Chapter Seventeen
Jacintha St. John had not slept well since her husband’s death. Which was foolish beyond belief. Infuriating, disappointing, and cold as he was, she had never expected to miss him.
She had been lying awake for hours as light slowly penetrated the curtains and proclaimed the new day. Terrence was buried. They had said goodbye for the last time, and now the children—whom he had loved despite everything—would have to face life without him.
Jacintha was afraid Bella was rushing into marriage with Han Cordell.
It was a good match, and Han was a good man from an excellent family, though he had some odd ideas.
Jacintha liked him, one of few people she and Terrence had agreed on.
It was just that Bella was so young, as young as Jacintha had been when she met Jason Madly…
She shuddered. Jason had been wild, exciting, reckless, like no one she had ever met before or since.
But love would never have saved her from the horror of marriage with him—turbulence, faithlessness, vile behavior, and viler friends she would no doubt have been expected to tolerate or even entertain.
She had long ago accepted that would never have worked.
Marriage with Jason Madly would have driven her to an early grave.
Twenty years as Terrence’s wife. Almost a whole lifetime of lies and disgust that had in many ways passed her by. All those years of hurt and disappointment had never turned her inside out as Jason had.
Just as well. I could not have survived it again.
Now she was free. She spread her arms out like wings across the bed that Terrence had not shared with her for many years, free and still vaguely discontented.
She had grown used to his presence in the house, in the thousand little things that made up marriage and family. No, she had never expected to miss him.
It was time to clear out the rest, burn the guilt.
She rose, washed, and dressed without summoning her maid, seized the reticule in which she kept the key, and went downstairs to Terrence’s study. She delved into the reticule, but it was empty. The key was not there.
It must have fallen out in the bedroom. Brunton would have put it in a drawer. But before she went back to look, some impulse made her turn the handle of the door.
It opened at once, and Jacintha walked in.
Bella sat at her father’s desk, his letters open in front of her. She had been weeping. She looked up and met her mother’s gaze.
Oh God, I should have burned everything when I had the chance…
“He kept my letters,” Bella whispered.
Jacintha’s throat closed up. “Of course he did. You were the apple of his eye. You and Anthony. He loved you.” But he never loved me…
She moved to put her arm around her daughter, and Bella clung to her. Horror and guilt swamped Jacintha. It was a secret she could never be free of, but her children could never know what she had done. Or why.
The sins of the parents…
*
The sound of her voice almost surprised Solomon.
He was so exhausted that, despite his misery and fear, he was nodding off to sleep when she said abruptly, “Men don’t just fall in love with women. Nor women with men, come to that.”
He opened his eyes and turned his head toward her in the dark. “I am not a complete innocent, Constance.”
“Good,” she said, “because I think St. John was one such man.”
Solomon frowned, wishing he could see her face. “Because he played the violin and didn’t have a string of mistresses?”
He felt the vibrations of her impatient head shake.
“Of course not. Because of what Zenobia said to you. That his wife knew she was not St. John’s mistress.
Despite the smug belief of some married women, they don’t always know.
That made me think, look at him from a slightly different angle.
She made a youthful escape and eloped with a dangerous man.
Her reputation was on the edge of ruin, until St. John stepped in.
It was the perfect solution. He protected her with his name.
She protected him with marriage and children. So they were both safe.”
“It’s a consideration when his preferences are against the law,” Solomon allowed. “But there is no evidence he was that way inclined.”
“Because he didn’t frequent the molly houses that cater to such tastes? Yes, I did inquire at a few. But I’m not talking about mere appetites, Solomon. I’m talking about love. Like yours and mine, like Dragan’s, like Cordell’s. Only he could never marry his love.”
Understanding battered at him, dragging several pieces into place. “Nevvy. Gareth Neville was his love…” Impossible, tragic, devastating, and ultimately lethal love.
The whys and wherefores of that whipped through his mind before they drowned under the greater, much more personal mystery. Since he couldn’t see her well enough, he loomed over her, taking her face between his hands.
“Why did you keep this from me? Do you really imagine I’m so precious that I didn’t know of such things and would fly from the case at the mere mention of it?”
“No, of course not.” Her voice was hoarse. Her fingertips found his face, gentle, caressing. “I was only afraid you would associate it with what happened to David. And we never talk about that.”
“David,” he said blankly. She was right.
They didn’t talk about it because he hated to even think about it.
But it was there in the background always, that David had been taken at the age of ten by evil men who had sold him into a life of use and abuse that he had endured until he grew strong enough to escape it.
Solomon had always concentrated on that strength of David’s, in fighting, in finding his own way, through honest work at sea that enabled him heal to some degree.
“But what happened to David was not love! It was the opposite—”
She reached up, pressing her cheek to his, and he felt the dampness of her tears. “I know. I know. I just wasn’t sure you did. But you do understand. I should have known that you would.”
He could not even be irritated, with her or with himself.
The depth of her care of him, of her love, overwhelmed him, blotting out even the tragedy of St. John and Neville.
Words eluded him. So he kissed her, and spoke with his body, and so did she.
Even as the beauty of that carried them away, he hung on to his sense of blessedness, of his sheer luck in being able to be with her.
*
Inevitably they slept late, leaving Janey and Hat to open the office. But it was rather lovely to enjoy a quiet breakfast in their own home, a moment of leisurely domestic peace at the start of what might well be a difficult day.
Constance, lethargic with relief after explaining her theory to Solomon, and blissful after the consequences of their understanding, drank her coffee, ate toast and poached eggs, and enjoyed a conversation without pitfalls.
“How was David last night? You said you went home with him to talk.”
“Yes. He’s restless, still. I think he feels wrong, doing nothing, as he sees it. But he didn’t mention going away.”
“Then nothing is troubling him that he needed your advice?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that.” A rare look of bafflement crossed his unguarded face. “He wanted to know about me.”
She smiled, nudging her forearm against his. “Darling, of course he does.”
Solomon laughed, endearingly self-conscious, though he quickly turned the tables by swooping in and kissing her lips. He tasted of coffee and marmalade. “Darling,” he repeated huskily. “I like that.”
Half an hour later, they departed together in the carriage for Scotland Yard, where Solomon placed the wrapped axe on Inspector Harris’s desk.
He looked gratifyingly startled. “What the devil…?”
“A thug tried to bury it in a neighbor’s back door last night,” Constance said. “We believe he was sent by Veronique’s husband, Kenny, as a warning and encouragement to pay up.”
Harris cocked an eyebrow. “Another blackmail victim? Excellent. I’ll add it to the rest. You’d better give Flynn your statement.”
Solomon pounced. “The rest? Then you’ve found other victims of Veronique?”
“Two. After a lot of difficult conversations. Enough to arrest her first thing this morning. We missed her husband, though—he seems to have done a bunk. We know him, of course—Horatio Kenny, minor villain in the East End, recently came into some money that he likes to flash around his less-fortunate friends. We had nothing to link him to the blackmail before. But I think we’ll bring in his associates too, shake the tree a bit harder and put the lot of them away till they’re old. ”
“Sounds good to me,” Solomon said.
“It’s one of the cleverer schemes I’ve come across,” Harris said without admiration.
“She just wrote out extortionate invoices no one but the victim had cause to question. And the victim, or the victim’s unwitting husband, simply paid up for items that were never bought, let alone received.
The sums on Mrs. St. John’s invoices match the amounts paid from St. John’s bank account, so it all looks perfectly legitimate. ”
“These would be Veronique’s special customers that her assistant wasn’t allowed near,” Constance said. “I wonder if she found me a likely mark for her next victim?”
“Did you find a hoard of blackmail material in her shop?” Solomon asked.
“In the flat above,” Harris said.
“What will you do with it?” Constance asked uneasily.
“Go through it and return what we can with discretion. Blackmail is a despicable crime, and I’ll rake up no more than I have to in order to jail the culprits.”
“As a matter of interest to us,” Solomon said, “since it involves nothing more than personal indiscretion, did you find anything related to Mrs. St. John? Perhaps under her maiden name?”