CHARLOTTE WAS ASLEEP when Pitt reached the bedroom, but just as she had been on her return from London, he was unable to wait until morning to share with her what he had learned. He was less gentle about waking her. He made no pretense at diplomacy. He walked straight in and lit the main gaslamp and turned it up.
“Charlotte,” he said in a normal voice.
She grunted at the brightness of the light and turned over slowly, hiding her face under the coverlet.
“Charlotte,” he repeated, going over and sitting on the bed. He felt abrupt, but it was not a time for approaching softly. “Wake up. I need to speak to you.”
She caught the urgency in his voice even through the remnants of sleep. She sat up, blinking and shielding her eyes, her hair too loosely braided to stay in place, and now falling over her shoulders.
“What is it? What’s happened?” She stared at him, not yet alarmed because there was no fear in him. “Do you know who did it?”
“No … but it wasn’t Justine.”
“Yes, it was.” She was awake now, still blinking in the light, but feeling curious. “It had to be. Why else would she be on the landing in a maid’s dress? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“She went in and hit him on the head, then pulled him under the water,” he agreed. “But she didn’t kill him … he was already dead!”
She glanced at him as if she were not sure if she had grasped what he had said.
“Already dead? Are you sure? How do you know?”
“Yes, I am sure, because Piers said so—”
“Piers?” She was sitting up now. “If he knew, why didn’t he say before?” Her face darkened. “Thomas … maybe he knew it was Justine and he is—”
“No.” He was quite certain. “No, he does not know what it means. He merely told me the evidence ….”
“What evidence?” she demanded. “What evidence does he know now that he didn’t know before?” She was shivering as the bedclothes fell from around her.
“We took the body to the laundry and did something of an autopsy …. Charlotte, Justine had every intention of killing Ainsley Greville, but someone else got there before her and broke his neck … with a single, very expert blow … someone who knows how to kill and has probably done it before.”
She shuddered, but seemed to have forgotten the bedclothes within a hand’s reach of her.
“You mean an assassin,” she said in a whisper. “One of the Irishmen here.”
“Yes, I can think of no other answer,” he agreed.
“Padraig Doyle?”
“I don’t know. Possibly.”
“Eudora will never get over it.” She stared at him. “Thomas …”
“What?” He thought he knew what she was going to say, something about pity and that it was not his fault; not to be too hurt for her, grieved, and above all guilty. He was wrong.
“You must prepare yourself for the possibility that she already knows,” she answered.
Everything in him was repelled by the idea—it was appalling. It was unimaginable that behind those soft features and wounded eyes was an accomplice, even a silent one, in cold, indiscriminate political murder.
Charlotte was looking at him with hurt and sorrow in her face, but for him, not for Eudora. “She is very close to her brother,” she went on quietly. “And she is as Irish as any of them, even if she doesn’t seem like it or hasn’t lived there for twenty years. She might still carry the old hatreds and the unreason which seems to infect everybody in this issue.”
She put out her hand and laid it softly over his. “Thomas … you’ve seen them, you’ve heard them argue. You can see what happens to people once they start talking about Ireland. One man’s freedom is seen as another man’s exploitation and loss, or theft of all he has built up over the generations, and far worse than that, and far more justifiable to defend, as loss of his freedom of faith. A Nationalist independent Ireland would be Roman Catholic. Its laws would be Catholic, whatever the beliefs of the individual. There would be censorship of books according to the Papal Index. All sorts of things would be banned.”
She grasped the coverlets and pulled them half around her.
“I resented it when my own father told me what to read and what not to. I should rebel if the Pope did. He’s not anything to do with me. But in a Catholic Ireland some books would be illegal. I wouldn’t even know they existed ….I’d learn only what the Church decided I should hear. Maybe I don’t want to read them ….I might even agree ….I just want the choice to be mine.”
He did not interrupt.
“On all things, I want laws my own people can vote on ….” She smiled lopsidedly. “Actually, I’d even like to vote on them myself. But either way, I won’t be told by a lot of cardinals in Rome what to do.”
“You’re exaggerating …” he protested.
“No, I’m not. In a Catholic state the Church has the last word.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’ve been talking to Kezia Moynihan. And before you say she is exaggerating too, she told me proof of it. There’s a lot they say which I think is nonsense. They blame the Catholics for all kinds of things, but that much is true. Where the Church of Rome has power, it is absolute. You can’t force religion on other people, Thomas. Mostly I think the Americans have it right. You should keep church and state separate ….”
“What do you know about the Americans?” He was startled. He had never thought of her as having the slightest interest in, let alone knowledge of, such things.
“Emily was telling me. Do you know how many millions of Irish people have emigrated to America since the potato famine?”
“No. Do you?”
“Yes … about three million,” she replied unhesitatingly. “That’s about one in three of the whole population, and it’s largely the young and able-bodied. Nearly all of them went to America, where they could find work—and food.”
“What is that to do with Eudora?” He was shaken by the information, and by the fact that Charlotte apparently knew it, but nothing could take the image of Eudora entirely from his mind.
“Only that the situation is desperate,” she answered, still looking at him with the same gentleness. “There are many people who think when issues are so large that the end justifies any means, even murder of those who stand in the way of what they see as a larger justice.”
He said nothing.
She hesitated, seeming on the brink of leaning forward and putting her arms around him, then changed her mind. Instead she climbed out of bed and went for her dressing robe.
“Where are you going?” he said in surprise. “You’re not going to Eudora?”
“No … I’m going to Justine.”
“Why?”
She put her robe on and tied the long sash. She was completely awake now, but she did not bother to wash her face from the ewer of cold water or run the brush over her tangled hair.
“Because I want to tell her she didn’t kill Ainsley Greville. She thinks she did.”
He stood up. “Charlotte, I don’t know that I want Justine to know ….”
“Yes you do,” she said firmly. “If you have to arrest Padraig Doyle tomorrow, you need this dealt with tonight. Don’t come with me. I can speak to her better on my own. We need to know the truth.”
He sat frozen on the bed. She was right in that they needed the truth, but he also dreaded it.
She went quietly along the corridor, across the landing and into the other wing. The whole house was silent. Everyone had long since gone to bed, apart from Pitt and Tellman, and presumably Piers. But he would not go to Justine’s room at this hour, and certainly not after what he had just been involved in. He would not take the smell and the emotional chaos of such a thing to her.