” Her eyes were troubled and for the first time since he had begun, she was uncertain of his reaction. “But Thomas …”
“What?”
“Don’t let emotion …” She chose the word carefully, leaving the implication of guilt unsaid, although he was certain she knew that was what he felt. “Don’t let emotion prompt you into rushing in without thought and preparation. They are not enemies you can afford to take lightly. They have no honor in the way they fight. They won’t give you a second chance because you are bereaved, or rash, or motivated by loyalty.