Bluegate Fields (11 page)

“Have you parents near to you?” he asked suddenly. “Someone with whom you can stay?”

“Oh, no!” Her face puckered with consternation and she screwed up her handkerchief, absently letting her reticule slide down her skirt to the floor. Charlotte bent and picked it up for her. “Thank you, Mrs. Pitt, you are so kind.” She took it back and clutched it. “No, Mr. Pitt, I couldn’t possibly do that. My place is at home, where I can be of as much support to Maurice as I am able. People must see that I do not for a single moment believe this dreadful thing that has been said about him. It is completely untrue, and I only beg that for justice’s sake you will do everything you can to prove it so. You
will,
won’t you?”

“Please, Mr. Pitt? You will not allow the truth to be buried in such a web of lies that poor Maurice is—” Her eyes filled with tears and she turned away with a sob to rest in Charlotte’s arms. She wept like a child, lost in her own desperation, unconscious of anyone else’s thoughts or judgments.

Charlotte slowly patted her, her eyes meeting Pitt’s helplessly. He could not read what she thought. There was anger, but was it at him, at circumstances, at Mrs. Jerome for intruding and disturbing them with her distress, or at their inability to do anything for her?

“I’ll do my best, Mrs. Jerome,” he said. “I can only find out the truth—I can’t alter it.” How abrasively cruel that sounded, and how sanctimonious!

“Oh, thank you,” she said between sobs and gasps for breath. “I was sure you would—but I am so grateful.” She clung to Charlotte’s hands like a child. “So very grateful.”

The more Pitt thought about it, the less did he find it within what he had observed of Jerome’s character that he should be so impulsive and so inept as to pursue Godfrey while simultaneously conducting an affair with his elder brother. If the man was so driven by his appetite that he had lost all ordinary sense, surely others would have noticed it—many others?

He spent a miserable evening, refusing to talk about it with Charlotte. The next day, he sent Gillivray on what he sincerely believed would be a fool’s errand, searching for a room rented by Jerome or Arthur Waybourne. In the meantime, he took himself back to the Waybournes’ house to interview Godfrey again.

He was received with extreme disfavor.

“We have already been through this exceedingly painful matter in every detail!” Waybourne said sharply. “I refuse to discuss it any further! Hasn’t there been enough—enough obscenity?”

“It would be an obscenity, Sir Anstey, if a man were hanged for a crime we believe he committed but are too afraid of our own distaste to make sure!” Pitt replied very quietly. “It’s a crime of irresponsibility I am not prepared to commit. Are you?”

“You are damned impertinent, sir!” Waybourne snapped. “It is not my duty to see that justice is done. That is what people like you are paid for! You attend to your job, and remember who you are in my house.”

“Yes, sir,” Pitt said stiffly. “Now may I see Master Godfrey, please?”

Waybourne hesitated, his eyes hot, pink-rimmed, looking Pitt up and down. For several moments both men were silent.

“If you must,” he said at last. “But I shall remain here, I warn you.”

“I must,” Pitt insisted.

They stood in mutual discomfort, avoiding each other’s eyes, while Godfrey was sent for. Pitt was aware that his anger was born of confusion within himself, of a growing fear that he would never prove Jerome’s guilt and thereby wipe away the memory of Eugenie’s face, a face that reflected her conviction of the world as she knew it, and of the man whose life she shared in that world.

Waybourne’s hostility was even easier to read. His family had already been mutilated—he was now defending it against any unnecessary turning of the knife in the wounds. Had it been his family, Pitt would have done the same.

Godfrey came in. Then, when he saw Pitt, his face colored and his body suddenly became awkward.

Pitt felt a stab of guilt.

“Yes, sir?” Godfrey stood with his back to his father, close, as if he were a wall, something against which he could retreat.

Pitt ignored the fact that he had not been invited, and sat down in the leather-covered armchair. His position made him look up slightly at the boy, instead of obliging Godfrey to crane up at him.

“Godfrey, we don’t know Mr. Jerome very well,” he began, in what he hoped was a conversational tone. “It is important that we learn everything we can. He was your tutor for nearly four years. You must know him well.”

“Yes, sir—but I never knew he was doing anything wrong.” The boy’s clear eyes were defiant. His narrow shoulders were high and Pitt could imagine the muscles hunched underneath the flannel of his jacket.

“Of course not,” Waybourne said quickly, putting his hand on the boy’s arm. “No one imagines you knew about it, boy.”

Pitt restrained himself. He must learn, fact by fact, small impressions that built a believable picture of a man who had lost years of cold control in a sudden insane hunger—insane because it defied reality, because it could never have achieved anything but the most transient, ephemeral of pleasures while destroying everything else he valued.

Slowly, Pitt asked questions about their studies, about Jerome’s manner, the subjects he taught well and those that appeared to bore him. He questioned whether the tutor’s discipline was good, his temper, his enthusiasms. Waybourne grew more and more impatient, almost contemptuous of Pitt, as if he were being foolish, evading the real issue in a plethora of trivialities. But Godfrey became more confident in his answers.

A picture emerged so close to the man Pitt had imagined that it gave him no comfort at all. There was nothing new to grasp, no new perspective to try on all the fragments he already possessed. Jerome was a good teacher, a disciplinarian with little humor. And what humor he had was far too dry, too measured through years of self-control, to be understandable to a thirteen-year-old born and bred in privilege. Ambition that to Jerome was unachievable was to Godfrey an expected part of the adult life he was being groomed for. He was unaware of any injustice in the relationship with his tutor. They belonged to different levels of society, and would always do so. That Jerome might resent him had never occurred to the boy. Jerome was a schoolmaster; that was not the same thing as possessing the qualities of leadership, the courage of decision, the innate knowledge and acceptance of duty—or the burden, the loneliness of responsibility.

The irony was that perhaps Jerome’s very bitterness was partly born of a whisper at the back of his brain that reminded him of the gulf between them—not only because of birth but because he was too small of vision—too self-obsessed, too aware of his own position—to command. A gentleman is a gentleman because he lives unself-consciously. He is too secure to take offense, too certain of his finances to account for shillings.

All this went through Pitt’s mind as he watched the boy’s solemn, rather smug face. He was at ease now—Pitt was ineffectual, not to be feared after all. It was time to come to the point.

“Did Mr. Jerome show any consistent favoritism toward your brother?” he asked quite lightly.

“No, sir,” Godfrey answered. Then confusion spread on his face as he realized what had half dawned on him through the haze of grief—hints of something that was unknown but abominably shameful, that the imagination hardly dared conjure up, and yet could not help but try. “Well, sir, not that I realized at the time. He was pretty—sort of—well, he spent a lot of time with Titus Swynford, too, when he took lessons with us. He did quite often, you know. His own tutor wasn’t any good at Latin and Mr. Jerome was very good indeed. And he knew Greek, too. And Mr. Hollins—that’s Titus’s tutor—was always getting colds in the head. We called him ‘Sniffles.’ ” He gave a juicy, realistic imitation.

Waybourne’s face twitched with disapproval of mentioning to a person of Pitt’s social inferiority such details of frivolous and rather childish malice.

“And was he also overfamiliar with Titus?” Pitt inquired, ignoring Waybourne.

Godfrey’s face tightened. “Yes, sir. Titus told the that he was.”

“Oh? When did he tell you?”

Godfrey stared back at him without blinking.

“Yesterday evening, sir. I told him that Mr. Jerome had been arrested by the police because he had done something terrible to Arthur. I told him what I told you, about what Mr. Jerome did to me. And Titus said he’d done it to him, too.”

Pitt felt no surprise, only a gray sense of inevitability. Jerome’s weakness had shown itself after all. It had not been the secret thing, erupting without warning, that had struck Pitt as so unlikely. Perhaps surrender to it had been sudden, but once he had recognized it and allowed the hunger to release itself in action, then it had been uncontrollable. It could only have been a matter of time until some adult had seen it and understood it for what it was.

What a tragic mischance that the violence—the murder—had arisen so quickly. If even one of those boys had spoken to a parent, the greater tragedy could have been avoided—for Arthur, for Jerome himself, for Eugenie.

“Thank you.” Pitt sighed and looked up at Waybourne. “I would appreciate it, sir, if you would give me Mr. Swynford’s address so that I can call on him and verify this with Titus himself. You will understand that secondhand testimony, no matter from whom, is not sufficient.”

Waybourne took a breath as if to argue, then accepted the futility of it.

“If you insist,” he said grudgingly.

Titus Swynford was a cheerful boy, a little older than Godfrey. He was broader, with a freckled, less handsome face, but he possessed a natural ease that Pitt found attractive. Pitt was not permitted to see his young sister Fanny. And since he could put forward no argument to justify insisting, he saw only the boy, in the presence of his father.

Mortimer Swynford was calm. Had Pitt been less aware of society’s rules, he might have imagined his courtesy to be friendliness.

“Of course,” he consented, in his rich voice. His manicured hands rested on the back of the tapestried antimacassar. His clothes were immaculate. His tailor had cut his jacket so skillfully it all but disguised the thickening of his body, the considerable swell of his stomach under his waistcoat, the heaviness of his thighs. It was a vanity that Pitt could sympathize with, even admire. He had no such physical defects to mask, but he would dearly like to have possessed even a fraction of the polish, the ease of manner with which Swynford stood waiting, watching him.

“I’m sure you won’t press the matter any further than is absolutely necessary,” he went on. “But you must have enough to stand up in court—we all understand that. Titus—” He gestured toward his son with an embracing sweep. “Titus, answer Inspector Pitt’s questions quite frankly. Don’t hide anything. It is not a time for false modesty or any misplaced sense of loyalty. Nobody cares for a telltale, but there are times when a man is witness to a crime that cannot be permitted to continue, or to go unpunished. Then it is his duty to speak the truth, without fear or favor! Is that not so, Mr. Pitt?”

“Quite so,” Pitt agreed with less enthusiasm than he should have felt. The sentiment was perfect. Was it only Swynford’s aplomb, his supreme mastery of the situation, that made the words sound unnatural? He did not look like a man who either feared or favored anyone. Indeed, his money and his heritage had placed him in a situation where, with a little judgment, he could avoid the need for pleasing others. As long as he obeyed the usual social rules of his class, he could remain exceedingly comfortable.

Titus was waiting.

“You were occasionally tutored by Mr. Jerome?” Pitt rushed in, aware of the silence.

“Yes, sir,” Titus agreed. “Both Fanny and I were. Fanny’s rather clever at Latin, although I can’t see what good it will do her.”

“And what will you do with it?” Pitt inquired.

Titus’s face split with a broad grin.

“I say, you’re rather odd, aren’t you? Nothing at all, of course! But we aren’t allowed to admit that. It’s supposed to be fearfully good discipline—at least that’s what Mr. Jerome said. I think that’s the only reason he put up with Fanny, because she was better at it than any of the rest of us. It would make you sick, wouldn’t it? I mean, girls being better at class, especially a thing like Latin? Mr. Jerome says that Latin is fearfully logical, and girls aren’t supposed to have any logic.”

“Quite sick,” Pitt agreed, keeping a sober face with difficulty. “I gather Mr. Jerome was not very keen on teaching Fanny?”

“Not terribly. He preferred us boys.” His eyes darkened suddenly, and his skin flushed red under his freckles. “That’s what you’re here about, isn’t it? What happened to Arthur, and the fact that Mr. Jerome kept touching us?”

There was no point in denying it; apparently, Swynford had already been very frank.

“Yes. Did Mr. Jerome touch you?”

Titus pulled a face to express a succession of feelings.

“Yes.” He shrugged. “But I never thought about it till Godfrey explained to me what it meant. If I’d known, sir, that it was going to end up with poor Arthur dead, I’d have said something sooner.” His face shadowed; his gray-green eyes were hot with guilt.

Pitt felt a surge of sympathy. Titus was quite intelligent enough to know that his silence could have cost a life.

“Of course.” Pitt put out his hand without thinking and clasped the boy’s arm. “Naturally you would—but there was no way you could know. Nobody wishes to think so ill of someone, unless there is no possible doubt. You cannot go around accusing somebody on a suspicion. Had you been wrong, you could have done Mr. Jerome a fatal injustice.”

“As it is, it’s Arthur who’s dead.” Titus was not so easily comforted. “If I’d said something, I might have saved him.”

Pitt felt compelled to be bolder and risk a deeper wound. “Did you know it was wrong?” he asked. He let go the boy’s arm and sat back again.

“No, sir!” Titus colored, the blood rushing up again under his skin. “To be honest, sir, I still don’t really know exactly. I don’t know whether I wish to know—it sounds rather dirty.”