Cardington Crescent Read online

  Charlotte was in the doorway, the gas lamp behind her shining on the auburn in her hair and catching the warm curve of her cheek. Without saying anything, she put her arms round him and held him surprisingly tightly. For a moment he was afraid something was wrong, that one of the children was ill; then he realized she would of course have seen an evening newspaper. If it had not mentioned his name, she had guessed from his lateness that he was involved.

  He had not intended to tell her. In spite of all the cases she had concerned herself with, part of him still believed she should be protected from such horror. Most men felt their homes were a retreat from the harshness, and frequently the ugliness, of the outside world, a place to refresh both body and spirit before returning again to the fray. Women were part of that gentler, better place.

  But Charlotte had seldom done the expected, even before she had appalled her well-bred family by marrying into the police, a descent so radical she was fortunate they had not disowned her.

  Now she loosed herself a little and looked up at him, her face puckered with concern.

  “You are on that case, aren’t you, Thomas? That poor woman found in St. Mary’s churchyard?”

  “Yes.” He kissed her gently, then again, hoping she would not talk about it. He was so tired he hurt, and there was nothing to say.

  As she grew older Charlotte was learning when to keep her own counsel a little more, but this was not one of those occasions. She had read the extra edition of the newspaper with horror and pity, cooked two dinners for Pitt and had to abandon them both, and she expected at the very least that he would share with her the thoughts and some of the feelings that had possessed him during the day.

  “Are you going to find out who she was?” she asked, pulling back and starting for the kitchen. “Have you eaten?”

  “No, of course I haven’t,” he said wearily, following her. “But don’t bother cooking anything now.”

  Her eyebrows shot up, but this time she glanced at his face and bit her tongue. Behind her on the blackened and polished range the kettle was billowing clouds of steam.

  “Would you like cold mutton, pickle, and fresh bread?” she asked sweetly. “And a cup of tea?”

  He smiled in spite of himself. It would be easier, and pleasanter in the long run, to surrender.

  “Yes, I would.” He sat down, putting his jacket over the back of the chair.

  She hesitated, then decided it would be wiser to make the tea before saying anything more, but there was a little upward quirk at the corner of her mouth.

  Five minutes later he had three slices of crumbly bread, a pile of homemade chutney—Charlotte was very good at chutney and marmalade—several slices of meat, and a breakfast cup full of steaming tea.

  Charlotte had contained herself long enough. “Are you going to find out who she was?”

  “I doubt it,” he said, filling his mouth with food.

  She stared at him solemnly. “Won’t somebody report her missing? Bloomsbury is quite a respectable area. People who have parlormaids notice if they’re gone.”

  In spite of their six years of marriage and all the cases she had one way or another found herself involved in, she still carried with her remnants of the innocence in which she had grown up, protected from unpleasantness, imprisoned from the harshness and the excitement of the world, as young ladies of gentility should be. To begin with, Charlotte’s breeding had awed Pitt and, in her blinder moments, angered him. But mostly it disappeared in all the infinitely more important things they shared: laughter at life’s absurdities, tenderness, passion, and anger at the same injustices.

  “Thomas?”

  “My darling Charlotte, she doesn’t have to have come from Bloomsbury. And even if she did, how many maids do you suppose have been dismissed, for any number of reasons, from dishonesty to having been caught in the arms of the master of the house? Others will have eloped!—or been supposed to have—or lifted the family silver and disappeared into the night.”

  “Parlormaids aren’t like that!” she protested. “Aren’t you even going to ask after her?”

  “We have done,” he replied with a tired edge to his voice. Had she no idea how futile it was—and that he would already have done everything he could? Did she not know that much of him, after all this time?

  She bent her head, looking down at the tablecloth. “I’m sorry. I suppose you’ll never know.”

  “Probably not,” he agreed, picking up his cup. “Is that a letter from Emily on the mantelpiece?”

  “Yes.” Emily was her younger sister, who had married as far above herself as Charlotte had descended. “She is staying with Great-aunt Vespasia in Cardington Crescent.”

  “I thought Great-aunt Vespasia lived in Gadstone Park.”

  “She does. They’re all staying with Uncle Eustace March.”

  He grunted. There was nothing to say to that. He had a deep admiration for the elegant, waspish Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, but Eustace March he had never heard of, nor did he wish to.

  “She sounds very unhappy,” Charlotte went on, looking at him anxiously.

  “I’m sorry.” He did not meet her eyes but fished for another piece of bread and the chutney dish. “But there’s nothing we can do. I daresay she’s bored.” This time he did look up, fixing her with something approaching a glare. “And you will go nowhere near Bloomsbury, not even to visit some long lost friend, either of yours or of Emily’s. Is that understood, Charlotte?”

  “Yes, Thomas,” she said with wide eyes. “I don’t think I know anybody in Bloomsbury, anyway.”

  2

  EMILY WAS INDEED profoundly unhappy, in spite of the fact that she looked magnificent in a shimmering aquamarine gown of daring and elegant cut and was sitting in the Marches’ private box at the Savoy. On stage, in all its delicious, lyrical charm, was Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera Iolanthe, of which she was particularly fond. The very idea of a youth half human and half fairy, divided at the waist, normally appealed to her sense of the absurd. Tonight it passed her by.

  The cause of her distress was that for several days now her husband, George, had taken no pains at all to hide the fact that he very evidently preferred Sybilla March’s company to Emily’s. He was perfectly civil, in an automatic kind of way, which was worse than rudeness. Rudeness would at least have meant he was sharply aware of her, not dimly, as of something blurred at the edge of his vision. It was Sybilla’s presence that brought the light to his face, it was she his eyes followed, she whose words held his attention, whose wit made him laugh.

  Now he was sitting behind her, and to Emily she looked as gaudy as some overblown flower, in her flame-colored gown, with her white skin and peat-water-dark eyes and all that opulent mass of hair. In spite of the hurt and the foolishness of it, Emily glanced sideways at him often enough to know that George barely looked at the stage. The hero’s plight did not move him in the slightest, nor the heroine’s winsome flirtations, nor the fairy Queen nor Iolanthe herself. He did smile and move his fingers gently in time to “The Peers’ Song,” which surely would move anyone at all, and his attention was caught for a moment’s sheer pleasure in the dancing trio, with the Lord High Chancellor kicking his legs in the air with abandoned glee.

  Emily could feel the misery and panic growing inside her. Everything around was color, gaiety, and sound; every face she could see was smiling—George at Sybilla, Uncle Eustace March at himself, Sybilla’s husband, William, at the fantasy on stage. His youngest sister, Tassie, only nineteen, thin as her mother had been and with a shock of hair the color of sunlight on apricots, was definitely smiling at the principal tenor. Old Mrs. March, her grandmother, was twitching the corner of her tight lips upward in spite of herself; she did not care to be amused. Great-aunt Vespasia, Tassie’s maternal grandmother, on the other hand, was delighted. She had a marked sense of the ridiculous and had long ago ceased to care a jot what anyone else thought of her.

  That left only Jack Radley, the single nonfamily gues
t of the evening, currently also staying at Cardington Crescent. He was a ravishingly handsome young man with excellent connections, but unfortunately, no money worth mentioning, and a highly dubious reputation with women. He was another outsider, and for that alone Emily could have liked him, regardless of his grace or his humor. It was fairly obvious that he had been invited with a view to arranging a marriage for Tassie, the only one of the ten March daughters still unmarried. The purpose of this liaison was not yet plain, since Tassie did not appear to be fond of him and had considerably more substantial expectations than he; although his family was related to those who held power he himself had no prospects. William had said unkindly that Eustace hungered for a knighthood—and in time, perhaps, a peerage—as the ultimate accolade to his family’s rise from trade to respectability. But that was surely an observation more malicious than truthful. There was a tension between father and son, a sharpness that intruded like a sudden splinter of glass every now and then, small but surprisingly painful.

  At present William was behind Emily’s chair, and he was the only one she could not see.

  During the interval it was he who brought her wine and a chocolate bonbon, not George; George was standing in the corner laughing at something Sybilla had said. Emily forced herself to make some sort of conversation, knowing it was a failure even as the words fell into hot silence, and the minute after she wished she had not said them. She was relieved when the curtain went up again.

  “I cannot think where Mr. Gilbert gets such ridiculous plots!” Old Mrs. March drummed her fingers irritably when the final applause had died. “There is absolutely no sense in it at all!”

  “There is not meant to be, Grandmama,” Sybilla said with a dreamy smile.

  Mrs. March stared at her over her pince-nez, the black velvet ribbon dangling down her cheek. “Someone who is foolish because nature has so designed them, I pity; someone who is foolish by intention it is beyond me to understand,” she said coldly.

  “That I can well believe,” Jack Radley murmured behind Emily’s ear. “And I’d swear Mr. Gilbert would find her equally incomprehensible—only he wouldn’t care.”

  “My dear Lavinia, he is no more foolish than some of the romances by Madam Ouida, which I see you reading under brown paper covers.”

  Mrs. March’s face froze, but there were pink spots in her cheeks where rouge would have been on a younger woman. She deplored the vulgarity of painting one’s face; women who did that were “of a certain sort.”

  “You are quite mistaken, Vespasia,” she snapped. “It is a pity your vanity prevents you obtaining a pair of spectacles. One of these days you will fall downstairs or otherwise make an unfortunate exhibition of yourself. William! You had better give your grandmama your arm. I don’t wish to be the center of attention as we leave.” She rose to her feet and turned to the door. “Especially of that kind!”

  “You won’t be,” Vespasia retorted. “Not as long as Sybilla insists upon wearing scarlet.”

  “Very suitable for her,” Emily said, before she thought. She had intended it to be inaudible, but just at the precise moment everyone around them stopped speaking and her voice came clearly into the pause.

  There was a touch of color in George’s face, and she looked away instantly, wishing she had bitten her tongue till it bled rather than betray herself so nakedly.

  “I’m so glad you like it,” Sybilla answered quite calmly, rising also. There seemed no end to her aplomb. “We all have colors which flatter us, and those which don’t. I doubt I should look as well as you do in that shade of blue.”

  That made it worse. Instead of spitting back she had been charming. Even now, George was smiling at her. Almost as if some invisible current had designed it, they were swept out of the box into the eddy of people pressing to reach the foyer, George next to Sybilla, offering his arm as if anything less would have been uncivil.

  Emily found herself, hot-faced and stumbling, being pushed and jostled forward with Jack Radley’s arm about her and Great-aunt Vespasia’s beautiful silver head in front.

  Once they reached the foyer it was inescapable that they should meet with people they knew, and be obliged to exchange opinions and inquiries as to health, and all the other chitchat of such an occasion. It swam over her head in a senseless bedlam. She nodded and smiled and agreed with everything that penetrated into her mind. Someone asked after her son, Edward, and she replied that he was at home and very well. Then George nudged her sharply, and she remembered to inquire after the family of the speaker. It all babbled on around her:

  “Delightful performance!”

  “Have you seen Pinafore?”

  “How does that piece go again?”

  “Shall you be at Henley? I do love regattas. Such a delightful thing for a hot day, don’t you agree?”

  “I prefer Goodwood. There is something about the races—all the silks, don’t you know!”

  “But my dear, what about Ascot?”

  “I rather care for Wimbledon, myself.”

  “I haven’t a thing to wear! I must see my dressmaker immediately—I really need an entire new wardrobe.”

  “Wasn’t the Royal Academy too frightful this year!”

  “My dear, I do agree! Perfectly tedious!”

  Clumsily, she survived nearly half an hour of such greetings and comments before at last finding herself alone in her carriage with George beside her, stiff and more distant than a stranger.

  “What on earth is the matter with you, Emily?” George said after they had sat in silence for ten minutes, while carriages ahead of them picked up their owners. Finally the way ahead was clear down the Strand.

  Should she lie, evade the moment of commitment to the quarrel which she knew he would hate? George was tolerant, generous, of an easy nature, but he wanted emotion only at times of his own choosing, and most certainly not now, when he was full of the echoes of such civilized enjoyment.

  Half of her wanted to face him, let all her scalding hurt burst out, demand he explain himself and his wounding and outrageous behavior. But just as she opened her mouth to reply, cowardice overcame her. Once she had spoken it would be too late to draw back; she would have cut off her only retreat. It was so unlike her—she was usually mistress of herself so coolly, with such measured reaction. It was part of what had first drawn him to her. Now she betrayed all that and took the easy lie, despising herself, and hating him for reducing her to it.

  “I don’t feel very well,” she said stiffly. “I think perhaps the theater was a little hot.”

  “I didn’t notice it.” He was still annoyed. “Nor did anyone else.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to point out how profoundly he had been otherwise engaged, but again she avoided the crisis.

  “Then maybe I am feverish.”

  “Spend tomorrow in bed.” There was no sympathy in his voice.

  He just wants me to stay out of the way, she thought, before I become even more of a nuisance and an embarrassment to him. Tears prickled in her eyes, and she swallowed hard, painfully grateful to be in the close, sharp darkness of the carriage. She said nothing, in case her voice betrayed her, and George did not pursue the subject. They rode through the summer night, their way lit by the hundred yellow moons of the gas lamps, hearing nothing but the steady clop-clop of the horses’ hooves and the rumble of the wheels.

  When they reached Cardington Crescent the footman opened the doors, and Emily climbed down and went up the steps under the portico and in through the front door without even glancing to see if George was behind her. It was customary to attend a dinner party before the opera and a supper party afterwards, but old Mrs. March did not feel her health equal to both—although in fact there was nothing whatsoever wrong with her except age—so they had forgone the supper. Now a late meal was served in the withdrawing room, but Emily could not face the laughter, the bright lights of the chandeliers, and the probing eyes.

  “If you will excuse me,” Emily said to no one in particu
lar, “it has been a delightful evening, but I am rather tired and I would prefer to retire. I wish you all a good night.” Not waiting for a reply, she continued straight on to the foot of the stairs before anyone’s voice held her back. It was not George, as she ached for it to be, but Jack Radley, only a pace behind her.

  “Are you all right, Lady Ashworth? You look a little pale. Shall we have something sent up to you?” Already he was at her elbow.

  “No, thank you,” she said quickly. “I am sure I shall be quite well when I have rested.” She must not be seen to be rude—it was so childish. She forced herself to turn and look at him. He was smiling. He really did have the most remarkable eyes; he contrived to look intimate even when she barely knew him, and yet it was not quite enough to be intrusive. She could see quite well how he had gained his reputation with women. It would serve George right if she fell as much in love with Radley as George had with Sybilla!

  “Are you sure?” he repeated.

  “Quite,” she answered expressionlessly. “Thank you.” And she went up the stairs as rapidly as she could without appearing to run. She was only on the landing when she heard the conversation resume, the laughter peal again, the gay lilt of people who are still in the spell of totally carefree pleasure.

  She woke to find herself alone and the sunlight streaming in through a crack in the imperfectly drawn curtains. George was not there, nor had he been. His side of the enormous bed was immaculate, the linen crisp. She had intended to have her breakfast sent up, but now her own company was worse than anyone else’s, and she rang sharply for her maid, refusing morning tea and sending her off to draw a bath and set out Emily’s clothes for the morning.

  She put a wrap round her shoulders and knocked sharply on the dressing room door. After several moments it was opened by George, looking sleepy and rumpled, his thick hair falling loosely, his eyes wide and dark.

  “Oh,” he said, blinking at her. “Since you weren’t well I thought I’d not disturb you, so I had them make up the bed in here.” He did not ask if she was better. He merely looked at her, at her milky skin with its faint blush and her coil of pale honey hair, came to his own conclusion, and retreated back to prepare himself for the day.