The butler brought in the morning newspaper and the Bishop motioned him to lay it on the table at his end, where he could reach it in a moment or two when he was ready.
“Take my plate away,” he directed.
“Yes, my lord. Is there something else you would prefer?” the butler asked solicitously, doing as he was bidden. “I am sure Cook would oblige.”
“No, thank you,” the Bishop declined. “I’m not hungry. Just pour the tea, would you.”
“Yes, my lord.” Again he did as he was bidden, and then discreetly withdrew.
“Are you feeling unwell?” Isadora asked before checking herself. It was so much habit with her that it required a conscious effort not to do so.
“The news is depressing,” he answered, but without picking up the paper. “The Liberals will win and Gladstone will form a government again, but it won’t last. But then nothing does.”
She must make the effort. She had promised him, and she sensed the fear in him across the table as if it were an odor in the air. “Governments don’t last, but neither should they,” she said gently. “The good things do. You’ve preached that all your life. You know it’s true. And the things that are destroyed, but in righteousness, God can rebuild. Isn’t that what the resurrection is all about?”
“That is the idea, the hope,” he replied, but his voice was flat, and he did not look up at her.
“Is it not the truth?” She thought that by provoking him into arguing it, the sound of his own words would strengthen him. He would realize that he did believe it.
“Really . . . I have no idea,” he answered instead. “It is a habit of thought. I repeat it over and over every Sunday because it is my job. I can’t afford to stop. But I don’t know that I believe it any more than the members of my congregation who come because it is the thing to be seen to do. Kneel in your pew every Sunday, repeat all the prayers, sing all the hymns and look as if you are listening to the sermon, and you will seem to be a good man. Your mind can be anywhere . . . on your neighbor’s wife, or his goods, or relishing his sins, and who will know?”
“God will know,” she said, startled by the anger in her voice. “And quite apart from that, you will know yourself.”
“There are millions of us, Isadora! Do you suppose God has nothing better to do than listen to our witterings? ‘I want this’ and ‘Give me that,’ ‘Bless so and so, which will release me of the necessity of doing anything about him.’ Those are the sort of orders I give my servants, which is why we have them in the first place, so we don’t have to do everything ourselves.” His face twisted with disgust. “That isn’t worship, it’s a ritual performed for ourselves, and to impress each other. What kind of a God wants that, or has any use for it at all?” There was contempt in his eyes, and anger, as if he had been let down unfairly and was just realizing the fullness of it.
“Who decided that it was what God wanted?” she asked.
He was startled. “It is what the church has done for the best part of two thousand years!” he retorted. “In fact, always!”
“I thought it was only meant to be the instrument of our growth,” she replied to him. “Not an end in itself.”
His brow creased with irritation. “Sometimes you talk the most arrant nonsense, Isadora. I am a bishop, ordained of God. Don’t try to tell me what the church is for. You make yourself ridiculous.”
“If you are ordained of God, then you should not doubt Him,” she snapped. “But if you are ordained of man, then perhaps you should be looking for what God wishes instead. It may not be the same at all.”
His face froze. He sat motionless for a moment, then leaned over and picked up the newspaper, holding it high enough to hide behind.
“Francis Wray committed suicide,” he said after a few moments. “It seems that damned policeman Pitt was hounding him over the murder of the spirit medium, imagining he knew something about it. Stupid man!”
She was horrified. She remembered Pitt; he had been one of Cornwallis’s men, one he was particularly fond of. Her first thought was for how it would hurt Cornwallis, for the injustice if it were not true, and for the disillusion, if by some terrible chance it were.
“Why on earth would he think that?” she said aloud.
“Heaven knows.” He sounded final, as if that closed the matter.
“Well, what do they say?” she demanded. “You’ve got it in front of you.”
He was irritated. “That was yesterday’s paper. There’s very little about it today.”
“What did they say?” she insisted. “What are they blaming Pitt for? Why would he think Francis Wray, of all people, would know anything about a spirit medium?”
“It really doesn’t matter,” he replied without lowering the paper. “And Pitt was quite wrong anyway. Wray had nothing to do with it, that has been proved.” And he refused to say anything further.
She poured a second cup of tea and drank it in silence.
Then she heard his suddenly indrawn breath and a gasp. The paper slid from his hands and fell in loose sheets in his lap and over his plate. His face was ashen.
“What is it?” she said with alarm, afraid he was having some kind of attack. “What’s happened? Have you pain? Reginald? Shall—“ She stopped. He was struggling to his feet.
“I . . . I have to go out,” he mumbled. He thrashed at the newspaper, sending the sheets slithering to the floor, rattling together.
“But you have the Reverend Williams coming in half an hour!” she protested. “He’s come all the way from Brighton!”
“Tell him to wait.” He flapped a hand at her.
“Where are you going?” She was on her feet also. “Reginald! Where are you going?”
“Not far,” he said from the doorway. “Tell him to wait!”
There was no use asking anymore. He was not going to tell her. It had to be something in the newspaper which had created such a panic of emotion in him. She bent and picked it up, starting her search on the second page, roughly where she guessed he had been reading.
She saw it almost immediately. It was an announcement by the police on the Maude Lamont case. There had been three clients at her house on Southampton Row for the last séance she had given. Two of them were named in her diary of engagements, the third had been represented by a little drawing, a pictograph or cartouche. It was like a small f hastily written, under a half circle. Or to Isadora’s eye, a bishop’s crozier under a roughly drawn hill—Underhill.
The police said that there was something in Maude Lamont’s papers which indicated that she had known who the third man was, and that he, like the other two, had been blackmailed by her. They were close to a breakthrough, and when they read her diaries again, with this new understanding, they would have the identity of Cartouche, and of her murderer.
The Bishop had gone to Southampton Row. She knew it as surely as if she had followed him there. He was the one who had gone to Maude Lamont’s séances, hoping to find some kind of proof that there was life after death, that his spirit would live on in a form he could recognize. It was not extinction that awaited him, but merely change. All the Christian teachings of his lifetime had built no sure faith in him. In his desperation he had turned to a spirit medium, with her table rappings, levitation, ectoplasm. Far worse than that, which held more horror, doubt and weakness, and which she could understand only too easily, he had known fear, loneliness soul-deep, even the hollow, consuming well of despair. But he had done it secretly, and even when Maude Lamont had been murdered, he had not come forward. He had allowed Francis Wray to be suspected of being the third person, and to have his reputation ruined, and now Pitt’s as well.