Highgate Rise (40 page)

He was obviously surprised to see her, when the landlady showed her in, but the expression on his face showed far more pleasure than irritation. If he minded being interrupted in his meal he hid it with great skill.

“Mrs. Pitt. How very agreeable to see you.” He rose, setting his napkin aside, and came around to greet her, holding out his hand and taking hers in a strong, warm grip.

“I apologize for calling at such an inconvenient time.” She was embarrassed already, and she had not yet even begun. “Please do not allow me to spoil your luncheon.” It was a fatuous remark. She had already done so by her mere presence. Whatever she said, he would not allow her to wait in the parlor while he ate in the dining room, and even if he were to, it could hardly be a comfortable repast in such circumstances. She felt her face coloring with awareness of the clumsy way she had begun. How could she possibly ask him all the intimate and personal questions she wished? Whether she ever learned if he was a fool—in Aunt Vespasia’s terms of reference—she herself most certainly was.

“Have you eaten?” he asked, still holding her hand.

She seized the opportunity he offered.

“No—no, I have somehow mislaid time this morning, and it is much later than I had realized.” It was a lie, but a very convenient one.

“Then Mrs. Turner will fetch you something, if you care to join me.” He indicated the table set for one. Whatever other lodgers there were resident, they appeared to take their midday meal elsewhere.

“I would not dream of inconveniencing Mrs. Turner.” She had only one answer open to her. She cooked herself; she knew perfectly well any woman with the slightest economy in mind did not prepare more than she knew would be required. “She cannot have been expecting me. But I should
be most happy to take a cup of tea, and perhaps a few slices of bread and butter—if she would be so good. I had a late breakfast, and do not wish for a full meal.” That was not true either, but it would serve. She had eaten a considerable number of tomato sandwiches at Aunt Vespasia’s.

He swung his arms wide in an expansive gesture and walked over to the bell, pulling it sharply.

“Excellent,” he agreed, smiling because he knew as well as she did that they were reaching a compromise of courtesy and truth. “Mrs. Himer!” His voice rang through the room and must have been clearly audible to her long before she had even entered the hall, let alone the dining room.

“Yes, Dr. Shaw?” she said patiently as she opened the door.

“Ah! Mrs. Turner, can you bring a pot of tea for Mrs. Pitt—and perhaps a few slices of bread and butter. She is not in need of luncheon, but some slight refreshment would be most welcome.”

Mrs. Turner shook her head in a mixture of doubt and acceptance, glanced once at Charlotte, then hurried away to do as she was requested.

“Sit down, sit down,” Shaw offered, drawing out a chair for her and holding it while she made herself comfortable.

“Please continue with your meal.” She meant it as more than good manners. She knew he worked hard, and hated to think of him obliged to eat his boiled mutton, potatoes, vegetables and caper sauce cold.

He returned to his own seat and began to eat again with considerable appetite.

“What can I do for you, Mrs. Pitt?” It was a simple question and no more than courtesy dictated. Yet meeting his eyes across the polished wood set with dried flowers, a silver cruet stand and assorted handmade doilies, she knew any evasion would meet his immediate knowledge, and contempt.

She did not want to make a fool of herself in his estimation. She was surprised how painful the idea was. And yet she must say something quickly. He was watching her and waiting. His expression had a remarkable warmth; he was
not seeking to find the slightest fault with her, and her sudden realization of that only made it worse. Old memories of other men who had admired her, more than admired, came back with a peculiar sharpness, and a sense of guilt which she had thought forgotten.

She found herself telling the truth because it was the only thing that was tolerable.

“I followed Mrs. Shaw’s work,” she said slowly. “I began with the parish council, where I learned very little.”

“You would,” he agreed, his eyes puzzled. “She started from my patients. There was one in particular who did not get better, regardless of my treatment of her. Clemency was concerned, and when she visited her she began to realized it was the condition of the house, the damp, the cold, the lack of clean water and any sanitation. She never would recover as long as she lived there. I could have told her that, but I didn’t because I knew there was nothing that could be done to better it, and it would only cause her distress. Clem felt people’s misery very much. She was a remarkable woman.”

“Yes I know,” Charlotte said quickly. “I went to those same houses—and I asked the same questions she had. I have learned why they didn’t complain to the landlord—and what happened to those who did.”

Mrs. Himer knocked briskly on the door, opened it and brought in a tray with teapot, cup and saucer and a plate of thin bread and butter. She put it down on the table, was thanked, and departed.

Charlotte poured herself a cup of tea, and Shaw resumed his meal.

“They got evicted and had to seek accommodation even less clean or warm,” Charlotte continued. “I followed them down the scale from one slum to another, until I saw what I think may be the worst there is, short of sleeping in doorways and gutters. I was going to say I don’t know how people survive—but of course they don’t. The weak die.”

He said nothing, but she knew from his face that he understood it even better than she did, and felt the same helplessness, the anger that it should be, the desire to lash out at
someone—preferably the clean and comfortable who chose to laugh and look the other way—and the same pity that haunted both of them whenever the eyes closed and the mind relaxed vigilance, when the hollow faces came back, dull with hunger and dirt and weariness.

“I followed her all the way to one particular street she went where the houses were so crammed with people old and young, men and women, children and even babies, all together without privacy or sanitation, twenty or thirty in a room.” She ate a piece of bread and butter because it had been provided—memory robbed her of appetite. “Along the corridor and up the stairs was a brothel. Down two doors was a gin mill with drunken women rolling about on the steps and in the gutter. In the basement was a sweatshop where women worked eighteen hours a day without daylight or air—” She stopped, but again she saw in his eyes that he knew these places; if not this particular one, then a dozen others like it.

“I discovered how hard it is to find out who owns such buildings,” she continued. “They are hidden by rent collectors, companies, managers, lawyers’ offices, and more companies. At the very end there are powerful people. I was warned that I would make enemies, people who could make life most unpleasant for me, if I persisted in trying to embarrass them.”

He smiled bleakly, but still did not interrupt. She knew without question that he believed her. Perhaps Clemency had shared the same discoveries and the same feelings with him.

“Did they threaten her also?” she asked. “Do you know how close she came to learning names of people who might have been afraid she would make their ownership public?”

He had stopped eating altogether, and now he looked down at his plate, his face shadowed, a painful mixture of emotions conflicting within him.

“You think it was Clem they meant to kill in the fire, don’t you?”

“I did,” she admitted, and saw him stiffen. His eyes lifted instantly and met hers, searching, startled. “Now I’m not
sure,” she finished. “Why should anyone wish to kill you? And please don’t give me an evasive answer. This is too serious to play games with words. Clemency and Amos Lindsay are dead already. Are you sure there will be no more? What about Mrs. Turner and Mr. Oliphant?”

He winced as if she had struck him, and the pain in his eyes was dark, the tightening of his lips undisguised. The knife and fork slid from his hands.

“Do you imagine I haven’t thought? I’ve been through every case I have treated in the last five years. There isn’t a single one that it would be even sane to suspect of murder, let alone anything one would pursue.”

There was no point in turning back now, even though no doubt Thomas had already asked exactly the same questions.

“Every death?” she said quietly. “Are you sure absolutely every death was natural? Couldn’t one of them, somewhere, be murder?”

A half-unbelieving smile curled the corners of his lips.

“And you think whoever did it may fear I knew—or may come to realize that—and is trying to kill me to keep me silent?” He was not accepting the idea, simply turning over the possibility of it and finding it hard to fit into the medicine he knew, the ordinary domestic release or tragedy of death.

“Couldn’t it be so?” she asked, trying to keep the urgency out of her voice. “Aren’t there any deaths which could have been profitable to someone?”

He said nothing, and she knew he was remembering, and each one had its own pain. Each patient who had died had been some kind of failure for him, small or great, inevitable or shocking.

A new thought occurred to her. “Perhaps it was an accident and they covered it up, and they are afraid you realized the truth, and then they became afraid you would suspect them of having done it intentionally.”

“You have a melodramatic idea of death, Mrs. Pitt,” he said softly. “Usually it is simple: a fever that does not break but exhausts the body and burns it out; or a hacking cough that ends in hemorrhage and greater and greater weakness
until there is no strength left. Sometimes it is a child, or a young person, perhaps a woman worn down by work and too many childbirths, or a man who has labored in the cold and the wet till his lungs are wasted. Sometimes it’s a fat man with apoplexy, or a baby that was never strong enough to live. Surprisingly often in the very end it is peaceful.”

She looked at his face, the memories so plain in his eyes, the grief not for the dead but for the confusion, anger and pain of those left behind; his inability to help them, even to touch the loneliness of that sudden, awful void when the soul of someone you love leaves the shell and gradually even the echo of life goes and it becomes only clay in the form of a person but without the substance—like a cold hearth when the fire is gone.

“But not always,” she said with regret, hating to have to pursue it. “Some people fight all the way, and some relatives don’t accept. Might there not be someone who felt you did not do all you could? Perhaps not from malice, simply neglect, or ignorance?” She said it with a small, sad smile, and so gently he could not think that she believed it herself.

A pucker formed between his brows and he met her eyes with a mild amusement.

“No one has ever showed anything beyond a natural distress. People are often angry, if death is unexpected; angry because fate has robbed them and they have to have something to blame, but it passes; and to be honest no one has suggested I could have done more.”

“No one?” She looked at him very carefully, but there was no evasion in his eyes, no faint color of deceit in his cheeks. “Not even the Misses Worlingham—over Theophilus’s death?”

“Oh—” He let out his breath in a sigh. “But that is just their way. They are among those who find it hard to accept that someone as … as full of opinion and as sound as Theophilus could die. He was always so much in evidence. If there was any subject under discussion, Theophilus would express his views, with lots of words and with great certainty that he was right.”

“And of course Angeline and Celeste agreed with him—” she prompted.

He laughed sharply. “Of course. Unless he was out of sympathy with his father. The late bishop’s opinions took precedence over everyone else’s.”

“And did they disagree overmuch?”

“Very little. Only things of no importance, like tastes and pastimes—whether to collect books or paintings; whether to wear brown or gray; whether to serve claret or burgundy, mutton or pork, fish or game; whether chinoiserie was good taste—or bad. Nothing that mattered. They were in perfect accord on moral duties, the place and virtue of women, and the manner in which society should be governed, and by whom.”

“I don’t think I should have cared for Theophilus much,” she said without thinking first and recalling that he had been Shaw’s father-in-law. The description of him sounded so much like Uncle Eustace March, and her memories of him were touched with conflicting emotions, all of them shades of dislike.

He smiled at her broadly, for a moment all thought of death banished, and nothing there but his intense pleasure in her company.

“You would have loathed him,” he assured her. “I did.”

An element in her wanted to laugh, to see only the easy and absurd in it; but she could not forget the virulence in Celeste’s face as she had spoken of her brother’s death, and the way Angeline had echoed it with equal sincerity.

“What did he die of, and why was it so sudden?”

“A seizure of the brain,” he replied, this time looking up and meeting her eyes with complete candor. “He suffered occasional severe headaches, great heat of the blood, dizziness and once or twice apoplectic fits. And of course now and again gout. A week before he died he had a spasm of temporary blindness. It only lasted a day, but it frightened him profoundly. I think he looked on it as a presage of death-”

“He was right.” She bit her lip, trying to find the words
to ask without implying blame. It was difficult. “Did you know that at the time?”

“I thought it was possible. I didn’t expect it so soon. Why?”

“Could you have prevented it—if you had been sure?”

“No. No doctor knows how to prevent a seizure of the brain. Of course not all seizures are fatal. Very often a patient loses the use of one side of his body—or perhaps his speech, or his sight—but will live on for years. Some people have several seizures before the one that kills them. Some lie paralyzed and unable to speak for years—but as far as one can tell, perfectly conscious and aware of what is going on around them.”