Paragon Walk

One

Inspector Pitt stared down at the girl, and an overwhelming sense of loss soaked through him. He had never known her in life, but he knew and treasured all the things that now she had lost.

She was slight, with fair brown hair, a childish seventeen. Lying on the white morgue table, she looked brittle enough to have snapped if he had touched her. There were bruises on her arms where she had fought.

She was expensively dressed in lavender silk, and there was a gold and pearl chain around her throat-things he could never have afforded. They were pretty, trivial enough in the face of death, and yet he would like to have been able to give such things to Charlotte.

Thoughts of Charlotte, safe and warm at home, brought a sickness tightening in his stomach. Had some man loved this girl as he loved Charlotte? Was there someone right now for whom everything clean and bright and gentle had gone? All laughter snatched away, with the breaking of this fragile body?

He forced himself to look at her again, but his eyes avoided the wound in her chest, the stream of blood, now congealed and thick. The white face was expressionless, all surprize or horror ironed out of it. It was a little pinched.

She had lived in Paragon Walk, very rich and very fashionable, and no doubt also idle. He had nothing in common with her. He had worked ever since leaving the estate that had employed his father possessing nothing but a cardboard box with a comb and a change of shirt and an education shared with the son of the great house. He had seen the poverty and the despair that teemed just behind the elegant streets and squares of London, things this girl had never dreamed of.

He pulled a face as he remembered with a twist of humor how horrified Charlotte had been when he had first described them to her, when he was merely the policeman investigating the Cater Street murders, and she a daughter of the Ellison house. Her parents had been appalled even to have him in the establishment, let alone to address him socially. It had taken courage for Charlotte to marry him, and at the thought of it the warmth burst up inside him again, and his fingers clenched on the edge of the table.

He looked down at the girl’s face again, furious at the waste, the wealth of experience she would never know, the chances gone.

He turned away.

“Last night after dark,” the constable beside him said glumly. “Ugly business. Do you know Paragon Walk, sir? Very ’igh class neighborhood, that. Most of it is, around there.”

“Yes,” Pitt said absently. Of course, he knew it; it was part of his district. He did not add that he knew Paragon Walk especially, because Charlotte’s sister had her town house there and so it had remained in his mind. As Charlotte had married socially beneath her, so Emily had married above and was now Lady Ashworth.

“Not the sort of thing you’d expect,” the constable went on, “not in a place like that.” He made a slight click of disapproval with his tongue. “I don’t know what things is coming to, what with General Gordon killed by that there dervish, or whatever, in January, and now we got rapists loose in a place like Paragon Walk. Shockin’, I call it, poor young girl like that. Looks as innocent as a lamb, don’t she?” He stared down at her mournfully.

Pitt turned round. “Did you say raped?”

“Yes, sir. Didn’t they tell you that at the station?”

“No, Forbes, they did not,” Pitt was sharper than he meant to be, to cover the new misery. “They just said murder.”

“Oh, well, she’s been murdered, too,” Forbes added reasonably. “Poor creature.” He sniffed. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to go to Paragon Walk now it’s morning, like, and talk to all them people?”

“Yes,” Pitt agreed, turning to leave. There was nothing more he could do here. The means of death was obvious, a long, sharp-bladed knife at least an inch broad. There was only one wound, which had to have been fatal.

“Right,” Forbes followed him up the steps, his heavy feet loud on the stone.

Outside Pitt gulped at the summer air. The trees were in full leaf and already at eight o’clock it was warm. A hansom cab clopped by at the end of the road, and an errand boy whistled about his business.

“We’ll walk,” Pitt said, striding out, coat flapping, hat jammed on the top of his head. Forbes was obliged to trot to keep up with him, and long before they were at Paragon Walk the constable was distressingly out of breath and wishing fervently his duty had landed him with anybody but Pitt.

Paragon Walk was a Regency road of great elegance, facing an open park with flowerbeds and ornamental trees. It curved gently for about a thousand yards. This morning it looked white and silent in the sunlight, and there was not even a footman or a gardener’s boy to be seen. Word of the tragedy would have spread, of course; there would be huddles in kitchens and pantries and embarrassed platitudes over the breakfast tables upstairs.

“Fanny Nash,” Forbes said, catching his breath for the first time as Pitt stopped.

“Pardon?”

“Fanny Nash, sir,” Forbes repeated. “That was ’er name.”

“Oh, yes.” The sense of loss returned for a moment. This time yesterday she would have been alive, behind one of those classic windows, probably deciding what to wear, telling her maid what to lay out for her, planning her day, whom to call on, what gossip to tell, what secrets to keep. It was the beginning of the London Season. What dreams had crowded through her mind such a little while ago?

“Number Four,” Forbes prompted at his elbow.

Inwardly Pitt cursed Forbes for his practicality, though he knew that was unfair. This was a foreign world to Forbes, stranger than the back streets of Paris or Bordeaux would have been. He was used to women in plain, stuff dresses who worked from waking to sleeping, large families living in a few, overfurnished rooms with the smell of cooking everywhere and the intimate usage of faults and pleasures. He could not think of these people as the same, under their silks, and their rigid, stylized manners. Without the discipline of work, they had invented the discipline of etiquette, and it had become just as ruthless a master. But Forbes could not be expected to understand that.

As a policeman, Pitt knew it was customary for him to present himself at the tradesman’s entrance, but he would not now begin something he had refused all his life.

The footman who came to the front door was grim and stiff-faced. He stared at Pitt with unaffected dislike, although the superciliousness of the look was somewhat spoiled by the fact that Pitt was several inches taller.

“Inspector Pitt, of the police,” Pitt said soberly. “May I speak with Mr. and Mrs. Nash?” He assumed assent and was about to go in, but the footman stood his ground.

“Mr. Nash is not at home. I will see if Mrs. Nash will receive you,” he said with distaste, then backed half a step. “You may wait in the hall.”

Pitt looked around him. The house was larger than it had appeared from outside. He could see a wide stairway with landings leading from it on either side, and there were half a dozen doors in the hall. He had learned something of art from working on the recovery of stolen goods, and he judged the pictures on the walls to be of considerable value, if too stylized for his own taste. He preferred the modern, more impressionistic school, with blurred lines, sky and water merging in a haze of light. But there was one portrait, after the manner of Burne-Jones, that caught his attention, not for its artist, but for its subject, a woman of exceptional beauty-proud, sensuous and dazzling.

“Cor!” Forbes let out his breath in amazement, and Pitt realized he had not been inside a house such as this before, except perhaps in the servants’ hall. He was afraid Forbes’s gaucheness would embarrass them both, and perhaps even handicap his questioning.

“Forbes, why don’t you go and see what you can learn from the servants?” he suggested. “Perhaps a footman or a maid was out? People don’t realize how much they notice.”

Forbes was torn. Part of him wanted to stay and examine this new world, not to be shut out of anything, but a larger part wanted to escape to the more familiar and do something he was confident in. His hesitation was brief and came to a natural end.

“Right, sir! Yes, I’ll do that. Might try some of the other houses, too. Like you say, never know what they’ve seen, till you try, like?”

When the footman returned, he conducted Pitt into the morning room and left him. It was five minutes before Jessamyn Nash appeared. Pitt knew her immediately; she was the woman from the portrait in the hall, with those wide, direct eyes, that mouth, that radiant hair, thick and soft as summer fields. She was dressed in black now, but it did nothing to dim her brilliance. She stood very straight, her chin high.

“Good morning, Mr. Pitt. What is it you wish to ask me?”

“Good morning, ma’am. I’m sorry to have to disturb you in such tragic circumstances-”

“I appreciate the necessity. You do not need to explain.” She walked across the room with exquisite grace. She did not sit, nor did she invite him to do so. “Naturally you must discover what happened to Fanny, poor child.” Her face froze for just an instant, stiff. “She was only a child, you know, very innocent, very-young.”

It was the same impression he had had, extreme youth.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

“Thank you.” He had no idea from her voice whether she knew he meant it, or if she took it as a simple courtesy, the automatic thing to say. He would like to have assured her, but then she would not care about the feelings of a policeman.

“Tell me what happened.” He looked at her back as she stood at the window. She was slender, shoulders delicately soft under the silk. Her voice, when it came, was expressionless, as though she were repeating something rehearsed.

“I was at home yesterday evening. Fanny lived here with my husband and myself. She was my husband’s half sister, but I presume you know that. She was only seventeen. She was engaged to marry Algernon Burnon, but that was not to be for three years at least, when she became twenty.”

Pitt did not interrupt. He seldom interrupted; the slightest remarks that seemed irrelevant at the time could turn out to mean something, betraying a feeling if nothing else. And he wanted to know all he could about Fanny Nash. He wanted to know how other people had seen her, what she had meant to them.

“-that may seem a long engagement,” Jessamyn was saying, “but Fanny was very young. She grew up alone, you see. My father-in-law married a second time. Fanny is-was-twenty years younger than my husband. She seemed forever a child. Not that she was simple.” She hesitated, and he noticed that her long fingers were fiddling with a china figurine from the table, twisting it around and around. “Just-” She fumbled for the word. “-ingenuous-innocent.”

“And she was living here with you and your husband, until her marriage?”

“Yes.”

“Why was that?”

She looked round at him in surprize. Her blue eyes were very cool, and there were no tears in them.

“Her mother is dead. Naturally we offered her a home.” She gave a tiny, icy smile. “Young girls of good family do not live alone, Mr.-I’m sorry-I forget your name.”

“Pitt, ma’am,” he said with equal chill. He was ruffled, surprised that he was still capable of feeling slighted after all these years. He refused to show it. He smiled within himself. Charlotte would have been furious; her tongue would have spoken as quickly as the words came to her mind. “I thought she might have remained with her father.”

Something of his humor must have softened his face. She mistook it for a smirk. The color rose in her exquisite cheeks.

“She preferred to live with us,” she said tartly. “Naturally. A girl does not wish to enter the Season without a suitable lady, preferably of her own family, to advise and accompany her. I was happy to do so. Are you sure this is relevant, Mr.-Pitt? Are you not merely indulging your curiosity? I appreciate our way of life is probably quite unknown to you.”

An acid reply came to his mind, but anger was irrevocable, and he could not yet afford to commit himself to her enmity.

He pulled a face. “Perhaps it has nothing to do with it. Please continue with your account of yesterday evening.”

She took a breath to speak, then apparently changed her mind. She crossed over to the mantel shelf, piled with photographs, and began again in the same flat voice.

“She had spent a perfectly usual day. She had no household affairs to attend to, of course-I do all that. She wrote letters in the morning, consulted her diary, and kept an appointment with her dressmaker. She lunched here at home, and then in the afternoon she took the carriage and went calling. She did tell me upon whom, but I forget. It is always the same sort of people, and as long as one remembers oneself, it really hardly matters. I dare say you can find out from the coachman, if you wish. We dined at home. Lady Pomeroy called, a most tiresome person, but a family obligation-you wouldn’t understand.”

Pitt controlled his face and regarded her with continued polite interest.

“Fanny left early,” she went on. “She has very little social ability, as yet. Sometimes I think she is too young for a Season! I have tried to teach her, but she is very artless. She seems to lack any natural ability to invent. Even the simplest prevarication is a trial to her. She went on some small errand, a book for Lady Cumming-Gould. At least, that is what she said.”

“And you do not think it was so?” he inquired.

A slight flicker crossed her face, but Pitt did not understand it. Charlotte might have interpreted it for him, but she was not here to ask.

“I should think it was precisely so,” Jessamyn replied. “As I have tried to explain to you, Mr.-er-” She waved her hand irritably. “Poor Fanny had no art to deceive. She was a guileless as a child.”

Pitt had seldom found children guileless; tactless perhaps-but most he could remember were possessed of the natural cunning of a stoat and the toughness in a bargain of a moneylender, although certainly some were blessed with the blandest of countenances. It was the third time Jessamyn had referred to Fanny’s immaturity.

“Well, I can ask Lady Cumming-Gould,” he replied with what he hoped was a smile as guileless as Fanny’s.

She turned away from him sharply, lifting one slender shoulder, as if his face had somehow reminded her who he was and that he must be recalled to his proper position.

“Lady Pomeroy had gone and I was alone when-” her voice wavered, and for the first time she seemed to lose her composure, “-when Fanny came back.” She made an effort not to gulp, and failed. She was obliged to fumble for a handkerchief, and the clumsiness of it brought her back. “Fanny came in and collapsed in my arms. I don’t know how the poor child had had the strength to come so far. It was amazing. She died but a moment afterward.”

“I am sorry.”

She looked at him, her face devoid of expression, almost as if she were asleep. Then she moved one hand to brush at her heavy taffeta skirt, perhaps in memory of the blood on her the night before.

“Did she speak at all?” he asked quietly. “Anything?”

“No, Mr. Pitt. She was nearly dead by the time she got so far.”

He turned slightly to look at the French doors. “She came in through there?” It was the only possible way without having passed the footman, and yet it seemed natural to ask.

She shivered minutely.

“Yes.”

He walked over toward them and looked out. The lawn was small, a mere patch, surrounded by laurel bushes and a herbaceous walk beyond. There was a wall between this garden and the next. No doubt, by the time he had closed this case, he would know every view and corner of all these houses-unless there was some pathetic, easy answer, but none presented itself yet. He turned back to her.

“Is there any way your garden connects with the others along the Walk, a gate or door in that wall?”

Her face looked blank. “Yes, but it is hardly the way she would choose to come. She was at Lady Cumming-Gould’s.”

He must send Forbes to all the gardens to see if there was any sign of blood. A wound such as that must have left some stain. And there might even be broken plants or footprints in gravel or grass.

“Where does Lady Cumming-Gould live?” he asked.

“With Lord and Lady Ashworth,” she replied. “She is an aunt, I believe, and is visiting for the Season.”

With Lord and Lady Ashworth-so Fanny Nash had been to Emily’s house the night she was murdered. Memories came rushing back of Charlotte and Emily as he had first known them in Cater Street when he was investigating the hangman murders. Everyone had been afraid, looking with new eyes at friends, even at family; suspicions had been born that could otherwise have lain silent all life long. Old relationships had faltered and broken under the weight. Now violence and obscene and ugly secrets were close again, perhaps inside the very house. All the nightmares would return, the cold questions one was afraid even to think, and yet could not shut out.

“Is there access between all the gardens?” he asked carefully, forcing the fog and terror of Cater Street from his mind. “Might she have returned that way? It was a pleasant summer evening.”

She looked at him with light surprize.

“I hardly think it likely, Mr. Pitt. She was wearing a dinner dress, not pantaloons! She went and returned by the road. She must have been accosted by some lunatic there.”

A ridiculous thought flashed through his mind to ask her how many lunatics lived in Paragon Walk, but perhaps she would not know there had been coachmen lounging around at one end waiting for their masters and mistresses to leave a party, and a constable on the beat at the other.

He eased his weight from one foot to the other and stood a little straighten

“Then I had best go and see Lady Cumming-Gould. Thank you, Mrs. Nash. I hope we will be able to clear up the matter quickly and not need to distress you for long.”

“I hope so,” she agreed with formal coolness. “Good day.”

At the Ashworth house he was shown into the withdrawing room by a butler whose face mirrored his social dilemma. Here was a person who admitted to being of the police, and therefore undesirable, and should not be allowed to forget he was here on sufferance only, a most unpleasant necessity due to the recent tragedy. Yet, on the other hand, he was quite extraordinarily also Lady Ash-worth’s brother-in-law! Which is what comes of marrying beneath one! In the end the butler settled for a pained civility and withdrew to fetch Lord Ashworth. Pitt was too entertained by the man’s predicament to be annoyed.

But when the door opened, it was not George but Emily herself who came in. He had forgotten how charming she could be, and at the same time how utterly different from Charlotte. She was fair and slight, dressed at the height of fashion and expense. Where Charlotte was disastrously forthright, Emily was far too practical to speak without thinking, and could be exquisitely devious when she chose, in a good cause, of course. And she usually considered Society to be an excellent cause. She could lie without a tremor.

She came in now and closed the door behind her, looking straight at him.

“Hello, Thomas,” she said wanly. “You must be here about poor Fanny. I didn’t dream we should have the good fortune that it should be you to investigate it. I’ve been trying to think if I knew anything that would be of help, as we did in Callander Square.” Her voice lifted for a moment, “Charlotte and I were rather clever there.” Then her tone dropped again, and her face took on a pinched, unhappy look. “But that was different. We didn’t know the people to start with. And the ones who were dead were dead before we ever knew of them. When you didn’t know people alive, it doesn’t hurt the same way.” She sighed. “Please sit down, Thomas. You tower there, sort of flapping. Can’t you do up your coat, or something? I must speak to Charlotte. She lets you come out without-” She looked him up and down and gave up the whole idea.

Pitt ran his hands through his hair and made it worse.

“Did you know Fanny Nash well?” he asked, sitting on the sofa and seeming to spread over it, all coattails and arms.

“No. And I’m ashamed to say it now, but I didn’t especially like her either.” She made an apologetic little face. “She was rather-dull. Jessamyn’s enormous fun. At least half of me can’t bear her, and I’m constantly diverted by thinking what I might do next to annoy her.”

He smiled. There were so many echoes of Charlotte in her that he could not help warming to her.

“But Fanny was too young,” he finished the sentence for her. “Too naive.”

“Quite. She was almost insipid.” Then her face changed, filling with pity and embarrassment, because she had momentarily forgotten death, and the manner of it. “Thomas, she was the last kind of creature in the world to invite such an abominable thing! Whoever did it must be quite insane. You must catch him, for Fanny’s sake-and for everyone else’s!”

All sorts of answers ran through his mind, reassurance about strangers and vagrants, long gone now, and they all died on his tongue. It was quite possible that the murderer was someone who lived or worked here in Paragon Walk. Neither the constable on duty at one end nor the servants waiting at the other had seen anyone pass. It was not the sort of area where people wandered unremarked. The probability was that it had been some coachman or footman from the party, inflamed with drink and with time on his hands, allowing a foolish impulse, perhaps when she threatened to cry out, to become suddenly an ugly and appalling crime.

But it was not the crime itself; it was the attendant investigation that frightened, and the haunting fear that it might not be a footman but some man on the Walk, one of themselves with a violent and obscene nature lying under the mannered surface they knew. And police investigations uncovered not only the major crimes, but so often the smaller sins, the meannesses and deceits that hurt so much.

But there was no need to tell her that. For all her title and her assurance, she was still the same girl who had been so vulnerable in Cater Street, when she had seen her father frightened and stripped of his pretenses.

“You will, won’t you?” Her voice cut across his silence, demanding an answer. She was standing in the middle of the floor, staring at him.

“We usually do.” It was the best thing he could say and be honest. And even if he had wished to, it was not much use lying to Emily. Like many practical and ambitious people, she was disastrously perceptive. She was well accomplished in the art of polite lies, and she read them like a book in others.

He recalled himself to the purpose of his visit.

“She came to see you that evening, didn’t she?”

“Fanny?” Her eyes widened a little. “Yes. She returned a book, or something, to Aunt Vespasia. Do you want to speak to her?”

He took the chance immediately.

“Yes, please. Perhaps you had better stay. In case she is distressed, you would be of comfort to her.” He imagined an elderly female relative of excessively gentle birth with a correspondingly tender susceptibility to the vapors.

For the first time Emily laughed.

“Oh, my dear,” she put her hand over her mouth. “You can’t imagine Aunt Vespasia!” She picked up her skirts and swept to the door. “But I shall most certainly stay. It is precisely what I need!”

George Ashworth was handsome enough, with bold dark eyes and a fine head of hair, but he could never have been an equal for his aunt. She was over seventy now, but there were still the remnants of a startling beauty in her face-the strength of the bones, the high cheeks and long, straight nose. Blue-white hair was piled on her head, and she wore a dress of deep lilac silk. She stood in the doorway and looked at Pitt for several minutes, then moved into the room, picking up her lorgnette, and studied him more closely.

“Can’t really see without the damn thing,” she said irritably. She snorted very gently, like an extremely well-bred horse. “Extraordinary,” she breathed out. “So you are a policeman?”

“Yes, ma’am.” For an instant even Pitt was at a loss for words. Over his shoulder he saw Emily’s face alight with amusement.

“What are you looking at?” Vespasia said sharply. “I never wear black. It doesn’t suit me. Always wear what suits you, regardless. Tried to tell Emily that, but she doesn’t listen. The Walk expects her to wear black, so she does. Very silly. Don’t let other people expect you into doing something you don’t wish to.” She sat down on the sofa opposite and stared at him, her fine, gray eyebrows arched a little. “Fanny came to see me the night she was killed. I assume you knew that, and that is why you have come.”

Pitt swallowed and tried to compose his face.

“Yes, ma’am. At what time, please?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“You must have some idea, Aunt Vespasia,” Emily interrupted. “It was after dinner.”

“If I say I have no idea, Emily, then I have no idea. I don’t watch clocks. I don’t care for them. When one gets to my age, one doesn’t. It was dark, if that is of any help.”

“A great help, thank you.” Pitt calculated quickly. It must have been after ten, at this time of the year. And Jessamyn Nash had sent the footman for the police at a little before quarter to eleven. “What did she come for, ma’am?” he asked.

“To get away from an excessively boring dinner guest,” Vespasia replied immediately. “Eliza Pomeroy. Knew her as a child, and she was a bore even then. Talks about other people’s ailments. Who cares? One’s own are tedious enough!”

Pitt hid a smile with difficulty. He dared not look at Emily.

“She told you that?” he inquired.

Vespasia considered whether to be patient with him- because he was foolish-and decided against it. The thought was plain in her face.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” she said smartly. “She was a child of quite moderate breeding, neither good enough nor bad enough to be frank. She said she was returning some book or other.”

“You have the book?” He did not know what made him ask, except habit to check every detail. It was almost certainly immaterial.

“I should imagine so,” she replied with slight surprize. “But I never lend books I expect to require again, so I couldn’t say. She was an honest child. She hadn’t the imagination to lie successfully, and she was one of those comfortable people who know their own limitations. She would have done quite nicely, had she lived. No pretensions and no spite, poor little creature.”

The humor and the pleasantness vanished as suddenly as winter sun, leaving a chill in the room behind it.

Pitt felt obliged to speak, but his voice was remote, and it sounded trivial, meaningless.

“Did she make any remark about calling upon anyone else?”

Vespasia seemed to have been touched by the same coldness.

“No,” she said solemnly. “She had stayed here long enough to serve her purpose. If Eliza Pomeroy had chanced still to be at the Nashes, she could quite easily have excused herself and gone straight up to bed without discourtesy. From her conversation before leaving here, I gathered she intended to go straight home.”

“She took her leave of you some time after ten?” Pitt confirmed. “How long do you judge she was here?”

“A little above a half an hour. She came in the early dusk and left when it was fully dark.”

That would be roughly quarter to ten until about quarter past, he thought. She must have been attacked somewhere in the short journey down Paragon Walk. They were large houses with broad frontages, carriageways, and shrubbery deep enough to hide a figure, but even so there were only three between Emily’s and the Nashes’. She could not have been on the street for more than minutes-unless she had called somewhere else after all?

“She was engaged to marry Algernon Burnon?” His mind searched for possibilities.

“Very suitable,” Vespasia agreed. “A pleasant enough young man of quite adequate means. His habits are sober and his manners good, if a trifle boring, so far as I know. Altogether a suitable choice.”

Pitt wondered inwardly how much good sense appealed to seventeen-year-old Fanny.

“Do you know, ma’am,” he said aloud, “if there was anyone else who especially admired her?” He hoped his meaning was plain under such genteel disguise.

She looked at him with a slight puckering of her eyebrows, and over her shoulder he could see Emily wince.

“I can imagine no one, Mr. Pitt, who held such feelings for her as to precipitate last night’s tragedy, which I presume is what you are trying to say?”

Emily shut her eyes and bit her lip to stop herself from laughing.

Pitt was aware he had fallen into precisely the strain of language he despised, and both women knew it. Now he must avoid overcompensating.

“Thank you, Lady Cumming-Gould.” He stood up, “I’m sure if anything comes to your mind that you believe could help us, you will let us know. Thank you, Lady Ashworth.”

Vespasia nodded slightly and permitted herself a faint smile, but Emily came around the table from the back of the sofa and held out both her hands.

“Please give my love to Charlotte. I shall be calling upon her directly, but not until the worst of this is over. But perhaps that won’t be long?”

“I hope not.” He touched her hand gently, but he had no belief that it would be so brief, or so easy. Investigations were not pleasant, and things were seldom the same afterward. There was always hurt.

He visited several of the other houses along the Walk and found at home Algernon Burnon, Lord and Lady Dilbridge, who had held the party, Mrs. Selena Montague, a very handsome widow, and the Misses Horbury. By half past five he left its quiet dignity and made his way back to the scruffy, heelworn utility of the police station. By seven he was at his own front door. The facade of the house was narrow, tidy, but there was no carriageway, no trees, only a scrubbed and whitened step and the wooden gateway through to the back yard.

He opened the door with his key, and at once the same little bubble of pleasure that rose inside him every time burst in warmth, and he found himself smiling. Violence and ugliness slipped away.

“Charlotte?”

There was a clatter in the kitchen, and his smile broadened. He went down the passage and stopped in the doorway. She was on her knees on the scrubbed floor, and two saucepan lids were still rolling just out of her reach under the table. She was in a plain dress with a white apron over it, and her shining, mahogany hair was coming out of its knot in long, trailing strands. She looked up and pulled a face, grabbing at the lids and missing. He bent and picked them up for her, holding out his other hand. She took it, and he pulled her up and toward him. As she relaxed in his arms, he dropped the lids on the table. It was good to feel her, the warmth of her body, of her answering mouth on his.

“Who have you been chasing today?” she asked after a moment.

He pushed the hair off her face.

“Murder,” he said quietly. “And rape.”

“Oh,” her face stiffened a little, perhaps memory. “I’m sorry.”

It would have been easy to have left it at that, not to have told her that it was someone Emily knew, living in Emily’s street, but she would have to know sometime. Emily would be bound to tell her. Perhaps they would solve it quickly after all-a drunken footman.

But she had already noticed his hesitation.

“Who was it?” she asked. Her first guess for his concern was wrong. “Was she someone with children?”

He thought of little Jemima, asleep upstairs now.

She saw the easing of his face, the shadow of relief.

“Who, Thomas?” she repeated.

“A young woman, a girl-”

She knew that was not all. “You mean a child?”

“No-no, she was seventeen. I’m sorry, love, she lived in Paragon Walk, just a few doors from Emily. I saw Emily this afternoon. She sent her love.”

Memories of Cater Street came back, of the fear that had ultimately reached into everything, touching and tainting everyone. She spoke the first fear that came to her mind.

“You don’t think George was-had anything to do with it?”

His face fell.

“Good heavens no! Of course not!”

She went back to the stove. She skewered the potatoes savagely to see if they were cooked, and two of them fell apart. She would like to have sworn at them, but she would not in front of him. If he still cherished her as a lady, let him keep his illusions. Her cooking was enough of a hurdle to overcome at one time. She was still enough in love with him to hunger for his admiration. Her mother had taught her how to govern a house most excellently and see that all the tasks were properly performed, but she had never foreseen that Charlotte would marry so far beneath her as to require that she actually do the cooking herself. It had been an experience not without its difficulties. It was to Pitt’s credit that he had laughed at her so little and only once lost his temper.

“Your dinner is nearly ready,” she said, carrying the pan to the sink. “Was Emily all right?”

“She seemed to be.” He sat on the edge of the table. “I met her Aunt Vespasia. Do you know her?”

“No. We don’t have an Aunt Vespasia. She must be George’s.”

“She ought to be yours,” he said with a sudden grin. “She is exactly as you might be when you get to be seventy or eighty.”

She let the pan go in her surprize and turned to stare at him, his body like some enormous flightless bird, coattails trailing.

“And the thought didn’t appall you?” she asked. “I’m surprized you still came home!”

“She was marvelous,” he laughed. “Made me feel a complete fool. She said precisely what she thought without a qualm.”

“I don’t do it without a qualm!” she defended herself. “I can’t help it, but I feel awful afterward.”

“You won’t by the time you’re seventy.”

“Get off the table. I’m going to put the vegetables on it.”

He moved obediently.

“Who else did you see?” she continued when they were in the dining room and the meal was begun. “Emily has told me something of the people in the Walk, although I’ve never been there.”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Of course, I do!” Why on earth did he need to ask? “If someone has been raped and murdered next door to Emily, I have to know about it. It wasn’t Jessamyn something-or-other, was it?”

“No. Why?”

“Emily can’t abide her, but she would miss her if she were not there. I think disliking her is one of her main entertainments. Although I shouldn’t speak like that of someone who might have been killed.”

He was laughing at her inside himself, and she knew it.

“Why not?” he asked.

She did not know why not, except she was quite sure her mother would have said so. She decided not to answer. Attack was the best form of defense.

“Then who was it? Why are you avoiding telling me?”

“It was Jessamyn Nash’s sister-in-law, a girl called Fanny.”

Suddenly gentility seemed irrelevant.

“Poor little child,” she said quietly. “I hope it was quick, and she knew little of it.”

“Not very. I’m afraid she was raped and then stabbed. She managed to make her way to the house and died in Jessamyn’s arms.”

She stopped with a forkful of meat halfway to her mouth, suddenly sick.

He saw it.

“Why the hell did you ask me in the middle of dinner?” he said angrily. “People die every day. You can’t do anything about it. Eat your food.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to point out that that did not make it any better. Then she realized that he had been hurt by it himself. He must have seen the body-it was part of his duty-and talked with those who had loved her. To Charlotte she was only imaginary, and imagination could be denied, while memory could not.

Obediently she put the food in her mouth, watching him. His face was calm, the anger entirely gone, but his shoulders were tense and he had forgotten to take any of the gravy she had so carefully made. Was he so moved by the death of the girl-or was it something far worse, fear that the investigations would uncover things uglier, close to him, something about George?