Pentecost Alley (21 page)

“So have I,” Emily admitted. “But I’m not sure I could
live with anyone who always spoke the unadulterated truth. I don’t think I want to know it, and I’m quite sure I don’t want to hear it. It may be very admirable, but I would sooner admire it from a distance … quite a large distance.”

Tallulah laughed, but there was no happiness in it. “You are deliberately misunderstanding me. I don’t mean he’s tactless, or cruel. I just mean he has a sort of … light inside him. He’s … whole. His mind doesn’t have lots of different pieces, like most people’s, all wanting different things, and lying to each other so you can try to have everything, and telling yourself it’s all right.”

“How do you know?”

“What?”

“How do you know that?” Emily repeated. “How do you know what is inside him?”

Tallulah was silent. Two girls in pink and peach walked past them, deep in conversation, heads close together, the brindled light in their hair. “I don’t know why I’m explaining all this to you!” Tallulah said at last. “It doesn’t really fit into any words. I know what I mean. I know that he has a kind of courage that most people haven’t. He faces what really matters, without evasions and excuses. His beliefs are whole.” She stared at Emily. “Do you understand me at all?”

“Yes,” Emily agreed quietly, dropping the challenge from her voice. “I only wanted to see if you really care for him as much as you think. Wouldn’t you find him a little serious? After a while might not so much goodness become a trifle predictable, and then ultimately become even boring?”

Tallulah turned her head away, her profile outlined against the bank of blossoms. “It really doesn’t matter. He’s never going to look at me as anything but Finlay FitzJames’s rather shallow sister who wastes her life buying dresses that cost enough to keep one of his Whitechapel families in food and clothes for years.” She
looked down at her exquisite skirt and smoothed it over the flat of her stomach. “This cost fifty-one pounds, seventeen shillings and sixpence. We pay our best maids twenty pounds a year. The scullery maids and tweenies get less than half that. I saw it in the household accounts. And I have a dozen or more dresses as good as this one.”

She shrugged and smiled. “And yet I go to church on Sundays and pray, and so does everyone else I know, all dressed in clothes like this. It isn’t that Jago would tell me I’m wrong. If no one buys them, then the people who make them have no trade. He just wouldn’t be bothered with me, because I care so much what I look like. But then for an unmarried woman that’s what matters, isn’t it.” It was not a question but a statement of fact.

Emily did not argue, nor did she bother to mention money or family influence. Tallulah knew the rules as well as she did.

“Would you marry him?” she asked softly, thinking of Charlotte and Pitt. But Charlotte was different. She had never been the socialite that Tallulah was. Her wit was far too acerbic, her outspokenness seldom—not often—funny. She was not intentionally outrageous; she was a genuine misfit. And to be honest, it was not as if she had had so many other good offers. She rather put people off.

Although in spite of her father’s wealth, if Tallulah continued to behave as she had done this afternoon and the other evening in Chelsea, she might not receive any offers in the future. There were many women whom people found vastly entertaining but did not marry.

Tallulah sighed and looked up at the flowers overhead, her expression a strange mixture of wistfulness and horror, and a kind of desperate laughter at herself.

“If I were to marry him, I would have to live in Whitechapel, wear gray stuff dresses and be happy ladling out soup to the poor. I should have to be polite to the self-righteous women who think laughter is a sin and love is telling people what they ought to do. I would eat the same food every day, answer my own door and
always watch what I said, in case it offended anyone. I’d never be able to go to the theater again, or the opera, or dine in restaurants, or ride in the Park.”

“Worse than that,” Emily put in. “You’d have to ride on the omnibus, crammed in with other people, fat, out of breath and smelling of onions. You’d have to do most of your own cooking, and count your money to judge whether you could buy a thing or not, and the answer would usually be not.” She was thinking of Charlotte’s early years, before Pitt’s last promotion. Some of them had been hard. But they had shared so much that Emily now looked back on that time with a kind of envy. She seemed to have shared more with Jack before he had won his seat in Parliament, when there was still so much to work for, and victory was uncertain, and a long way away. He had needed her so much more then.

“It wouldn’t be so bad as that,” Tallulah argued. “Papa would make me an allowance.”

“Even if you married a parish priest, instead of his choice for you?” Emily said skeptically. “Are you sure?”

Tallulah stared at her, her eyes wide and dark brown, nearly black.

“No,” she said quietly. “No, he’d be furious. He’d never forgive me. He’d like me to marry a duke, although an earl or a marquis might do. I don’t think his ambition has any ceiling, to be honest. If I thought about it harder, it would frighten me. Nothing ever stops him, he just finds a way around it. People have tried to stand up to him, but they never win.”

Distant laughter sounded somewhere behind them, and a girl giggling. It really was getting very hot.

“Have you?” Emily asked.

Tallulah shook her head. “I’ve never needed to.”

“Would you, to marry Jago?”

Tallulah turned away. “I don’t know. Perhaps not. But as I said, it doesn’t matter. Jago wouldn’t have me.”

“Perhaps that’s just as well,” Emily said deliberately. “That you don’t have to make up your mind what you
really want: to be rich and have pretty gowns, parties, trips to the theater, and marry whoever your father tells you … or marry a man you really love and admire, and trust, and help him in his life’s work—in comparative poverty. I don’t suppose you’d ever actually be hungry, and you’d always have a roof over your head—but it might leak.”

Tallulah swung around on the seat to stare at her in a flash of temper.

“I don’t suppose your roof leaks, Mrs. Radley!” she snapped. “Even if Jack Radley’s would, I’ll lay any odds the late Lord Ashworth’s doesn’t!”

It was a reference to Emily’s first husband and his very considerable wealth. Emily might have resented the gibe, but she knew she had provoked a retaliation, and she accepted it as fair.

“No it doesn’t,” she agreed. “But whether I even took a decision or not is beside the point. The thing is for you to recognize the reality of what your choices are. No one has everything. No relationship does. Look at Jago carefully. Look at whoever else there is, and decide what you want … then fight for it.”

“You make it sound simple.”

“That part of it is.”

“No, it isn’t.” Tallulah sat forward and leaned over, putting her hands up over her cheeks. It was a gesture of deep and troubled thought.

An elderly couple walked by, heads close together in earnest conversation, the woman’s parasol trailing, the man’s hat at a rakish angle. She said something and they both laughed.

“If this wretched business with Finlay doesn’t get solved soon,” Tallulah went on suddenly, her voice low and filled with anger and fear, “and the police don’t stop asking everyone questions about us, then it won’t matter anyway. We’ll all be ruined, and nobody will speak to any of us unless they have to. I’ve known it to happen. A story comes out. It is whispered around, and suddenly no
one sees you. You are invisible. You can walk down the street and everyone is looking the other way. You talk to people and they don’t hear you.” Her voice was rising with the fear inside her. “Restaurants where you dine frequently find they are full whenever you call. Dressmakers are too busy to see you. Milliners have nothing to suit you. Your tailors can’t fit you in. You call on people and nobody is ever at home, even if the lights are on and the carriages are lined up outside. It is as if you’d died, without being aware of it. It can happen over cheating at cards or welching on a debt of honor. Think what it would do over being hanged for murder!”

This time Emily did not rush in so quickly. It was much too painful an issue to challenge beliefs, or call it self-examination. She would like to have thought beyond doubt that of course Finlay was innocent; it was only a matter of waiting until Pitt found the proof. But she had known Pitt long enough, and seen sufficient cases of human tragedy and violence, to have any such comfortable illusion. People one loves, people one imagines one knows, can have aspects to their nature which are full of uncontrollable pain or anger, dark needs even they barely understand.

“If they are still investigating him, then they have not yet proof,” she said aloud, weighing her words carefully.

“It means they still think he is guilty, though,” Tallulah responded instantly, her eyes brilliant. “Otherwise they’d leave him alone.”

The heat in the arbor was motionless. Distant laughter sounded yards away, although it was merely around the corner. The clink of glass and china came clearly above the buzz of conversation. But they were both too intent on the matter at hand to think of refreshment.

“Do you know why?” Emily asked quietly.

Tallulah’s mouth tightened. It was obviously something she had thought about and the answer troubled her.

“Yes. There were belongings of his found where this woman was killed, a badge from that ridiculous club he
used to belong to, and a cuff link. He told them about it. He said he lost both of them years ago. He hasn’t seen them, and neither has anyone else.” Her face tightened. “Some sordid little policeman came and questioned his valet, but he’s only been with us for a few years, and he’d never seen them at all. Finlay certainly didn’t have them that night.” She stared at Emily, defying her to disbelieve.

“Nothing else?” Emily asked without changing her expression from one of strictly practical enquiry into fact.

“Yes … actually, some prostitute says she saw a man going into the woman’s room, and swears he looked like Finlay. But how can they take her word against his? No jury ever would!” She searched Emily’s eyes. “Would they?”

Emily could feel the fear in Tallulah as powerfully as the heat of the sun or the clinging scent of the flowers. It was more real than the distant chatter or movement of color as a woman in an exquisite gown drifted by. But was it fear of social ruin, fear of being unjustly convicted or fear that perhaps he was not innocent at all?

“I wouldn’t have thought so,” Emily said cautiously. “Where was he that evening?”

“At a party in Beaufort Street. I can’t remember what number, but nearer the river end.”

“Well, can’t he prove it?” Emily said with a rush of hope. “Someone there must remember him. In fact, probably dozens of people do. Surely he’s said so?”

Tallulah looked deeply unhappy.

“Wasn’t he there?” Emily asked.

“Yes … yes he was.” Tallulah’s face creased with confusion and misery. “I saw him there myself….”

A waiter strode by, holding aloft a tray of chilled drinks in long-stemmed glasses which chinked as they touched each other. In the distance someone laughed.

Emily realized there must be far more to the story, something very ugly and very private. She did not ask.

“But you cannot say so,” she concluded the obvious.

Tallulah turned to her quickly. “I would if I thought anyone would believe me. I’m not trying to protect myself. I’d clear Fin in a second, if I could! But it wasn’t that sort of party. They were all taking opium, and that kind of thing. I was only there for about half an hour, then I left. But I did see Fin, although I think he was already too far gone to see me. The place was full of people, all laughing and either drunk or in a daze.”

“But you saw Finlay … definitely!” Emily said with conviction. “You weren’t drunk … or … or on opium?”

“No.” Tallulah took a shaky breath. “But, you see, when Papa asked where I had been, in front of Mama, and the servants, and Mama’s doctor … I said I had been somewhere else. No one would believe me now. They’d think I was just lying to protect Fin! And who wouldn’t think so? If I were them, that’s what I’d think.”

Emily would like to have argued, said something comforting, but she knew that Tallulah was right. No one would take her testimony seriously.

Tallulah looked down at her hands lying on her skirt. “Damnation!” she said fiercely. “Isn’t this a mess!” She clenched her fists. “Sometimes he’s so stupid I could hate him.”

Emily said nothing. She was thinking hard, searching for any thread she could grasp that might help. This was a practical problem. It would not be solved by indulging emotions, however justified.

“I remember I used to think he was marvelous,” Tallulah went on, as much to herself as to Emily. “When I was young he used to have such exciting ideas. He would invent games for us, turn the whole nursery into another world, a desert island, a pirate ship, the Victory at Trafalgar, or a palace, or the Houses of Parliament.” She smiled and her eyes were soft with the memory. “Or a forest with dragons. I’d be the maiden and he’d rescue me. He’d be the dragon as well. He used to make me laugh so much.”

Emily did not interrupt.

“Then of course he had to go away to school,” Tallulah went on. “I missed him terribly. I don’t think I’ve ever been as lonely as I was then. I lived the whole term time until he should come back home again. To begin with he was just the same, but gradually he changed. Of course he did. He grew up. He only wanted to play with boys. He was still kind to me, but he had no patience. All his dreams were forward and not backward to where I was. It was then I began to understand all the things that men can do and women can’t.” She looked across at a group strolling past, a man in a tall hat with a young woman on one arm and an older woman on the other with a magnificent feather-trimmed hat, but she did not seem to see them.

“Men can go to Parliament or become ambassadors,” she went on. “Join the army or the navy, become explorers or bankers or deal in stocks or imports and exports.” She shrugged dramatically. “Write drama, music, be philosophers or poets. Women get married. Men get married too, but only as an incidental. I realized that when I understood what Papa expected of me and what he hoped for Fin. He would like to have had more sons. Mama was always sorry for that. I suppose it was her fault.”