Highgate Rise (17 page)

Shaw came to Charlotte’s rescue.

“I am delighted that you did, Mrs. Ellison. I am exceedingly tired of the polite but meaningless conversation of people who wish to express their sympathy but endlessly repeat each other simply because there is nothing anyone can say
that is deep enough.” His face lightened. “Words do not encompass it, nor do they bridge the gap between those who grieve and those who do not. It is a relief to talk of something else.”

Suddenly the memory of Somerset Carlisle and the sorrow in his face was as clear in Charlotte’s mind as if he had been here in the room with them.

“May I speak privately with you, Dr. Shaw?”

“Really!” Prudence murmured in amazement.

“Well …” Angeline fluttered her hands as if to brush something away.

“Charlotte,” Caroline said warningly.

The same smile touched Shaw’s mouth with amusement.

“Certainly. We shall repair to the library.” He glanced at Celeste. “And leave the door open,” he added deliberately, and watched her scowl with irritation. A protest rose to her lips, and she abandoned it; the explanation of what she had not thought, or implied, was worse than its absence. She shot him a look of intense annoyance.

He held the door open for Charlotte and then as she swept out, chin high, he followed her and strode ahead. Since she had no idea where she was going, he led the way to the library, which turned out to be as impressive and pompous as the hall, with cases and cases of leather-bound books in brown and burgundy and dark green, all lettered with gold. Pious scripts were framed in mahogany on the free wall space, and there was a large picture of some high church dignitary above the mantelpiece, carved in marble and inset with quartz pillars supporting the shelf. Massive leather-covered chairs occupied much of the dark green carpet, giving the whole room a claustrophobic feeling. A large bronze statue of a lion ornamented the one table. The curtains, like those in the withdrawing room, were heavily fringed, tied back with fringed sashes, and splayed carefully over the floor at their base.

“Not a room to put you at your ease, is it?” Shaw met her eyes very directly. “But then that was never the intention.”
A smile curled the corners of his mouth. “Are you impressed?”

“That was the intention?” She smiled back.

“Oh assuredly. And are you?”

“I’m impressed with how much money he must have had.” She was perfectly frank without even considering it. He was a man whose honesty demanded from her exactly the same. “All these leather-bound books. There must be a hundred pounds’ worth in every case. The contents of the whole room would keep an average family for at least two years—food, gaslight, a new outfit for every season, coal enough to keep them thoroughly warm, roast beef every Sunday and goose for Christmas, and pay a housemaid to boot.”

“Indeed it is, but the good bishop did not see it that way. Books are not only the source of knowledge, but the display of them is the symbol of it.” He made a slight gesture of distaste with his shoulders, and paced over to the mantel, and back again, straightening the bronze as he passed it.

“You were not fond of him,” she said with a half smile.

Again his face was unwaveringly direct. In any other man she might have felt it bold, but it was so obviously part of his nature only the most conceited woman would have interpreted it so.

“I disagreed with him about almost everything.” He waved his hands. “Not, of course, that that is the same thing. I do not mean to equivocate. I apologize. No, I was not fond of him. Some beliefs are fundamental, and color everything that a man is.”

“Or a woman,” she added.

His smile was sudden and illuminated his entire face. “Of course. Again, I apologize. It is very avant-garde to suppose that women think at all; I am surprised you mention it. You must keep most unusual company. Are you related to the policeman Pitt who is investigating the fire?”

She noticed that he did not say “Clemency’s death,” and the flicker of pain in his moment of hesitation was not lost on her. He might mask the hurt, but the second’s glimpse of it showed a side of him that she liked even better.

“Yes—he is my husband.” It was the only time she had admitted it when she was involving herself in a case. Every other time she had used her anonymity to gain an advantage. And also, the wives of policemen were not received in society, any more than would be the tradesmen’s wives. Commerce was considered vulgar; trade was beneath mention. In fact the very necessity of earning money at all was not spoken of in the best circles. One simply presumed it came from lands or investments. Labor was honest and good for the soul, and the morals; but the more leisure one had, the greater status one possessed.

He stood perfectly still for a moment, and the very unnaturalness of it in him spoke a kind of pain.

“Is that why you came—to learn more information about us? And brought your mother and grandmother too!”

The only possible answer was the truth. Any alternatives, however laced with honesty, would jar on his ear and degrade them both.

“I think curiosity may well be why Grandmama came. Mama, I think, came with her to try to make it a little less—awful.” She stood facing him across the table with its rampant bronze lion. “I came because I heard from Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, and Mr. Somerset Carlisle, that Mrs. Shaw was a most remarkable person who had given much time to fighting against the power of slum landlords, that she wished to change the law to make them more accessible to public awareness.”

They were standing barely a yard from each other and she was acutely aware of his total attention.

“Mr. Carlisle said she had an unusual passion and unselfishness about it,” she went on. “She was not looking for personal praise nor for a cause to occupy herself, but that she simply cared. I felt such a woman’s death should not go unsolved, nor people who would murder her in order to protect their miserable money remain unexposed—and perhaps scandal of that might even further her work. But your aunts tell me she was not involved in anything of that kind. So it seems I have the wrong Clemency Shaw.”

“No you have not.” Now his voice was very quiet and he moved at last, turning a little away from her towards the mantelpiece and the fire. “She did not choose to tell anyone else what she was doing. She had her reasons.”

“But you knew?”

“Oh yes. She trusted me. We had been”—he hesitated, choosing his word carefully—“friends … for a long time.”

She wondered why he chose the term. Did it mean they had been more than merely lovers—or something less—or both?

He turned back and looked directly at her, without bothering to disguise the grief in his face, nor its nature. She thought he did mean “friends,” and not more.

“She was a remarkable woman.” He used her own words. “I admired her very much. She had an extraordinary inner courage. She could know things, and face them squarely, that would have crushed most people.” He drew in his breath and let it out slowly. “There is a terrible empty space where she used to be, a goodness no longer here.”

She wanted to move forward and touch him, put her hand over his and convey her empathy in the simplest and most immediate way. But such a gesture would be bold, intrusively intimate between a man and a woman who had met only moments ago. All she could do was stand on the spot and repeat the words anyone would use.

“I’m sorry, truly I am sorry.”

He swung his hands out wide, then starting pacing the floor again. He did not bother to thank her; such trivialities could be taken for granted between them.

“I should be very glad if you learned anything.” Quite automatically he adjusted the heavy curtains to remove a crooked fold, then swung back to face her. “If I can help, tell me how, and I shall do it.”

“I will.”

His smile returned for an instant, full of warmth.

“Thank you. Now let us return and see if Josiah and the aunts have been totally scandalized—unless, of course, there is something else you wish to say?”

“No—not at all. I simply desired to know if I was mistaken in my beliefs, or if there were two people with such an unusual name.”

“Then we may leave the wild seductiveness of the bishop’s library”—he glanced around it with a rueful smile—“and return to the propriety of the withdrawing room. Really, you know, Mrs. Pitt, we should have conducted this interview in the conservatory. They have a magnificent one here, full of wrought iron stands with palms and ferns and potted flowers. It would have given them so much more to be shocked about.”

She regarded him with interest. “You enjoy shocking them, don’t you?”

His expression was a curious mixture of impatience and pity.

“I am a doctor, Mrs. Pitt; I see a great deal of real suffering. I get impatient with the unnecessary pain imposed by hypocrisy and idle imaginations which have nothing better to do than speculate unkindly and create pain where there need be none. Yes, I hate idiotic pretense and I blow it away where I can.”

“But what do your aunts know of your reality?”

“Nothing,” he admitted, pulling his face into a rueful smile. “They grew up here. They have neither of them ever left this house except to make social calls or to attend suitable functions and charitable meetings which never see the objects of their efforts. The old bishop kept them here after his wife died; Celeste to write his letters, read to him, look up reference works for his sermons and discourses and to keep him company when he wished to talk. She also plays the piano, loudly when she is in a temper, and rather badly, but he couldn’t tell. He liked the idea of music, but he was indifferent to its practice.”

Even standing in the doorway his intense inner energy was such that he could not keep entirely still. “Angeline took care of all his domestic needs and ran the household, and read romantic novels in brown paper wrappers when no one was looking. They never kept a housekeeper. He considered
it a woman’s place and her fulfillment to keep a home for a man and make it a haven of peace and security.” He waved his hands, strong and neat. “Free from all the evils and soil of the outer world with its vulgarity and greed. And Angeline has done precisely that—all her life. I suppose one should hardly blame her if she knows nothing else. I stand reproved. Neither her ignorance nor her sometime fatuity are her fault.”

“They must have had suitors?” Charlotte said before she thought.

He was tidying the curtains automatically and straightened up to look at her.

“Of course. But he saw them off in short shrift, and made sure the call of duty drowned out everything else.”

Charlotte saw a world of disappointment and domestic details, suppressed and confused passions forever overlaid by pious words and the irresistible pressures of ignorance, fear and guilt; duty always winning in the end. Whatever the Worlingham sisters did to occupy their minds and justify the arid years of their lives was to be pitied, not added to further by blame.

“I don’t think I would have cared for the bishop either,” she said with a tight smile. “Although I suppose he is like a great many. They are certainly not the only daughters whose lives have been spent so, with father—or mother. I have known several.”

“And I,” he agreed.

Perhaps the conversation might have gone further had not Caroline and Grandmama appeared in the doorway of the withdrawing room across the hall and seen them.

“Ah, good,” Caroline said immediately. “You are ready to leave. We were just saying good-bye to the Misses Worlingham. Mr. and Mrs. Hatch have already gone.” She looked at Shaw. “May we extend our condolences to you, Dr. Shaw, and apologize for intruding upon a family occasion. You have been most courteous. Come, Charlotte.”

“Good afternoon, Dr. Shaw.” Charlotte held out her hand and he took it immediately, holding it till she felt the warmth of him through her gloves.

“Thank you for coming, Mrs. Pitt. I look forward to our meeting again. Good day to you.”

“Perhaps I should—” Charlotte glanced towards the withdrawing room door.

“Nonsense!” Grandmama snapped. “We have said all that is necessary. It is time we left.” And she marched out of the front door, held open for them by a footman; the parlormaid was presumably occupied in the kitchen.

“Well?” Grandmama demanded when they were seated in the carriage.

“I beg your pardon?” Charlotte pretended mystification.

“What did you ask Shaw, and what did he say, child?” Grandmama said impatiently. “Don’t affect to be stupid with me. Awkward you may be, and certainly lacking in any degree of subtlety whatever, but you are not without native wit. What did that man say to you?”

“That Clemency was precisely what I had supposed her,” Charlotte replied. “But that she preferred to keep her work for the poor a private matter, even from her family, and he would be most obliged if I learned anything about who murdered her.”

“Indeed,” Grandmama said dubiously. “He took an uncommonly long time to say so little. I shouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if he did it himself. There is a great deal of money in the Worlingham family, you know, and Theophilus’s share, as the only son, passed to his daughters equally. Shaw stands to inherit everything poor Clemency had.” She rearranged her skirts more carefully. “And according to Celeste, even that is not sufficient for him. He has set his cap on that young Flora Lutterworth, and she is little better than she should be, chasing after him, seeing him in private goodness knows how many times a month. Her father is furious. He has ambitions for her a great deal higher than a widowed doctor twice her age and of no particular background. Caroline, please move yourself farther to the left; you have not left me sufficient room. Thank you.” She settled herself again. “They have quarreled over it quite obviously, to any discerning eye. And I daresay Mrs. Clitheridge
has had a word with her, in a motherly sort of way. It is part of the vicar’s duty to care for the moral welfare of his flock.”

“What makes you think that?” Caroline said with a frown.

“For goodness sake, use your wits!” Grandmama glared at her. “You heard Angeline say Lally Clitheridge and Flora Lutterworth had had a heated and most unpleasant exchange, and were hardly on speaking terms with one another. No doubt that was what it was about—anyone could deduce that, without being a detective.” She turned a malevolent eye on Charlotte. “No—your doctor friend had every reason to have done away with his wife—and no doubt he did. Mark my words.”