Midnight at Marble Arch (17 page)

She looked stricken. “So whatever it is they are saying, he either believes it or he doesn’t care because he wanted to be rid of her anyway,” she accused.

“The engagement was broken off before she died,” Pitt pointed out, shaking his head.

“Exactly!” she retorted. “He listened to some rumor and abandoned her!” Her face was flushed and her eyes brilliant. She was so quick to defend the vulnerable. He loved her for it and he would not change her, even in situations when it would be far wiser to weigh the matter first. She had been wrong before, dangerously so, but that did not stop her.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she accused him. “Of course I might be wrong. Would you be weighing it this carefully if it had happened to someone we were close to?”

“But it isn’t,” he said reasonably.

“It isn’t this time! What about when it is?” she demanded.

He took a deep breath and turned to face her. “If something like this were to happen to someone we love, God forbid, I would be just as furious as you are, just as hurt, and just as impetuous,” he admitted. “And it would also probably do no good at all. Loving someone makes you care passionately. It makes you a decent person, warm, vulnerable, generous, and brave. But it doesn’t make you right, and it certainly doesn’t make you effective in finding the truth.”

“I think the truth is she was raped,” she said quietly, tears suddenly bright in her eyes.

“And I still can’t believe that anyone would truly blame her for that,” he responded.

“Oh, Thomas! Don’t be so … blind!” she said desperately. “Of course they can blame her. They have to! If they don’t, they have to accept that it can happen to anyone, to them or their daughters.”

She shook her head. “Or else you’re the kind of person who has to stand and stare at it, probe to see where it hurts the most, and make yourself important by knowing something other people don’t.” Her voice was brittle with contempt. “Then you can be the center of attention while you tell everyone else, making up any details you might not happen to know.”

He took a step toward her, touching her lightly. Her arms were rigid under his fingers. The wind outside rattled harder in the trees and blew in through the door with the first patter of rain and the sweet, rich smell of damp earth.

“Aren’t you being a little hard on everyone, generally?” he asked.

Her eyes widened. “You mean I’m being a bit hysterical, perhaps? Because I’m afraid that one day it could be our daughter?”

“No,” he said firmly. “Rape is very rare, thank God, and Jemima will not be allowed to keep the company of any young man we don’t know, or whose family we don’t know.”

“For the love of heaven, Thomas!” Charlotte said between her teeth. “How on earth would you know how many rapes there are? Who is going to talk about it? Who’s going to report it to the police? And do you really think that it’s never young men we
know
who could do such things?”

Pitt felt a sudden icy twinge of fear, and then helplessness. His imagination raced.

She saw it in his eyes, and bent her head forward to rest her brow against his neck. The wind ruffled her skirt and then pushed the door wider, so it banged against the wall.

“It’s a hidden crime. All we can do is bite the heads off anyone who speaks lightly or viciously about Angeles Castelbranco. And don’t tell me I shouldn’t do that. I don’t care if it’s appropriate or suitable. I care about protecting her mother.”

He slid his arms around her and held her very tightly.

P
ITT COULD NOT DEVOTE
his own time to making discreet inquiries into the character and reputation of Angeles Castelbranco, and to send anyone else might raise more speculation than it would answer. Why would any man unrelated to the girl be asking such questions unless there was cause to suspect something; for example, her virtue?

He was still weighing the various possibilities open to him, and discarding them one by one, when two days later Castelbranco came to his office again, his face even more haggard than before. He seemed barely able to stand and he gripped his hands together when he sat in the chair Pitt offered him, as though to keep them from trembling. Twice he began to speak and then stopped.

“I visited de Freitas,” Pitt told him quietly. “He equivocated. First
he said it was Angeles who broke off the engagement, then he admitted it was he. I have been considering how to prove it either way without raising even further malicious speculation.”

“It is too late,” Castelbranco said, shaking his head. “I don’t know what happened or who is behind it. I cannot think who would say such things, or why they would. I fear it is some enemy I have made who is taking the cruelest possible revenge on me.”

“If that is so, there may be something Special Branch can do,” Pitt began, then realized he might be offering a false hope. “What makes you think this?”

“Someone has said that her death was not a terrible accident but a deliberate act of suicide.” Castelbranco had difficulty keeping his voice from choking. “And suicide is a mortal sin,” he whispered. “The Church will not bury her with Christian rites—my … my child is …” The tears slid down his cheeks and he lowered his head.

Pitt leaned forward and put his hand on Castelbranco’s wrist, gripping him hard. “Don’t give up,” he said firmly. “That decision is hasty and may be born of serious misinformation.” He tried to keep the contempt for men who would make such a cruel decision—childless men without pity or understanding—out of his voice and knew he failed. He didn’t want to add that grief to Castelbranco’s all but unbearable burden. Now, above all else, the man needed his faith.

“Perhaps this should be the subject of a proper inquiry after all,” he said. “If such a thing is being alleged, then the discretion I have tried to exercise may be pointless.”

“It is,” Castelbranco said hoarsely. The tears were now running down his cheeks. He was too harrowed to be self-conscious. “It has been suggested that she was with child, and the disgrace of it drove her to take both their lives. That is a double crime, self-murder and murder of her innocent babe. I don’t know how my wife can live with it. She is already dying inside. I fear that would …”

His eyes searched Pitt’s face as if to find some hope he could not even imagine there. He was teetering on the edge of an abyss of despair. “I need the truth,” he whispered. “Whatever it is, it cannot be
worse than this. I loved my daughter, Mr. Pitt. She was my only child. I would have done anything to make her safe and happy … and I could not even keep her alive. Now I cannot save her reputation from the mouths of the filthy, and I cannot save her soul to heaven. She was a child! I remember …” He lost command of his voice and faltered to a stop.

Pitt tightened his grip. “I know. My own daughter is willful, erratic, hot-tempered one moment, tender the next.” He could see Jemima in his mind. He remembered holding her as a baby, her tiny, perfect hands clinging to his thumb. He remembered her discovering the world, its wonders and its pain, her innocence, her trust that he could make everything better, and her laughter.

“She can seem so wise I marvel at her,” he went on. “Then the instant after she’s a child again, with no knowledge of the world. She’s a baby and a woman at the same time. She looks so like my wife, and yet when I look into her eyes, it is my own I see looking back at me. I can imagine what you are suffering well enough to know that I know nothing of it at all.”

Castelbranco bent his head and covered his face with his hands.

Pitt let go of his wrist and sat back in his chair, silent for several seconds.

“I have a certain degree of discretion as to what I can investigate,” he said at last. “As you are the ambassador of a country with whom we have a powerful and long-standing treaty, it could be in the national interest that we do not allow you to be victimized in this way while you and your family are in London. That I can do, as a courtesy to you as the representative of your country.”

Castelbranco rose to his feet awkwardly, swaying a little until he regained his balance.

“Thank you, sir. You could not have offered more. I appreciate your understanding.” He bowed and turned round slowly before walking upright to the door. Once outside he closed it softly behind him.

Pitt shifted only slightly, to look out his window, to bring order to his thoughts. He had meant what he said: he could not grasp the enormity
of the man’s pain, his helplessness that his child had been destroyed both on earth and, in his belief, in heaven as well; and he had been unable to do anything to prevent it.

Pitt was not sure what he believed of heaven. He had never given it much consideration. Now he was certain he did not worship a God who would condemn a child—and Angeles was little more than that—for any sin, let alone an unproven one, and for which she had already paid such a hideous price.

Castelbranco must be wrong about God’s nature. Such judgment was a law of men, who flexed their muscles to dominate, to keep the disobedient under control, to frighten the willful into submission. God must be better than that, or what exactly is His mercy for?

But that was an argument for another time. Nothing would bring Angeles back. The truth might restore at least her good name, and perhaps help to find some way around the bitter damnation of the Church, the judgment of men who, by their very calling, had no children of their own, no understanding of the endless tenderness a parent feels, no matter how tired, frustrated or temporarily angry.

Did any parent ever put his or her child beyond forgiveness, truly? He could not imagine Charlotte doing so, for all her impetuosity, her high hopes and at times instant judgments, hot tempers, impatience, ungoverned tongue; no, she would defend those she loved to her last breath.

He smiled as he thought of her. She was exasperating, sometimes even a professional liability with her crusading ideas, and, in the past, her incessant meddling in his cases. But she was never, ever a coward. She might have been a lot less trouble if she had been, and a lot safer. And, he admitted, a lot less help. But without question, he would never have loved her as he did.

Heaven help him, was Jemima going to be the same? At three years younger, Daniel was already more levelheaded; Jemima, however, would instinctively, without thought or planning, leap to his defense, right or wrong.

One day she would be a mother like Charlotte: protect first, and chastise afterward. Punish, but forgive. And having forgiven, she
would never mention the offense again. Charlotte had once sent Daniel to his room without supper for carrying a grudge after a matter had been resolved.

Pitt knew now at least where he would begin. He rose to his feet and called for Stoker. When he arrived, Pitt gave him his task. Then he went alone to see Isaura Castelbranco.

He caught a hansom with ease, and all too rapidly made his way through the busy, jostling streets to the ambassador’s residence. Perhaps Castelbranco had prepared her, because Isaura received Pitt without any excuses or prevarication. He was asked to wait in the private study, where mirrors were turned to the wall, pictures draped with black and the curtains on the windows pulled all but closed.

Isaura came in quietly. The only sound he heard was the click of the latch as the door closed. She stood straight, but she seemed smaller than he remembered, and her face was bleached of all color except the faint olive of her complexion.

“It is kind of you to come, Mr. Pitt,” she said with a slight huskiness, as if she had not used her voice for quite some time, after so much weeping.

“The ambassador asked me to look into the events leading up to Miss Castelbranco’s death and find out whatever facts I can,” he explained. In the face of her dignity it would be faintly insulting to be anything but direct. “I expect you can tell me at least some things that I do not know.”

A slight movement touched her mouth, almost a smile.

“My husband is deeply grieved. He loved his daughter very much, as did I. But I think perhaps I am a little more realistic as to what may be done.” She looked down for a moment, then up again, meeting his eyes. “Of course part of me wishes for revenge. It is natural. But it is also futile. Anger is a quite understandable reaction to loss. And he has lost his only child. You did not know her, Mr. Pitt, but she was lovely, full of life and dreams, warmhearted …” She stopped, unable for a moment to keep up her brave demeanor. She turned half away from him, concealing her face.

“As you may know, I have a daughter myself, Senhora Castelbranco,”
he said. “She is fourteen and already half a woman. I suppose that is why the case matters so much to me. I could easily be in your place.”

“Please God, you will not be.” She turned back to him slowly. Something in his words had allowed her to reclaim at least a semblance of self-mastery. “If you were, you might feel the fury my husband does, the desperate desire to clear our daughter’s name from the slander that is being spread. But your wife would tell you, as I tell the ambassador; we are helpless to bring any charges. It will only prolong the speculation and the gossip. It will cure nothing.”

Pitt was taken aback. She was as much ravaged by grief as her husband, and yet she seemed quite calm in her refusal to take the issue further. It was not defeat. Meeting her eyes he knew she was not emotionally frozen by shock. She spoke from determination, not emptiness.

“Don’t you want to know what happened?” he asked. “If only for your peace of mind … for the future, perhaps?”

Her lips tightened a moment, not a smile so much as a grimace. “I do know, Mr. Pitt. Perhaps I should have told my husband, but I did not. I knew it would …” she drew in a deep breath, “… it would hurt him, with no purpose. There is nothing we can do.”

Pitt was surprised and confused. He knew what Charlotte and Vespasia suspected had happened, where and when, and almost certainly by whom. But would Isaura respond this way if their suspicions were indeed correct?

“I can’t act without your permission, Senhora, but for the sake of the valued relationship between England and Portugal, I must discover what happened,” he said gently.