She pulled them away.
“Mr. Pitt won’t allow that, Piers. I’m guilty of a crime … not the crime I intended, but a crime all the same. He’ll arrest me in the morning, I expect. If not then, later, after he solves the real murder and the death of Mr. McGinley.”
“Maybe he won’t,” Charlotte intervened. “It’s legally a crime, of course, but it isn’t one which matters a lot.” She looked at Piers. “Unless, as the nearest relative of the deceased, you want to press a charge of defiling the dead? I don’t know what he’ll do. And I don’t know about Tellman either. I don’t know what they have to do.”
Piers turned to Charlotte, his eyes wide. “What will they do to her? A few months in prison at the worst, surely?” He looked back at Justine. “We can wait ….”
She lowered her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. What medical practice would you have, married to a wife who had spent time in prison, let alone for defiling the bodies of the dead?”
He said nothing, trying to muster an argument.
“You wouldn’t get a single patient,” Charlotte agreed, hating to have to be realistic. “You would have to go abroad, perhaps to America …” The thought began to look better. “That way you would also run no risk of meeting anyone you had known previously.”
Justine turned her head and looked at Charlotte with a wry smile. “How very tactfully put.” She looked at Piers again. “You can’t marry a defiler of bodies, my dear, and you can’t marry a whore either.” She winced at the word, using it to wound herself before he could. “No matter how exclusive or expensive.” She laughed. “I know a lot of respected ladies of rank and wealth have extremely loose morals, but they do it for gifts, not for money, and there is all the difference in the world in that. I don’t really understand why. They don’t do it to earn their living. They have plenty of money; they do it because they are bored. I suppose it is the old difference between amateurs and players.” Her voice was rich with mockery. “Trade is so vulgar, after all.”
They all laughed, jerkily, a little too close to hysteria.
“America,” Piers said, looking at Justine, then at Charlotte.
“America,” Justine agreed.
“What about your mother?” Charlotte asked. “What if she needs you?”
“Me?” Piers looked surprised. “She’s never needed me.”
“And if your uncle Padraig is the one who really killed your father and Lorcan McGinley?”
His face darkened and he looked down again. “It’s pretty possible, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It looks as if it could be either him or Fergal Moynihan, and frankly, I don’t think Fergal has the stomach.”
Piers seemed very slightly amused by her bluntness, but it was the humor of despair.
“No, neither do I. But I think Padraig has. And he had plenty of cause, at least where my father is concerned. But I’m not staying here, so if Mama doesn’t want to go back to Ireland, to the Doyle family, who’ll probably make her welcome, then she’d better come to America with us. I can’t see the far west suiting her, but we’d all have to make the best of it. At least there they will have plenty of need for doctors, and they won’t care very much if we are Irish, English, or half-and-half, and they certainly won’t care what our religion is. And as you said, there won’t be much chance of one running into old acquaintances, not if we go to the frontier.”
His voice dropped a little. “But we’ll be poor. All I have won’t last us very long. People may not pay doctors much out there, and they may take a long time to get used to me and accept me. It will be hard work. There’ll be none of the luxuries we take for granted here. Certainly no servants, no pretty gowns, no hansom cabs to call, no sophisticated theater, music, or books. The climate will be harder. There may even be hostile Indians ….I don’t know. Are you still willing?”
Justine was torn between hope and terror of the unknown, the grim and dangerous, perhaps beautiful, but hideously unfamiliar. But it was all she had. She nodded slowly, but with absolute certainty.
“We still have to tell your mother something.”
He nodded also. “Of course. But not yet. Let us see what Mr. Pitt does about Uncle Padraig first, and what he has … decided.”
Charlotte moved away from the shadows at last. “It will be dawn soon. The maids will be up already.” She looked at Piers. “I think we should go back to our rooms and try to get ready for the day. We will need all our strength and whatever courage and intelligence we can bring to it.”
“Of course.” Piers went to the door and opened it for her. He turned and looked at Justine. Their eyes met in something almost like a smile.
“Thank you,” Justine said to both of them, then she spoke to Piers. “I know there is a very great way to go yet, even if I am not prosecuted. I shall have to prove to you that I am what I am trying to be. There is no point in saying I am sorry over and over again. I will show it by being there, every hour, every day, every week, until you know it.”
Charlotte and Piers went out, glanced at each other, then turned their separate ways.
When Charlotte reached her own room the small light was still on in the dressing room, but the bedroom door was ajar and it was dark inside. She was about to take off her robe and creep in when she was startled by a noise and whisked around to find Pitt standing just inside the room, his face drawn with exhaustion. “Where the hell have you been?” he demanded, his voice rough-edged with anxiety.
Guilt washed over her in a wave. She had not even thought of telling him where she was.
“I’m sorry,” she said, aghast at herself. “I stayed with Justine. She was so … so devastated. She told Piers. It took him all night, which in the circumstances is no time at all, but I think it will be all right.” She took a step towards him. “I’m sorry, Thomas. I didn’t think.”
“No,” he agreed. “She tried to kill Greville. You can’t protect her from that.”
“So what are you going to do?” she asked. “Arrest her for killing a corpse? I’m sure it is a crime, but does it matter? I mean …” She shook her head. “I know it matters, but will it really help anyone to prosecute her?”
He said nothing.
“Thomas … she won’t go unpunished. She can’t stay here, and she knows that. She wants to leave her old life, and she and Piers can go to America, to the west, where nobody will know her.”
“Charlotte …” He looked crumpled and worn out with sadness.
“You can’t stop him marrying her … if he wants to,” she said quickly. “And she did tell him ….”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I went with her. I don’t know whether it will be all right or not, maybe no one will for years. But he’ll try. Can’t you just … turn a blind eye? Please?” It crossed her mind to say something about Eudora, and what it would mean to her, but she dismissed it as unworthy. This was between herself and Pitt, and Eudora Greville had nothing to do with it. “It will be hard enough for them,” she added. “They will leave everything they know behind them and take only their love, their courage, and their guilt.”
He leaned forward and kissed her long and very close, and then again, and then a third time. “Sometimes I haven’t the slightest idea what you are thinking,” he said at last, looking puzzled.
She smiled. “Well, that’s something, I suppose.”
Gracie woke up, and it was a moment before she remembered what had happened the day before, the strange, sweaty candle in Finn’s room, the look in his eyes when she had touched it … the guilt which had betrayed to her what it was, and then his anger when she had run away, then his arrest. It was hard to feel different about him quickly. There was too much memory of sweetness. One could not turn off emotion in a few hours, not when it had run so deep through you.
She got up and washed and dressed. She did not care how she looked. Clean and tidy was all that mattered, good enough for the job. Pretty wasn’t important anymore. Only the day before it had mattered so much.