Bethlehem Road (16 page)

“And you find protestations and pleadings are no use?” he said fatuously, hating having to be so false to the understanding, even the empathy he felt. He had grown up the son of servants on a country estate; he knew about obedience and ownership.

Her disgust stung. “You are either a fool, Mr. Pitt, or else you are deliberately patronizing me in a fashion both contemptible and completely pointless. If you are trying to make me say that I consider there are occasions when violence is the only means left to someone suffering intolerable wrongs, then consider me to have said it.” She glared at him, defying him to make the next, inevitable charge.

“I am not a fool, Mrs. Ivory,” he said instead, meeting her blazing eyes. “Nor do I imagine you are. Whatever you pleaded for to Mr. Etheridge, it was not that he should change the whole order of society and give to women an equality they have never enjoyed in all our two thousand years. You may be marvelously ambitious, but you will have started with something more specific, and I think more personal. What was it?”

The rage died away again suddenly, like a force that has been so violent it has consumed all its fuel, and only the pain was left. She sat down on a cushioned wood settle and stared not at him but at the garden through the open window.

“I imagine if I do not tell you, then you will only go and dig it up elsewhere, perhaps less accurately. I was married fifteen years ago, to William Ivory. My property was not great, but it would have been more than enough for me to live on in some comfort. Of course, on my wedding day it became his. I have never seen it since.”

Her hands were completely calm in her lap; she held a lace handkerchief, which she had pulled from her pocket, but she did not twist it. Only the whiteness of her knuckles betrayed the straining muscles.

“But that is not my complaint—although I find it monstrous. It was an institutionalized way for men to steal women’s money and do whatever they pleased with it, on the grounds that we were too feeble-witted and too ignorant of financial affairs to manage it ourselves. We must watch our husbands squander it, and never speak a word, even if we had a hundred times more sense! And if we did not know how to manage affairs, whose fault is that? Who forbade our education in anything but the most trivial matters?”

Pitt waited for her to return to her grievance. All this time Africa Dowell stood at the far end of the settle, a figure of startling immobility, as if she had indeed been one of the romantic paintings she resembled, and like them all manner of passion and dreams were in her face; she might well just this instant have seen the mirror of Shalott crack from side to side, sealing her doom. Whatever Florence Ivory was recounting, it was well known to her, and she felt the same unhealed wound.

“We had two children,” Florence continued. “A boy, and then a girl. William Ivory became more and more dictatorial. Our laughter offended him. He thought me light-minded if I enjoyed my children’s company, told them stories or played games, and yet if I wished to talk of politics, or of changes in the laws which might help the poor and the oppressed, he said I meddled in things that were too weighty for me and were not my concern, and I had no idea what I was talking about. My place was in the parlor, the kitchen, or the bedroom; nowhere else.

“Finally I could bear it no longer, and I left. I knew from the outset that I could not have my son, but my daughter, Pansy, who was then six years old”—even speaking the name seemed to wrench her—“I took with me. It was very hard for us. We had little money, and few means of earning any. At first I was given shelter by a friend here in London who had some understanding of my plight, and some pity for me. But her own circumstances became severely reduced, and I was obliged by honor not to burden her with our care any longer.

“It was then, about three years ago, that Africa Dowell took us in.” She looked round and saw Pitt’s face, perhaps detecting in him confusion and a certain impatience. It was indeed a sad story, but she had in no way touched upon Vyvyan Etheridge, nor had she any reason to blame him for any part of it.

“I supported electoral reform,” Florence said wryly. “I even went so far as to endorse Miss Helen Taylor’s attempt to stand for Parliament. I freely expressed my feelings on the subject of women’s rights—that we should be able to vote and to hold office, to make decisions, both as to our money and our children, even to have access to that knowledge which would enable us to choose what number of children we had, rather than spend all our adult years bearing one child after another until exhausted in body and heart, and destitute in pocket.”

Her voice grew harsher, and the humiliation and bitterness lay like an open wound, still lacerated, still pouring blood.

“My husband heard of it and pressed the courts that I was an unfit person to have custody of my daughter. I pleaded my cause to Vyvyan Etheridge. He said he saw well that my political views were no part of my fitness as a mother, and I should not be deprived of my child because of them.

“I did not know at that time that my husband had friends of such influence as he might bring to bear on Mr. Etheridge. He used them, he spoke man to man, and Mr. Etheridge sent word to me that he regretted he had misunderstood my case, and on closer investigation he agreed with my husband that I was an unstable woman, of a hysterical and ill-informed nature, and my daughter would be better with her father. That same day they came and took her from me, and I have not seen her since.” She hesitated a moment, mastering herself with difficulty, forcing the memory out of her mind, and when she continued her voice was flat, almost dead. “Am I sorry Vyvyan Etheridge is dead? I am not! I am sorry only that it was quick and that he probably did not even know who had killed him, or why. He was a coward and a betrayer. He knew I was neither a hysterical person nor light-minded. I loved my daughter more than any other person on earth, and she loved me and trusted me. I could have cared for her above all other interests or causes, and I would have taught her to have courage, dignity, and honor. I would have taught her she was loved, and how to love others. And what will her father teach her? That she is fit for nothing but to listen and to obey, never to feel all her passion, to think or to dream, never to stand up for what she believes is right or good... .” Her voice faltered with the extremity of her loss and the waste of a child’s life, the daughter she had borne and loved, tearing at her heart. It was several long minutes before she could speak again.

“Etheridge knew that, but he bowed to pressure from other men, from the people who might make it uncomfortable for him if he supported me. It was easier not to fight, and so he allowed them to take my child and give her to her autocratic and loveless father. I am not even permitted to see her.” Her face was a mask of such anguish Pitt felt it was intrusive even to look at her. The tears ran down her cheeks, and she wept without a grimace; it had a kind of terrible beauty, simply from the power of her passion.

At last Africa knelt down and gently took her hand. She did not hold Florence Ivory in her arms; perhaps the time for that had already been and gone. Instead she looked across the flowered muslin of Florence’s skirt at Pitt.

“Such men deserve to die,” she said very quietly and gravely. “But Florence did not kill him, nor did I. If that is what you came hoping to discover, then your journey has been wasted.”

Pitt knew he should press them now as to where they had been at the times Hamilton and Etheridge had been killed, but he could not bring himself to ask it. He assumed they would swear that they had been here at home in their beds. Where else would a decent woman be at close to midnight? And there was no proving it.

“I hope to find out who did murder both Mr. Etheridge and Sir Lockwood Hamilton, Miss Dowell, but I do not hope it is you. In fact I hope you can show me that it was not.”

“The door is behind you, Mr. Pitt,” Africa replied. “Please have the courtesy to leave us.”

Pitt arrived home at dusk, and as soon as he was in the door he tried to put the case from his mind. Daniel had had his supper and was ready for bed, it was merely a matter of hugging him good night before Charlotte took him upstairs. But Jemima, being two years older, had privileges and obligations commensurate with her seniority. They were alone in the parlor by the fire. She bent and picked up all the pieces of her jigsaw puzzle, muttering to herself as she did so. Pitt knew immediately that the mess had been left largely by Daniel, and that she was feeling weightily virtuous clearing it up. He watched her small figure, careful to hide his smile, and when she turned round with immeasurable satisfaction at the end, he was perfectly grave. He did not comment: discipline was Charlotte’s preserve while the children were still so young. He preferred to treat his daughter as a very small friend whom he loved with an intensity and a sweetness that still caught him unaware at times, tightening his throat and quickening his heart.

“I’ve finished,” she said solemnly.

“Yes, I see,” he replied.

She came over to him and climbed onto his knee as matter-of-factly as she would into a chair, turned herself round, and sat down. Her soft little face was very serious. Her eyes were gray and her brows a finer, child’s echo of Charlotte’s. He seldom noticed that her hair had the curl and texture of his, only that it was the rich color of her mother’s.

“Tell me a story, Papa,” she requested, although from the way in which she had settled herself and the certainty in her voice, perhaps it was a command.

“What about?”

“Anything.”

He was tired and his imagination exhausted by struggling with the murders of Etheridge and Hamilton. “Shall I read to you?” he suggested hopefully.

She looked at him with reproach. “Papa, I can read to myself! Tell me about great ladies—princesses!”

“I don’t know anything about princesses.”

“Oh.” Disappointment filled her eyes.

“Well,” he amended hastily, “only about one.”

She brightened. Obviously one would do.

“Once upon a time there was a princess ...” And he told her what he could remember of the great Queen Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VIII, who despite much danger and many tribulations finally became monarch of all England. He got so involved in it he did not notice Charlotte standing in the doorway.

Finally, having recalled all he could, he looked at Jemima’s rapt face.

“What next?” she prompted.

“That’s all I know,” he admitted.

Her eyes widened in wonder. “Was she real, Papa?”

“Oh yes, as real as you are.”

She was very impressed. “Oh!”

Charlotte came in. “And it’s really bedtime,” she said.

Jemima put her arms round Pitt’s neck and kissed him. “Thank you, Papa. Good night.”

“Good night, sweetheart.”

Charlotte met his eyes for a moment, smiling. Then she picked up Jemima and carried her out of the room, and as Pitt watched them go, he suddenly thought again of Florence Ivory and the child she had loved, and had had taken from her.

Would any judge consider Charlotte a “suitable” person? She had married beneath her, regularly meddled in the detection of crimes, had gone careering round music halls and mortuaries, had disguised herself as a missing courtesan, and had driven after a murderess in a carriage chase that had ended up in a fight on a bawdy house floor. And certainly she had campaigned in her own way for reform!

He could not think clearly of what he might feel if any law could visit him and take away his children if his social circumstances were deemed inadequate. The pain of it drenched even his imagination.

And the thought that inevitably followed it was that he could well believe Florence Ivory might have hated Etheridge enough to cut his throat, and Africa Dowell with her, had she known and loved the child too, and seen the grief. It was a conclusion he could not escape, deeply as he wanted to.

He said nothing of it to Charlotte that night, but in the morning when the post came, he noticed the letter in Emily’s hand with its Venetian postmark and knew it would be full of news, excitement, and romance. Emily might have debated whether to talk of all the glamor she was enjoying or to temper it, in view of the fact that Charlotte would never see such things, but knowing Emily, he believed she would not patronize Charlotte with such an evasion. And he guessed the mixture of happiness and envy, and the sense of being left out, that Charlotte would feel.

She would say nothing, he knew that. She had not shown him the first letter, nor would she show him this one, because she wanted him to think she cared only that Emily was happy, not about all the things Emily had, and indeed in her heart that was what mattered to her.

He chose this moment to tell her of his involvement in the Westminster murders, both to take her mind from Emily’s new and glittering world and to ease a certain loneliness he felt in not so far having shared with her his feelings, his frustration, confusion, and deep awareness of pain.

He sat at the breakfast table eating toast and Charlotte’s sharp, pungent marmalade.

“Yesterday I spoke to a woman who may have cut the throats of two men on Westminster Bridge,” he said with his mouth full.

Charlotte stopped with her cup halfway to her mouth. “You didn’t tell me you were working on that case!” she exclaimed.

He smiled. “There hasn’t been much opportunity, what with Emily’s wedding. Then I suppose I became involved in the routine, rather sad questions. It doesn’t concern anyone you know.”

She pulled a little half apologetic face, realizing his unsaid need to speak of something that had puzzled or grieved him. He read her expression, the understanding between them wry and sweet.

“A woman?” she said with raised brows. “Could it really have been a woman? Or do you mean she paid someone else?”

“This woman, I think, could have done it herself. She has the passion, and believes she has cause—”

“Has she?” Charlotte interrupted quickly.

“Perhaps.” He took another bit of the toast and it crumbled in his hand. He picked up the pieces and finished them before taking another slice. Charlotte waited impatiently. “I think you would feel she had,” he said, and he outlined for her all that had happened so far, enlarging his opinions of Florence Ivory and Africa Dowell, finding depth and subtlety in them as he searched for the precise words he wanted.