Ashworth Hall (18 page)

If you see her again, other than as the ordinary demands of civilized society dictate, and in public, I shall take the necessary steps to sue her for divorce, and cite you as an adulterer. I am sure I do not need to spell out what this will do to your career.

I do not write this in idleness. Through her behaviour with you I have lost all regard for her, and while I would not willingly ruin her, I shall do so rather than continue to be betrayed in this fashion.

Yours most candidly
         Gerald Easterwood

Pitt looked up at Piers. The image of Greville of only a few moments ago had been shattered.

“Do you know a Mrs. Easterwood?” he said quietly.

“Yes. At least by reputation. I’m afraid it is not much … not as good as perhaps Mr. Easterwood would like to imagine.”

“Was he a friend of your father’s?”

“Easterwood? No. Hardly the same social circle. My father—” he hesitated “—was a good friend to those he liked, or considered his equals. I can’t imagine him using another man’s wife, not if the man were someone he knew … I mean, as a friend. He was very loyal to his friends.” He started as if to repeat it again, and realized he had already stressed it.

Pitt looked at the next letter. It was another political threat, and very plainly concerning the future of Ireland, but seemed to be more in favor of the Protestant Ascendancy and the preservation of the estates which had been worked for and paid for by Anglo-Irish landlords. It also promised reprisals if Greville should betray their interests.

The one after was personal and signed.

My dear Greville,

I can never thank you sufficiently for the generosity you have extended to me in this matter. Without you it would have been a disaster for me—deserved perhaps, but nevertheless because of your intervention I shall survive, to behave with more circumspection in the future.

I am forever in your debt,

Your humble and grateful friend
              Langley Osbourne

“Do you know him?” Pitt asked.

Piers looked blank. “No.”

There were three more. Another was an Irish threat, but so illiterately written it was hard to understand what was desired, except an ill-defined idea of justice. The threat of a most colorful death was constrastingly plain, and mention was made of an old story of lovers who had both been betrayed by the English.

The following one was quite long, and from a friend of some considerable intimacy and length of time. The tone was one of social arrogance, class loyalty, common memory and interest, and deep unquestioned personal affection and trust. Pitt instinctively disliked the writer, one Malcom Anders, and found himself judging Greville less kindly because of it.

The last letter was unopened, even though the postmark was dated almost two weeks before. Apparently it had been of little interest to him. Presumably he had recognized the writing and not bothered to read it. Perhaps he had received it when there was no fire burning and he had not wished to leave it in the wastepaper basket, where a curious housemaid or footman might see it and maybe have sufficient literacy to be able to understand it.

Pitt opened it carefully and read. It was a love letter from a woman who signed herself Mary-Jane. It spoke of an intimate relationship which Greville had ended, according to the writer, abruptly and without explanation, other than the assumption that he had become bored with her. There seemed a callousness about the whole matter which Pitt found repellent. Certainly there was an element of using, and nothing of love. Whether she had loved him, or simply used him also, in a different manner, he could only guess.

He handed the letters back to Piers.

“I can see why he felt the threats were probably irrelevant,” he said matter-of-factly. “They could be from anyone at all, and seem to come from Nationalist Catholic and Protestant Unionist alike. It doesn’t help us at all. Still, we’ll take them.”

“Just … the threats?” Piers said quickly.

“Yes, of course. Lock the others back in the drawer. You can destroy them later if we find they have nothing to do with the case.”

“They can’t have.” Piers still held them in his hand. “There’s nothing political about them. It’s simply a sordid affair … well, two. But both of them are over … were over … before this. Can’t you just burn them, and keep quiet? My mother has enough to bear without having to know about this.”

“Lock them up again,” Pitt instructed. “And keep the keys yourself. When the case is over you can come in here and sort anything you want to, and destroy what is better kept discreet. Now, let me look through the rest of the drawers.”

The butler returned, looking haggard, bringing the promised hot toddy. He seemed on the brink of enquiring as to their success, then changed his mind and left.

They searched the rest of the library but found nothing more of interest to the case. The books and papers shed more light on Greville’s character. He was obviously a man of high intelligence and wide interests. There was the first draft of a monograph on ancient Roman medicine, and Pitt could happily have taken the time to read it, had he had any excuse. It was vividly written. On the shelves there were books on subjects as diverse as early Renaissance painting in Tuscany and the native birds of North America.

Pitt wondered if Eudora had any place in the room, if he had shared some of his interests with her, or if their worlds of the mind had been entirely separate, as was the case in some marriages. All that many held in common were a home, children, a social life and status, and economic circumstance. The imagination, the humor, the great voyages of the heart and intellect, were all made alone. Even the searching of the spirit was unshared.

How much would Eudora really miss him? Had she any idea of the reality of her home, or did she see what she wished to see? Many people did that as a way to place armor around their vulnerability and preserve what they had for survival. He could not blame her if she were one of those.

Luncheon was brought to them in the library and they ate by the fire, saying little. Piers had already learned more about his father in the last two hours than in the preceding ten years, and it complicated the picture he held of him. There was too much to admire and to despise, too much that tore open the emotions and made grief a far more complex thing than simply a sudden loneliness.

Pitt did not intrude with speech.

After they had finished Pitt went out to find the coach driver and question him about the incident on the road. That had been a serious and genuine attempt at murder.

He found the man in the stables polishing a harness. The smell of leather and saddle soap jerked him back in memory to his youth and the estate where his father had been gamekeeper and he had grown up. He could have been a boy again, scrounging winter apples, sitting silently in the corner listening to the grooms and coachmen talking of the horses and dogs, swapping gossip. He could imagine going back to supper in the gamekeeper’s cottage, and to bed in his tiny room under the eaves. Or later, after his father’s disgrace, after the anger and the rage of injustice had passed, to his room at the top of the big house, when Sir Arthur had taken in his mother and himself.

Now he would ride back to Ashworth Hall and sleep beside Charlotte in one of the great guest bedrooms with its four-poster bed and embroidered linen and a fire in the grate. He would not douse himself quickly in the icy water from the pump, but ring a bell, and a manservant would bring him ewers of steaming hot water, enough for a bath if he wanted it. He would have a separate room in which to dress, and then breakfast would be as much as he could eat, with a choice of half a dozen different dishes. He would have silver knives and forks to use, and a linen napkin. And he would sit with people for whom this was the usual and familiar way of life. They had never experienced anything else.

But after he had finished he would not leave for the schoolroom he had been permitted to share with Matthew Desmond, nor for the numerous small tasks around the estate, safely taught or supervised by someone older. He would bear the responsibility for solving the murder of a minister of government, a man whose life he had been sent to safeguard in the first place … and failed.

He leaned against the stable wall, his feet in the comfortable, familiar-smelling straw, and heard the horses moving contentedly in other stalls on the farther side.

He had already introduced himself to the coachman and explained to him that Greville was dead. He had wondered whether to try to keep it from him, and decided that if he were a loyal servant, he would tell a stranger little of meaning if he thought his master still alive.

“Describe for me the incident when you were driven off the road,” he asked.

The man spoke haltingly, searching for words, all the time his browned hands were working with the leather and soap, rubbing, relishing. His account was in all essentials, exactly the same as Greville’s. He also remembered the eyes of the other driver.

“Mad, they looked ter me,” he said with a shake of his head. “Starin’, like.”

“Pale or dark?” Pitt asked.

“Pale, like light coming off water,” he answered. “Never seen a face like it afore. Nor again, I ’ope!”

“But you had no success in finding where the horses came from?”

“No.” He looked down at the harness in his hands. “Din’ try ’ard enough, I reckon. If we ’ad, p’raps Mr. Greville’d be alive now. Lunatics, them Irish. Course, not all of ’em. Young Kathleen were a good girl. Couldn’t ’elp likin’ er. I were real sorry when she went.”

“Who was Kathleen?” It probably did not matter, but he would ask anyway.

“Kathleen O’Brien. She were a maid ’ere. Not unlike our Doll, she were, only dark; dark as night, wi’ them blue Irish eyes.”

“Was she from Ireland?”

“Oh yes! Voice as soft as melted butter, an’ sing real lovely.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Six month.” His face closed over and his shoulders tightened.

“Why did she leave?” Pitt could not dismiss the thought crossing his mind that she could have had relatives—brothers, even a lover—who were passionate Nationalists.

“There weren’t nothing wrong wi’ Kathleen,” the coachman said, keeping his eyes on his work. “If yer thinkin’ she ’ad summat ter do wi’ that, yer wrong.”

“Why would she have?” Pitt asked quietly. “Did she leave here with a bad feeling? Did she have cause?”

“I’ve got nothing to say, Mr. Pitt.”

“Did you drive Mr. Greville in London as well, or only here?”

“I bin up ter Lunnon lots o’ times. There in’t much proper carriage drivin’ ’ere when both the master and mistress is up in town. John can do all o’ that. Learn ’im a bit.”

“So you would drive Mr. Greville in London?”

“I said so.”

“Do you know Mrs. Easterwood?”

No answer was necessary. The hesitation gave him away, then the angle of his body, the way his fingers stopped on the leather, then started again, digging into it, knuckles white.

“Were there many like Mrs. Easterwood?” Pitt asked quietly.

Again there was silence.

“I understand your loyalty,” Pitt went on. “And I admire it … whether it is to Mr. Greville or his widow ….” He saw the man wince at the word. “But he was murdered, struck over the head and drowned in his own bath, left there all night for Doll to find him in the morning, naked, his face under the water—”

The coachman jerked his head up, his eyes narrow and angry.

“You got no call ter go tellin’ me that! It in’t decent for folks ter know—”

“Folks don’t know.” Pitt reached across and passed him a clean cloth. “But I mean to find out who did it. It wasn’t just one man, because the coach driver with the staring eyes isn’t at Ashworth Hall. There was also a good man murdered in London, a decent man with a family, to keep this secret. I want them all, and I mean to have them. If I have to learn some squalid details about a few women like Mrs. Easterwood, and a good deal about Mr. Greville that the public don’t need to know, then I will.”

“Yes sir.” It was grudging. He hated it, but he saw no alternative. His hands clenched over the harness and his shoulders were tight.

“Were there others like Mrs. Easterwood?” Pitt asked again.

“A few.” He kept his eyes on Pitt’s. He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Mostly up Lunnon way. Never wi’ wives of a friend. He’d not take anything what’s theirs. Only take them as is willin’—” He stopped suddenly.

“And don’t count,” Pitt finished for him, remembering the tone of Malcolm Anders’s letter.

“There’s nobody what doesn’t count, Mr. Pitt.”

“Even whores?”

The coachman’s face reddened. “You got no place to go calling any woman a whore, Mr. Pitt, an’ I don’ care who you are, I won’t stand ’ere an’ listen to it.”

“Even girls like Kathleen O’Brien? Lie with anyone to better their chances and—” Pitt too stopped suddenly, seeing the rage and the hurt in the man’s eyes. He had gone too far. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. He meant it. He could picture the story. It would be one of a dozen variations on the old theme, a handsome maid, a master who was used to taking anything he wanted and did not think of servants as people like himself, with tenderness and dignity or honor to be hurt. The distinction would not even be intentional.

“She weren’t like that.” The coachman glared at him. “You’ve no place saying it!”

“I wanted to provoke you into honesty,” Pitt confessed. “What happened to Kathleen?”

The man was still angry. He reminded Pitt of the coachman where he grew up, taciturn, loyal, honest to the point of bluntness, but endlessly patient with animals or the young.