Rutland Place (7 page)

“Of anything, girl! How can I ask for news of something if I do not know what it is? If I already knew it, it would not be news to me, would it?”

It was a fallacious argument, but Charlotte had long ago discovered the futility of pointing that out to her.

“We called upon Mrs. Charrington and Miss Lagarde,” she said. “I found them both quite delightful.”

“Mrs. Charrington is eccentric.” Grandmama’s voice was tart, as if she had bitten into a green plum.

“That pleased me.” Charlotte was not going to be bested. “She was very civil, and after all that is the important thing.”

“And Miss Lagarde—was she civil too? She is far too shy for her own good. The girl seems incapable of flirting with any skill at all!” Grandmama snapped. “She’ll never find herself a husband by wandering around looking fey, however pretty her face. Men don’t marry just a face, you know!”

“Which is as well for most of us.” Charlotte was equally acerbic, looking at Grandmama’s slightly hooked nose and heavy-lidded eyes.

The old woman affected not to have understood her. She turned toward Caroline icily. “You had a caller while you were out.”

“Indeed?” Caroline was not particularly interested. It was quite usual for at least one person to visit during the afternoon, just as she and Charlotte had visited others; it was part of the ritual. “I expect they left a card and Maddock will bring it in presently.”

“Don’t you even wish to know who it was?” Grandmama sniffed, staring at Caroline’s back.

“Not especially.”

“It was that Frenchman with his foreign manners. I forget his name.” She chose not to remember because it was not English. “But he has the best tailor I have seen in thirty years.”

Caroline stiffened. There was absolute silence in the room, so thick one imagined one could hear carriage wheels two streets away.

“Indeed?” Caroline said again, her voice unnaturally casual. There was a catch in it as if she were bursting to say more and forcing herself to wait so her words would not fall over each other. “Did he say anything?”

“Of course he said something! Do you think he stood there like a fool?”

Caroline kept her back to them. She took one of the daffodils out of the bowl, shortened its stalk, and replaced it.

“Anything of interest?”

“Who ever says anything of interest these days?” Grandmama answered miserably. “There aren’t any heroes anymore. General Gordon has been murdered by those savages in Khartoum. Even Mr. Disraeli is dead—not that he was a hero, of course! Or a gentleman either, for that matter. But he was clever. Everyone with any breeding is gone.”

“Was Monsieur Alaric discourteous?” Charlotte asked in surprise. He had been so perfectly at ease in Paragon Walk, good manners innate in his nature, even if she had frequently seen humor disconcertingly close beneath.

“No,” Grandmama admitted grudgingly. “He was civil enough, but he is a foreigner. He cannot afford not to be civil. If he’d been born forty years earlier, I daresay he would have made something of himself in spite of that. There isn’t even a decent war now where a man could go and prove his worth. At least there was the Crimea in Edward’s time—not that he went!”

“The Crimea is in the Black Sea,” Charlotte pointed out. “I don’t see what it has to do with us.”

“You have no patriotism,” Grandmama accused. “No sense of Empire! That’s what is wrong with the young. You are not great!”

“Did Monsieur Alaric leave any message?” Caroline turned around at last. Her face was flushed, but her voice was perfectly steady now.

“Were you expecting one?” Grandmama squinted at her.

Caroline breathed in and out again before replying.

“Since I do not know why he called,” she said, walking over to the door, “I wondered if he left some word. I think I’ll go and ask Maddock.” And she slipped out, leaving Charlotte and the old lady alone.

Charlotte hesitated. Should she ask the questions that were teeming in her head? The old woman’s sight was poor; she had not seen Caroline’s body, the rigid muscles, the slow, controlled turn of her head. Still, her hearing was excellent when she chose to listen, and her mind was still as sharp and as worldly as it had ever been. But Charlotte realized that there was not anything Grandmama could tell her she had not already guessed for herself.

“I think I will go and see if Mama can spare the carriage to take me home,” she said after a moment or two. “Before dark.”

“As you please.” Grandmama sniffed. “I don’t really know what you came for just to go calling, I suppose.”

“To see Mama,” Charlotte answered.

“Twice in one week?”

Charlotte was not disposed to argue. “Goodbye, Grandmama. It has been very nice to see you looking in such good health.”

The old lady snorted. “Full of yourself,” she said dryly. “Never did know how to behave. Just as well you married beneath you. You’d never have done in Society.”

All the way home, rolling smoothly through the streets in her father’s carriage, Charlotte was too consumed by her thoughts to take proper pleasure in how much more comfortable the carriage was than the omnibus.

It was painfully apparent that Caroline’s interest in Paul Alaric was not in the least casual. Charlotte could recall too many of the idiotic details of her own infatuation with her brother-in-law Dominic, before she had met Thomas, to be deceived by this. She knew just that affectation of indifference, the clenching of the stomach in spite of all one could do, the heart in the throat when his name was mentioned, when he smiled at her, when people spoke of them in the same breath. It was all incredibly silly now, and she burned with embarrassment at the memory.

But she recognized the same feeling in others when she saw it; she had seen it before for Paul Alaric, more than once. She understood Caroline’s stiff back, the overly casual voice, the pretense of disinterest that was not strong enough to stop her from almost running to Maddock to find out if Alaric had left a message.

It had to be Paul Alaric’s picture in the locket. No wonder Caroline wanted it back! It was not some anonymous admirer from the past, but a face that might be recognized by any resident of Rutland Place, even the bootboys and the scullery maids.

And there was no possible way she could explain it! There could be no reason but one why she should carry a locket with his picture.

By the time Charlotte reached home, she had made up her mind to tell Pitt something about it and to ask his advice, simply because she could not bear the burden alone. She did not tell him whose picture was in the locket.

“Do nothing,” he said gravely. “With any luck, it has been lost in the street and has fallen down a gutter somewhere, or else it has been stolen by someone who has sold it or passed it on, and it will never be seen again in Rutland Place, or by anyone who has the faintest idea who it belonged to, or whose picture it is.”

“But what about Mama?” she said urgently. “She is obviously flattered and attracted by this man, and she doesn’t intend to send him away.”

Pitt weighed his words carefully, watching her face. “Not for a little while, perhaps. But she will be discreet.” He saw Charlotte draw breath to argue, and he closed his hand over hers. “My dear, there is nothing you can do about it, and even if there were you have no right to interfere.”

“She’s my mother!”

“That makes you care—but it does not give you the right to step into her affairs, which you are only guessing at.”

“I saw her! Thomas, I’m perfectly capable of putting together what I saw this afternoon, the locket, and what will happen if Papa finds out!”

“Then do what you can to make sure that he doesn’t. Warn her to be careful, by all means, and to forget the locket, but don’t do anything more. You will only make it worse.”

She stared back at him, into his light, clever eyes. This time he was wrong. He knew a lot about people in general, but she knew more about women. Caroline needed more than a warning. She needed help. And whatever Pitt said, Charlotte would have to give it.

She lowered her eyes. “I’ll warn her—about pursuing the locket,” she agreed.

He understood her better than she knew. He would not press her into a position where she was obliged to lie. He sat back, resigned but unhappy.

P
ITT WAS TOO BUSY
with his own duties to harass his mind with anxieties over Caroline. Previous cases had led him into association with people of similar positions in Society, but the circumstances in which he had seen them had necessarily been unusual, and he was aware that these past associations gave him little real understanding of their beliefs or their values. He understood even less of what might be acceptable to them in their relationships, and what would cause irreparable harm.

Pitt felt it was dangerous for Charlotte to get mixed up in the Rutland Place thefts, but he knew that most of his reaction sprang from his emotions rather than his reason: he was afraid she would be hurt. Now that she had moved from Cater Street and left her parents’ home, she had absorbed new beliefs, albeit some of them unconsciously, and she had forgotten many assumptions that used to be as natural to her as they still were to her parents. She had changed, and he was afraid that she had not realized how much—or that she had expected them to have changed also. Her loyal, fiercely compassionate, but blind interference could so easily bring pain to them all.

But he did not know how to persuade her from it. She was too close to see.

He was sitting at his brown wood desk at the police station looking at an unpromising list of stolen articles, his mind on Charlotte, when a sharp-nosed constable came in, his face pinched, eyes bright.

“Death,” he said simply.

Pitt raised his head. “Indeed. Not an uncommon occurrence, unfortunately. Why does this one interest us?” His mind pictured the alleys and creaking piles of rotting timber of the rookeries, the slums that backed onto the solid and spacious houses of the respectable. People died in them every day, every hour: some died from cold, some from disease or starvation, a few from murder. Pitt could afford to concern himself only with the last, and not always with them.

“Whose?” he asked.

“Woman.” The constable was as sparing with words as with his money. “Wealthy woman, good address. Married.”

Pitt’s interest quickened. “Murder?” he said, half hopeful, and ashamed of it. Murder was a double tragedy—not only for the victim and those who cared for her, but for the murderer also, and whoever loved or needed or pitied the tormented soul. But it was less gray, less inherently part of a problem too vast to begin, than death from street violence, or poverty, which was innate in the very pattern of the rookeries.

“Don’t know.” The constable’s eyes never moved from Pitt’s face. “Need to find out. Could be.”

Pitt fixed him with a cold stare.

“Who is dead?” he demanded. “And where?”

“A Mrs. Wilhelmina Spencer-Brown,” the constable answered levelly, a faint ring of anticipation in his voice at last. “Of number eleven Rutland Place.”

Pitt sat up. “Did you say Rutland Place, Harris?”

“Yes, sir. Know it, do you, sir?” He added the “sir” only to keep from being impertinent; usually he did without such extra niceties, but Pitt was his superior and he wanted to work on this job. Even if it was not murder, and it probably was not, a death in Society was still a great deal more interesting than the run-of-the-mill crimes he would otherwise employ himself with. All too seldom did he find a genuine mystery.

“No,” Pitt answered him dourly. “I don’t.” He stood up and pushed his chair back, scraping it along the floor. “But I imagine we are about to. What do you know about Mrs. Wilhelmina Spencer-Brown?”

“Not a lot.” Harris fell in behind him as they collected hats, coats, and mufflers, and strode down the police station steps into the March wind.

“Well?” Pitt demanded, keeping his eye on the thoroughfare in hope of seeing an empty cab.

Harris doubled his step to keep up.

“Early thirties, very respectable, nothing said against her. Still,” he said hopefully, “there wouldn’t be, in that sort of address. Plenty of servants, plenty of money, by the looks. Although looks don’t always mean much. Known those as had three servants, bombazine curtains, and nothing but bread and gravy on the table. All appearance.”

“Did Mrs. Spencer-Brown have bombazine curtains?” Pitt inquired, moving sideways sharply as a carriage sped by him, splattering a mixture of mud and manure onto the pavement. He swore under his breath, and then yelled “Cabbie!” furiously at the top of his lungs.

Harris winced. “Don’t know, sir. Only just got the report. Haven’t been there myself. Do you want a cab, sir?”

“Of course I do!” Pitt glared at him. “Fool!” he muttered under his breath, then was obliged to take it back the next moment when Harris leapt into the street with alacrity and stopped a hansom almost in its tracks.

A moment later they were sitting in the warmth of the cab, moving at a sharp trot toward Rutland Place.

“How did she die?” Pitt continued.

“Poison,” Harris replied.

Pitt was surprised. “How do you know?”

“Doctor said so. Doctor called us. Got one of them new machines.”

“What new machines? What are you talking about?”

“Telephones, sir. Machine what hangs on the wall and—”

“I know what a telephone is!” Pitt said sharply. “So the doctor called on a telephone. Who did he call? We haven’t got one!”

“Friend of his who lives just round the corner from us—a Mr. Wardley. This Mr. Wardley sent his man with the message.”

“I see. And the doctor said she was poisoned?”

“Yes, sir, that was his opinion.”

“Anything else?”

“Not yet, sir. Poisoned this afternoon. Parlormaid found her.”

Pitt pulled out his watch. It was quarter past three o’clock.

“What time?” he asked.

“About quarter past two, or just after.”

That would be when the maid went to inquire whether they would be expecting callers for tea, or if Mrs. Spencer-Brown was going out herself, Pitt thought. He knew enough about the habits of Society to be familiar with the afternoon routine.