She looked a little surprised.
He pulled a small, ironic face. “I can’t imagine Alicia dug him up,” he said, meeting her eyes. “Or Dominic?”
Her body relaxed, altering the line of the high lace neck. “No,” she sighed wearily. “Of course not. They would be the last ones to wish him back. It would appear, unless the whole thing is fortuitous after all, that either one of them murdered Augustus or someone believes they did.”
“Tell me about the other people in the Park,” he repeated.
“The old lady is a fearful creature.” Vespasia seldom minced words. “Sits upstairs in her bedroom all day devouring old love letters, and letters of blood and military vainglory from Waterloo and the Crimea. In her own eyes she is the last of a great generation. She savors over and over again every victory in her life, real or imagined, up to the last minute, so she can wring life dry before it is snatched away from her. She doesn’t like Alicia, thinks she has no courage, no style.” A sudden dry twist lit up her face. “I really don’t know whether she would like her better or worse if she thought her capable of having murdered Augustus!”
Pitt hid a smile by turning it into a grimace. “What about the daughter, Verity?”
“Nice girl. Don’t know where she gets it from; must be her mother’s side. Not especially good-looking, but quite a bit of life to her, underneath the well-drilled manners. Hope they don’t marry her off before she has a little fun.”
“How does she get on with Alicia?”
“Well enough, so far as I know. But you needn’t look at her; she would have no idea where to employ a grave robber, and she could hardly do it herself!”
“But she might prompt someone else,” Pitt pointed out. “Someone in love with her—if she thought her stepmother had murdered her father.
Vespasia snorted. “Don’t believe it. Far too devious. She’s a nice child. If she thought such a thing she would have come out and accused her, not gone around persuading someone to desecrate her father’s grave. And she seems genuinely fond of Alicia, unless she’s a far better actress than I take her for.”
Pitt had to agree. The whole thing was preposterous. Perhaps, after all, it was the work of a lunatic and the fact that it was the same body both times only a grotesque mischance. He said as much to Vespasia.
“I tend to disbelieve in coincidences,” she replied reluctantly, “but I suppose they do occur. The rest of the Park are ordinary enough, in their way. Lord St. Jermyn I cannot fault; neither can I like him, in spite of the fact that it is he who will sponsor our bill through Parliament. Hester is a good woman making the best of an indifferent situation. They have four children, whose names I cannot remember.”
“Major Rodney is a widower. He was not at the interment, so you have not seen him yet. He fought in the Crimea, I believe. No one can recall his wife, who must have died thirty-five years ago. He lives with his maiden sisters, Miss Priscilla and Miss Mary Ann. They talk too much and are always making jam and lavender pillows, but are otherwise perfectly pleasant. There is nothing to say about the Cantlays. I believe they are precisely what they seem to be: civil, generous, and a little bored.
“Carlisle is a dilettante; plays the piano rather well, tried to get into Parliament and failed, a bit too radical. Wants to reform. Good family, old money.”
“The only one of any interest is that appalling American who bought number seven, Virgil Smith. I ask you?” She raised her eyebrows as high as they would go. “Who on earth but an American would call a child Virgil? And with a name like Smith! He’s as plain as a ditch, and with manners to suit. He has not the least idea how to conduct himself, which fork to eat with, or how to address a duchess. He talks to cats and dogs in the streets!”
Pitt had spoken to cats and dogs himself, and he found he was warming to the man immediately. “Did he know Lord Augustus?” he asked.
“Of course not! Do you imagine Lord Augustus kept the company of people like that? He had not the imagination!” Her face softened. “Fortunately, I am old enough for it not to matter anymore what company I am seen to keep, and I rather like him. At least he is not a bore.” She looked at Pitt rather pointedly, and he knew that he himself was included in the same bracket of socially impossible people who redeem themselves by not being bores.
He could learn no more from her at present, so, after thanking her for her frankness, he took his leave. This evening he would have to tell Charlotte that Dominic Corde was involved, and he wanted to prepare himself.
Charlotte had not taken more than a cursory interest in the case of grave robbing. It did not concern anyone she knew, not like the murders at Paragon Walk the previous year. She had plenty to keep her busy in the house, and Jemima was consumed with curiosity every minute she was awake. Charlotte spent half her day in household duties, and the other half deciphering Jemima’s questions and supplying answers to them. Time after time she could, with a flash of instinct, understand what Jemima meant and repeat the words over clearly to be imitated with solemn diligence.
By six o’clock when Pitt came home, cold and wet, she was tired herself and as glad as he to sit down. It was in the comfortable silence after dinner that he told her. He had debated how to phrase it, whether to lead up to it or simply be bold. In the end his own urgency overtook him.
“I went to see Aunt Vespasia today.” He looked at her, then away again, into the fire. “About the grave robbing. She knows everyone in Gadstone Park.”
Charlotte waited for him to continue.
Usually he was good at being evasive, coming to things in his own way, but this was too powerful; it forced itself to be said.
“Dominic is involved!”
“Dominic?” She was incredulous; it was too unbelievable, too unexpected to have sense. “What do you mean?”
“Dominic Corde is involved with the Fitzroy-Hammonds. Lord Augustus died a few weeks ago, and his corpse has been unburied twice and left to be found, once on the box of a hansom cab and once in his own pew in church. Alicia, his wife, now his widow, had an admirer, and has had for some time—Dominic Corde!”
She sat quite still, repeating his words over inside her head, trying to grasp them. She had not even thought of Dominic for months; now all her adolescent dreams flooded back, embarrassing in their gaucheness and their fervor. She felt the color burn up her face and wished Pitt had never known anything about it, that she had been less transparent in her infatuation when he had first met her in Cater Street.
Then she began to realize the enormity of it. He had said Dominic was involved. Did he really imagine Dominic had had something to do with disinterring the body? She could not imagine it—not because of the cruelty or the desecration of it, but because she did not believe Dominic had the heat of emotion or the courage in him to do such a wild thing.
“How involved?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” His voice was unusually sharp. “I should imagine he means to marry her!”
For once he had misunderstood her. “I mean how is he involved with digging up the body?” she corrected. “Surely you don’t think he could have done it? Why should he?”
He hesitated, searching her eyes, trying to gauge what she was thinking, how much it mattered to her. He had seen the color in her face at the mention of Dominic’s name, and it brought a coldness to him, an uncertainty he had not known for years, not since his father had lost his job and the family had left the great estate where he had been born and grown up.
“I don’t imagine he did,” he answered. “But I have to consider the possibility that Lord Augustus did not die as naturally as was supposed at the time.”
The blood drained out of her face. “You mean murder?” Her tongue was dry. “You think Dominic might have murdered him? Oh, no—I don’t believe it! I know him—he is not—” She could not think of a way to say it without cruelty, and less than justice.