Midnight at Marble Arch (12 page)

“How do you do, Mrs. Hythe?” he replied. “I am sorry to intrude on your evening with such an unhappy subject.”

She sat down gracefully and the men followed her lead.

“That is hardly of any importance, if we can assist you in any way.” She dismissed it with a slight gesture of one hand. “I liked Catherine very much. She was funny and wise and brave. I have no idea who could have wanted to kill her, but if I can help you find him, then all my time is yours.” She looked at him gravely, waiting for his answer.

He told her of his conversation with Flaxley, and then later with Quixwood, explaining why he needed to know Catherine’s friends, but always skirting around the subject of rape. However, he was not subtle enough to deceive her.

“Was his intention robbery?” she said very quietly, almost under her breath. “Or did he attack her … personally?”

There was nothing to be gained by evasion, and he needed her help. “I am afraid it was the latter. The details of that would be better not spoken of.”

“I see.” She did not argue with him, nor respond to her husband’s sudden look of surprise and distress.

“Perhaps if I give you a list of her most recent engagements,” Narraway suggested, “then you can tell me who you remember as also being present, and who might have become close to her recently. I realize it is distasteful, but—”

“We understand,” Hythe interrupted him. He glanced at Maris and then back at Narraway, holding out his hand for the list.

Narraway passed it to him, and watched as he and Maris read it together.

For half an hour they mentioned names back and forth, and Narraway learned something of each of the events Flaxley had described. Hythe appeared to have enjoyed those he had also attended, and there was pleasure in his voice as he told of each. If the grief Hythe exhibited as he remembered Catherine was artificial, he was a superb actor.

But Narraway had known people every bit as convincing who would kill without hesitation if their own needs were thwarted or their safety in jeopardy. Quixwood was right: Hythe and Catherine had clearly been good friends, and Maris also, especially where music was concerned. If there had been an affair between Catherine and Hythe, then it was well concealed. But he had to grant that it was easily possible. Everything Hythe said seemed to be true, and yet looking at the tenseness in his shoulders, the awkward way he sat, without moving, Narraway grew increasingly certain that he was concealing something that mattered, something that frightened him.

Maris explained that she was close to one of her sisters, recently widowed, and she spent much of her time helping her, offering comfort, simply being there so her sister was not alone. Alban Hythe could not account for his time on most of these occasions, including the night of Catherine’s murder.

The three conversed for nearly two hours. Afterward, Narraway thanked them both and left, walking out into the soft dusk of the summer evening, the last light fading pink in the west. He was saddened by the possibility that Alban Hythe had begun an affair with Catherine because of her loneliness and his temporary solitude, and perhaps a weakness in both of them, played on by the depth of intellectual
understanding and mutual love of the interesting, beautiful and creative.

But what terrible change in their seeming friendship had led to such violence? Had he wanted more and she refused him? Or had she wanted more, possibly even a commitment, and he refused her? Had she threatened his safety in some way and he responded from a fearful darkness in his character she had not for a moment imagined?

Narraway walked along the pavement toward the lights of the main thoroughfare and felt sadness overwhelm him. His anger at Hythe also returned, for the life and passion that, he was beginning to suspect, Hythe might’ve destroyed.

5

“M
AMA
, I
CAN
’
T POSSIBLY
wear that!” Jemima said indignantly. “I shall look terrible. People will think I am ill. They’ll be offering me chairs to sit on, in case I fall over.” Her face was flushed with temper and frustration. She appeared the picture of health, as if it would take a runaway carriage to knock her off balance, not a fainting fit.

Pitt looked up from the newspaper he was reading. They were all in the parlor, the summer evening air drifting in from the open French windows. Daniel was absorbed in a
Boy’s Own Paper
and Charlotte had been looking at the
London Illustrated News
.

Pitt regarded the dress Jemima was holding up. “You wanted that last year,” he pointed out. “It suited you excellently.”

“Papa, that was last year!” she said with exasperation at his lack of understanding.

“You haven’t changed all that much.” He looked her up and down quite carefully. “An inch taller, perhaps,” he conceded.

“Two inches taller,” she corrected him. “At the very least. And anyway, I’m completely different.” It distressed her that he had not noticed.

“You don’t look completely different to me,” he answered.

“Yes, she does,” Daniel argued. “She’s a girl. She’s getting all …” Suddenly he realized what he was saying and was lost for the appropriate words.

Jemima blushed. “You’re trying to make me look like a child,” she accused her father. “Genevieve’s father does the same thing. He doesn’t want her ever to become a woman.”

“You’re fourteen,” Pitt said flatly. “You
are
a child.”

“I’m not! That’s a terrible thing to say!” Unaccountably Jemima was on the edge of tears.

Daniel bent his head back to his
Boy’s Own Paper
, lifting it a little higher to hide his face.

Pitt looked at Charlotte. He had no idea how he had offended, or what to do about it. It was totally unreasonable.

Charlotte had grown up with two sisters and there was no mystery in it for her.

“You are not having a purple dress, and that’s all there is to it,” she told her daughter. “If you feel that that one is too young for you, then wear the blue one.”

“Blue’s ordinary,” Jemima responded. “Everyone has blue. It’s dull. It’s safe!” That was the worst condemnation she could think of.

“You don’t need anything special,” Pitt told her gently. “You’re very pretty whatever you wear.”

“You just say that because you’re my father!” Her voice choked as if she could not control her tears any longer. “You have to like the way I look.”

“I don’t!” He was surprised and a little defensive himself. “If you wore something I didn’t like, I would say so.”

“You’d have my hair in braids down my back as if I were ten!” she said furiously. She turned to Charlotte. “Mama, everyone wears blue, it’s boring. And pink looks like you’re a child!”

“Yellow?” Daniel suggested helpfully.

“Then I shall look as if I have jaundice!” she responded. “Why can’t I wear purple?”

Daniel was not to be put off. “Green?”

“Then I’ll look sickly! Just be quiet!”

“Aunt Emily wears green,” he pointed out.

“She’s got fair hair, stupid!” she shouted at him.

“Jemima!” Charlotte said sharply. “That was quite uncalled for. He was being perfectly sensible, and pale green would look very nice—”

“I don’t want to be ‘nice’!” Jemima said furiously. “I want to be interesting, different, grown up.” The tears spilled from her eyes onto her cheeks. “I want to look lovely. Why can’t you understand?” Without waiting for an answer she swung round and stormed out. They heard her feet banging on the treads up the stairs and then a door on the landing slam.

“What did I do?” Daniel asked incredulously.

“Nothing,” Charlotte assured him.

“Then why is she like that?”

“Because she’s fourteen,” Charlotte replied. “She wants to look nice at the supper party she’s going to.”

“She always looks nice.” Pitt was reasonable, and confused. “She’s very pretty. In fact she looks more like you every day.”

Charlotte smiled ruefully. “I’m not sure she’d appreciate your saying so, my dear.”

“She did the other day,” he argued.

“That was then, this is now,” she answered. There was no use trying to explain it to him. He had grown up without sisters. Girls of Jemima’s age were as incomprehensible to him as mermaids or unicorns.

Daniel shrugged and turned the next page of his
Boy’s Own
, to the story of a pirate adventure off the coast of India. “Why couldn’t she have been a boy?” he said resignedly. “That would have been better for all of us.”

“It would have been easier,” Charlotte corrected him. “Not better.”

Pitt and Daniel exchanged glances, but both were wise enough not to take issue with her.

A
N HOUR LATER
C
HARLOTTE
went upstairs to Jemima’s room and knocked on the door. When there was no answer she rapped sharply, then went in anyway. Jemima was sitting on the bed, her hair loose and tangled, her cheeks tearstained. She glared defiantly at her mother.

“I suppose you’ve come to tell me off,” she said belligerently. “That I have to wear blue, and be glad of it. And that if I smile I’ll look charming anyway … and about as interesting as a jug of milk!”

Charlotte did not ask whose interest Jemima was working to awaken; she already knew. His name was Robert Durbridge and he was eighteen. He was far too old for Jemima at the moment, but otherwise was a pleasant-seeming young man, the son of the local rector and bent on every kind of rebellion against the path in the Church that his parents had planned for him.

“Wear a green sash around your waist and you will be quite different from other girls,” she suggested helpfully.

“What?” Jemima’s eyes flew wide open. “Mama, you can’t wear blue and green together! Nobody does that!”

Charlotte smiled at her. “Then you will be the first. I thought you wanted to be different. Have you changed your mind?”

“Blue and green?”

“Why not? Blue sky and green trees. You see it all the time.”

“I don’t want to look like a field,” Jemima said in disgust.

“A willow tree against the sky,” Charlotte corrected her. “Stop being so obstructive. There is nothing less attractive than bad temper, I promise you. Now wash your face and pull yourself together. It is not your father’s fault, or your brother’s, that you are full of emotion and indecision. It’s part of growing up and we all experience it. You are behaving as if you are the center of the world, and you aren’t.”

“You don’t understand!” Jemima wailed, her face crumpling.

“Of course not,” Charlotte agreed with a smile. “I was never fourteen,
I went straight from being twelve to being twenty. So did both of my sisters.”

“Twenty!” Jemima was horrified. “You mean I’m going to feel like this for another six years?”

“Please heaven, I hope not!” Charlotte said with feeling.

In spite of herself, Jemima smiled, and then started to giggle. “Can I really wear a green sash on my dress?”

“Of course. So you had better walk with your head up, and smile to everyone, because they will all be looking at you, including young Robert Durbridge.”

“Do you think so?” Jemima blushed. “But then maybe I should wear …”

“Jemima!” Charlotte interrupted.

“Yes, Mama.”

“The subject is closed.”

C
HARLOTTE AND
P
ITT ATTENDED
yet another reception that duty obliged them to, but Charlotte admitted to herself that there were elements of it she thoroughly enjoyed, not the least being that she was nobody’s guest. She was here because Pitt was invited.

In the swirl of greetings, polite conversations, and the swapping of suitably trivial inquiries and answers, they began to move among the throng of people. Charlotte noticed Vespasia, strikingly elegant as usual. Pitt looked for those with whom he needed to speak.

Charlotte met various women she had encountered before, but found her attention wandering. They were discussing family matters: who was engaged to marry whom; love affairs and misfortunes she was thankful did not concern her. She realized that all too soon she would have to consider Jemima finding a suitable husband, but she had three or four years’ grace yet before that needed to be a preoccupation. When she was young and single she had loathed being presented to various people in the hope that some young man might please her, and she him. Now she felt an embarrassing wave of sympathy for her own mother. She knew perfectly well that she had been extraordinarily difficult,
and in the end decided to marry a policeman and virtually disappear from Society.

By that time her mother had been relieved to accept any settled life for her middle daughter and had put up barely any resistance.

She was still smiling at the memory when she saw Angeles Castelbranco with some other young women. They all appeared to be laughing with two young men, both of whom were quite openly admiring Angeles. Charlotte could not blame them or find it surprising. She was a beautiful young woman, and at the moment her face was flushed and her eyes brilliant.

Then Neville Forsbrook approached the group, smiling.