“I’m special friends,” Evie said, turning the phrase over in her mind.
“Of course you are, darling. You are my special friend,” Emily assured her. “Shall we draw a picture? I’ll do this part and you can do the house, over there.”
Evie began enthusiastically, grasping the crayon in her left hand. Emily thought of changing it to the right, and decided not to.
She was concerned over Charlotte. It was going to be very difficult for her to adapt to having Pitt no longer in a senior police position. It was not exactly a job to be proud of, but it was moderately respectable. Now he did something she could barely mention, and his cases could not be discussed. Of course the money was another matter altogether, and not as good!
The thing that affected Emily the most was the inability to share in any of it herself. She had in the past helped Charlotte when she was involved in Pitt’s cases, the more colorful and dramatic of them, where people of the higher social strata were implicated. She and Charlotte had access to the withdrawing rooms of society that Pitt would never have. They had almost solved some of the more bizarre and dreadful murders themselves. Lately that had happened less and less, and Emily was beginning to realize how she missed not only Charlotte’s company, and the challenge and excitement of it, but the intrusion into her life of the passions of triumph and despair, danger, judgment, guilt and innocence which had forced her to think more deeply than the comfortable issues of politics which seemed always to do with masses and not individuals, theories and laws rather than the lives of men and women of flesh, dreams, real ability for joy or pain.
If she were to help Charlotte and Thomas again it would be a hard reminder of the urgencies of life and the realities. It would force her to test her beliefs in a way merely thinking never could. She was afraid of it, and for that very reason she also was impelled towards it. Charlotte was away somewhere in Dartmoor. Emily did not have the exact address; Thomas had been very vague. But she would go and see Rose Serracold herself and learn a great deal more about the death of this spirit medium she had been involved with—Maude Lamont.
She dressed in an outdoor costume in the latest fashion from Paris. It was shell pink with broad diagonal stripes of lavender across the skirt, and a white ruff high at the throat. The soft colors were unusual, and remarkably flattering to her.
She made all her duty calls to wives of men with whom it was important to maintain a steady, close connection. She talked about the weather, the trivial news, exchanging compliments and meaningless chatter all afternoon, knowing that the message beneath the words was what mattered.
Then she was free to pursue the questions that had been at the back of her mind since breakfast. She finally gave her coachman instructions to go to the Serracolds’ home. Received by the footman, she was shown into the sun-filled conservatory, heavy with the smell of wet earth and leaves and falling water. She found Rose sitting alone staring at the lily pool. She too was dressed as if for calling, in dramatic olive green and white lace, which with her flaxen hair and extraordinarily slender body made her look as if she were some exotic water flower herself.
But as Emily came closer and Rose looked up, Emily saw the tension in Rose stretching the silk of her gown until it hung without her usual extravagant elegance.
“Emily, I’m so pleased to see you!” she said with relief spreading across her face. “I would not have let anyone else in, I swear it!” Her expression crumpled into one of bewilderment. “Maude Lamont has been killed! I suppose you know that; it was in the newspapers. It happened two days ago . . . I was there! At least I was in the house that evening. Emily, I’ve had the police here this afternoon. I don’t know how to tell Aubrey. What am I going to say?”
This was a time for practicality, not gentleness. If she were to learn anything of value, she could not afford to allow Rose to dominate the conversation. She went straight to the first subject which really mattered. “Did Aubrey not know you were seeing a spiritualist?”
Rose shook her head fractionally, the light gleaming on the polished sheen of her hair.
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“Because he wouldn’t have liked it!” Rose said immediately. “He doesn’t believe.”
Emily thought about it for a moment. There was a lie in it, a concealment. She was not sure what it was, but she was quite certain it had to do with Rose’s reason for going.
“He would find it a little embarrassing,” Rose explained unnecessarily, looking down at the floor, but with a very slight smile on her lips.
“But you went anyway,” Emily pointed out. “Even now, just before the election. Which means you had a reason for going that was so strong it outweighed Aubrey’s wishes, and any damage it might do him, or he would think it might. Are you really so sure of his winning?” She tried to sound sympathetic and to keep out of her voice the impatience she felt at such naive arrogance.
Rose’s eyebrows lifted suddenly. She was about to answer, then the words died on her lips. “I thought I was,” she said instead. Then her voice became urgent. “Do . . . do you think this could make any difference? I didn’t kill her! Please heaven—I needed her alive!”
Emily knew she was intruding, but there was no time for delicacy. “Why did you need her, Rose? What could she possibly give you that matters so much right now?”
“She was my contact with the other side, of course!” Rose said impatiently. “Now I have to find someone else and start all over again! There isn’t time . . .” She bit back the words, knowing she had already said too much.
“Time before what?” Emily pressed. “The election? Is it something to do with the election?” Questions as to why Thomas was still here in London crowded into her mind.
Rose’s expression was closed. “Before Aubrey wins his seat and takes up a place in Parliament,” she answered. “And I have much less privacy.”
She was still lying, or at least telling a half-truth, but Emily could not prove it. Why? Was it a political secret or a personal one? How could she find out? “The man who was here from the police, what did you tell him?” she urged.
“About the other two clients who were there that evening, of course.” Rose stood up and walked over to the bowl of peonies and delphiniums on the wrought-iron table. She poked absentmindedly at the stems, rearranging them to no advantage. “The man from Bow Street seemed to think one of them had done it.” She gave a shiver and tried to disguise it with a shrug. “He was not as I would expect a policeman to be,” she continued. “He was very quiet and polite, but he made me uncomfortable. I would like to think he wouldn’t come again, but I expect he will. Unless, of course, they find very quickly who it was. It must be the man who didn’t believe, I should think. It wouldn’t be the soldier who wished to speak to his son. He cares just as much as I do.”
Emily was confused. She had no idea what Rose was talking about, but this was not the time to admit it. “And if he found something he didn’t like?” she said softly. “What then?”
Rose stopped with a delphinium in her hand, still lifted in the air, her face pinched, eyes miserable. “Then he would be crushed,” she answered, her voice husky. “He would go away in despair . . . and . . . and try to heal himself, I suppose. I don’t know how. What does one do when . . . when you hear the unbearable?”
“Some people would retaliate,” Emily answered, watching Rose’s stiff back, the silk twisted as she stood half turned. “If nothing else, at least to make sure no one else heard the unendurable thing.” Her imagination raced, in spite of the pity she felt for Rose’s very obvious distress. Who were the men? What reason could they have had for killing the medium? What secret had Rose stumbled into?
“That’s what the policeman suggested,” Rose said after a second.