Cardington Crescent (17 page)

“You must excuse Lady Cumming-Gould her eccentricities. She was a great beauty once, you know, and so she was allowed to get away with being outrageous, and I’m afraid she has never grown beyond it. Indeed, I think with age she has become more so—I know my dear mother finds her quite trying at times.” He rubbed his hands and smiled experimentally, searching Charlotte’s face to see how she responded to this information. “But we must all exercise forbearance!” he went on quickly, sensing disapproval. “That is part of being a family—so important! Cornerstone of the country. Loyalty, continuity, one generation to the next—that’s what civilization is all about. Marks us from the savages, eh?”

Charlotte opened her mouth to argue that in her opinion savages had an excellent dynastic sense, and were intensely conservative, which was precisely why they remained savages instead of inventing and exploring things new. But again Eustace carried on regardless before she could begin.

“And of course from your point of view poor Sybilla must seem most cruel and ill-behaved, because you will naturally take Emily’s part. But you know there was far more to it than that. Oh dear, yes. I am afraid it was George who pursued, you know—quite definitely George. And dear Sybilla is so used to admiration she failed to discourage him appropriately. It was ill-judged of her, of course. I feel obliged to tell her so, directly. And George should have been far more discreet—”

“He shouldn’t have done it at all!” Charlotte interrupted hotly.

“Ah, my dear!” Eustace’s face was lit with a smile of patience and condescension. He wagged his head a little. “Let us not be unrealistic. One expects girls of Tassie’s age to have romantic illusions, and heaven forfend I should wound her susceptibilities at so tender a stage in her life, when she is just on the brink of betrothal. But a married woman of Emily’s years must come to terms with the nature of men. A truly feminine woman has forgiveness in her nature for our foibles and weaknesses, as indeed we men have for the frailties of women.” He smiled at her, and for a moment his hand hovered warmly over hers and she was intensely aware of him.

Charlotte was furious. There was something about him that brought back in a rush every patronizing word she had ever heard. She ached to wipe the complacence off his moon face.

“You mean that if Emily had lain with Mr. Radley, for example, George would have forgiven her?” she asked sarcastically, pulling her hand away.

She had succeeded. Eustace was genuinely shocked. She had preempted a subject he would not have put words to himself. The blood drained from his skin, then rushed back in a tide of color. “Really!” he spluttered. “I appreciate that you have had a grave shock, and perhaps you are afraid for Emily, understandably. But my dear Mrs. Pitt, there is no call for vulgarity! I shall do you the favor of putting from my mind that I ever heard you so forget yourself as to make such a vile suggestion. We shall agree never to refer to it again. You strike at the very root of all that is fine and decent in life. If women were to behave in that way, why, good God!—a man wouldn’t know if his son were his own! The home would be desecrated, the very fabric of Society would fall apart. The idea does not bear thinking of!”

Charlotte found herself blushing, although as much from anger as embarrassment. Perhaps she was being ridiculous, and the movement of his hand really had been no more than sympathy.

“I did not suggest it, Mr. March!” she protested, raising her chin and staring at him. “I merely meant that perhaps Emily expected as high a standard from George as she was prepared to adhere to herself.”

“I see you are very inexperienced, Mrs. Pitt, and somewhat romantic.” Eustace shook his head knowingly, but his expression eased out into a smile again. “Women are quite different from men, my dear, quite different! We have our corresponding virtues of intellect, manliness and courage.” Unconsciously he flexed the muscles of his arm. “A man’s brain is a far more powerful thing than a woman’s.” His eyes roamed gently and with pleasure over her neck and bosom. “Think what we have achieved for humanity, in every way. But if a woman does not have modesty, patience and chastity, a sweet disposition, what is she? Indeed, what is the whole world without the influence of our wives and mothers? A sea of barbarism, Mrs. Pitt—that is what it is.” He stared at her, and she met his gaze unflinchingly.

“Was that what you wished to say to me, Mr. March?” she asked.

“Ah, no, er ...” He seemed thrown off balance and blinked rapidly; he had lost the thread of his thought entirely, and she gave him no assistance.

“I merely wished to make sure that you were comfortable,” he said at last. “We must present a united face to the world. You are one of us, my dear, through poor Emily. We must do what is best for the family. It is not a time for selfishness. I am sure you understand that.”

“Oh, absolutely, Mr. March,” she agreed, staring solemnly at him. “I shall not forget my family loyalties, you may be assured.”

He smiled with a gust of relief, apparently forgetting that Thomas Pitt was her most immediate relative. “Excellent. Of course you will not. Now I must leave you time to change for dinner, and perhaps to visit poor Emily. I am sure you will be an enormous help to her. Ha!”

After dinner the ladies withdrew from the dining room, to be followed quite soon by the gentlemen. Conversation was stilted, because Emily had joined them for the first time since George’s death and no one knew what to say. To speak of the murder seemed needlessly cruel, and yet to converse as if it had not happened deformed all other subjects into such artificiality as to be grotesque. Consequently Charlotte rose at a little after nine and excused herself, saying she wished to retire early and was sure they would understand. Emily went with her, much to everyone’s relief. Charlotte imagined she could hear the sigh of exhaled breath as she closed the door behind them, and people sank a little more easily into their chairs.

She woke in the night, thinking she had heard Emily moving about next door, and she was anxious in case her sister was too distressed to sleep. Perhaps she should go to her.

She sat up and was about to reach for a shawl when she realized the noise was from a different direction, more towards the stairs. Why should Emily go downstairs at this time of night?

She slipped out of bed and, without fumbling for slippers, went to the door, opened it, and crept out and along to the main landing. She had put her head round the corner before she saw what it was in the gaslight at the head of the stairs; she froze as if the breath had been snatched from her and her skin doused in cold water.

Tassie March was coming up the stairs, her face calm and weary, but with a serenity unlike anything Charlotte had seen in her before. The restlessness was gone, all the tension released. Her hands were held out in front of her, sleeves crumpled, smears of blood on the cuffs, and a dark stain near the hem of her skirt.

She reached the top of the stairs just as Charlotte realized her own position and shrank back into the shadows. Tassie passed on tiptoe less than a yard away from her, still with that unhurried smile, leaving a heavy, sickly, and quite unmistakable odor behind her. No one who had smelled fresh blood could ever forget it.

Charlotte went back to her room, shivering uncontrollably, and was sick.

E
MILY WOKE EARLY
the next morning. It was the day of George’s funeral. She felt cold immediately, and the white light on the ceiling was bleak, without warmth or color in it. She was filled with the kind of misery that is edged with anger and intolerable loneliness. This would make it all final. Not, of course, that it was not final anyway. George was dead, there was no going back or recapturing anything of the past warmth, except in memory. But a funeral, a burial, made it certain in the mind, took the immediacy out of it, and relegated the man to the past.

She hunched up under the blankets, but there was no comfort in it. It was too early to get up, and anyway she did not want to see other people. They would be full of their own business, making a show of it, thinking what hat to wear, how to behave, how they looked. And above all they would be watching her, suspiciously. Most of them believed she had killed George, deliberately crept into old Mrs. March’s room, stolen her digitalis, and slipped it into the coffeepot.

Except one. One of them would know she had not—because that one had. And that person was prepared to see her suspected, perhaps charged—even tried, and ... She let her thoughts continue, even though it was stupid, self-inflicted pain. And yet she went on, visualizing the courtroom, herself in drab prison dress, hair screwed back, face white and hollow-eyed, the jury that could not look at her, the odd women among the spectators whose eyes reflected pity—perhaps who had suffered the same rejection, or felt they had. Then the verdict, and the judge with a face like stone, reaching for the black cap.

There she stopped. After that it was too frightening. In her imagination she could smell rope and damp, inky darkness. It was not just a morbid thought; it could be real, with no warm bed, no relieved awakening.

She sat up and threw off the bedclothes, then reached for the bell. It was a long, flat five minutes before Digby knocked and came in, her hair a little hastily pinned up and her apron tied unevenly. She looked nervous but determined.

“Good morning, m’lady. Would you like a cup of tea straightaway, or shall I draw your bath?”

“Draw the bath,” Emily replied. There was no need to discuss what she would wear; it could only be the formal black barathea with black hat and black veil which she had sent for. Not a fashionable, flattering veil that lent mystery, but a widow’s weeds, hiding the face, disguising the ravages of grief.

Digby disappeared and came back a few minutes later, sleeves rolled up, a tentative smile hovering uncertainly on her lips. “It’s a fine day, m’lady. At least you won’t get rained on.”

Emily really did not care, but perhaps it was a minor blessing. Standing at a graveside with water trickling down her neck, wetting her feet, and making the edges of her skirts heavy and sodden would add a physical dimension to the bleakness that consumed her mind. It might even have been welcome; it was easier to think of frozen feet and wet ankles than of George lying white and rigid inside the closed coffin, being lowered into the ground and covered up, gone for the rest of her life. He had been so warm, so important, always at the foundation of her thoughts for so many years. Even when he was not with her, the sure knowledge that he would be there in a little while was a safety she had never considered losing.

Suddenly the tears came, catching her by surprise; all the sniffing and swallowing did not control them. She sat down again and covered her face with her hands.

Quite unexpectedly she found Digby’s arms round her and her head resting against Digby’s stiff, sloping shoulder. Digby said nothing; she just gently rocked Emily back and forth, stroking her hair, as if she were a very young child. It was so natural, Emily felt no embarrassment, and when the pain inside her eased and the relief of tiredness came over her, she let go, and went to her bath without the need to explain or reassert in any way that she was the mistress and Digby the maid. There were no questions or answers. Digby knew precisely what was needed, and the silence was one of understanding.

She took breakfast alone with Charlotte. She did not wish to see anyone else, except perhaps Aunt Vespasia, but she did not appear.

“She did not say so,” Charlotte said quietly as they took a thin slice of toast each and spread them with butter, then poured themselves cups of hot, weak tea from the flowered pot, “but I think she is busy massing a sort of defense.”

Emily did not ask what she meant; they both knew the ranks were closing against the police, against intrusion and scandal—and that meant against Emily also. If she were guilty it could all be over in a few days. No more investigation. They could grieve in decency for the appropriate time and resume their lives again.

Charlotte smiled bleakly. “I don’t think even Mrs. March will give her tongue full rein with Aunt Vespasia there. I feel there is not much love lost between them.”

“I wish I could think it was Mrs. March who killed George,” Emily said thoughtfully. “I’ve been trying to scrape up any kind of reason why she should.”

“Did you succeed?”

“No.”

“Nor I. But there must be an enormous amount that we don’t know.” Charlotte’s face was dark and tense, as if she was afraid. “Emily, I woke up in the night and I thought I heard you walking around.”

“I’m sorry—”

“No, it wasn’t you! It was coming from the stairs, so I got up to follow, but when I got the landing I saw it was Tassie. She was coming up and she walked past me to her bedroom. I saw her quite clearly. Emily, her sleeves were smeared with blood, and there were splashes down the front of her skirt and at the hem. She was smiling! There was a sort of peace about her. Her eyes were shining and wide open, but she didn’t even see me. I kept back in the small passage to the dressing room, and she walked so close I could have touched her.” She felt a little sick again as the smell came back, nauseating and sweet.

Emily was dazed—this was unbelievable. She offered the only explanation she could conceive of. “You had a nightmare.”

“No, I didn’t,” Charlotte insisted. “It was real.” Her face was tight and miserable but she did not waver. “I thought I might have been dreaming, with everything that’s happened, so I went down to the laundry room this morning and found the dress soaking in one of the coppers.”

“And was it covered in blood?”

Charlotte shook her head no more than an inch. “No, it was washed out. But then it would be; she’d hardly leave it like that for the maids to find, would she.”

“But it doesn’t make sense,” Emily still protested. “Whose blood? Why? Nobody’s been murdered that way”—she swallowed—“that we know of.”

Another hideous memory stirred in Charlotte’s mind, of parcels in a graveyard, but she refused to allow it to take shape. “Do you think she could be mad?” she said wretchedly. It seemed the only explanation left—and one must be found, for Emily’s sake.