Chapter 56
FIFTY-SIX
Keswick
Quinn set the earring aside, the memory of Geneva’s unease lingering in her mind.
Her encounter with Tom Dennison had been as unexpected as it was distressing.
It was understandable that the man would be anxious about his future and might interpret Douglas Bellamy’s gift as a payoff rather than the gesture it was intended to be.
He was clearly unbalanced. His war experiences had left him with lingering trauma, but did that mean he posed a real danger to Geneva?
That remained to be seen. Still, Quinn could not ignore the possibility; Dennison now had to be added to the list of potential suspects.
She hoped he had not been the one to harm Geneva Bellamy.
He had already suffered enough, and he seemed ill-equipped to manage the emotions that overwhelmed him.
Yet it would be foolish to dismiss his anger.
Murders were often driven by emotion, not reason, and a man who felt slighted, expendable, and afraid could all too easily cross that line, especially when he’d had to contend with nothing but mistrust and derision since he’d returned from the front.
He was accustomed to people mocking him and dismissing his feelings, and if Geneva failed to acknowledge his volatility and decided not to champion his cause with Jesse, he just might snap.
Setting the valet’s angry outburst aside, Quinn had to admit she felt a flicker of irritation towards Geneva herself.
From Quinn’s vantage point, Geneva’s dilemma did not seem quite as insurmountable as she made it out to be.
Had Quinn been in her position, she would have refused both men and gone off to London, free to live as she pleased.
But that was the thinking of a twenty-first-century woman.
A girl of twenty-one, born just after the turn of the twentieth century, would never have been encouraged to pursue independence.
Geneva had never needed to fend for herself and, like most women of her time, had been raised to believe that her sole purpose lay in marriage and motherhood.
Striking out alone, with no safety net, would have been terrifying.
The only skills available to her were those of a governess or paid companion, and that was hardly a life for a young woman.
Of course it would seem more appealing to become the next Countess of Gosforth, or even to run off to America and help Rory establish himself in his cousin’s business.
And then there was Honor. Even if she went away to finishing school and returned at nineteen, she would still need her sister.
The girls were close; they wanted to remain together.
Who could blame them? Quinn had not grown up with Jo, but she had mourned her deeply despite her betrayal, and still thought of her almost every day.
She was being unfair to Geneva and to Honor alike, she thought.
They were products of a different generation, and she could not impose her own values upon them.
Yet she could not stop wondering what had become of Honor after Geneva’s death.
Given her age, she would have lived through some of the most horrific events of the twentieth century and would surely have been shaped by them.
She might have lived to see the end of the century, and it was likely that she had living descendants.
Those descendants would be affected by the grim discovery on their family’s land and might have strong opinions about the episode being aired, particularly if it cast one of their ancestors in an unflattering light.