Bluegate Fields by Anne Perry Page A

took his coat off, and hung it up, then noticed the parlor door open and the lamps lit. Surely Emily was not here at this time in the evening? He did not want to have to be polite, still less to satisfy Emily’s inveterate curiosity. He was tempted to keep on walking to the kitchen. He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he could get away with it, when Charlotte pulled the door wide open and it was too late.
    “Oh, Thomas, you’re home,” she said unnecessarily, perhaps for the benefit of Emily, or whoever it was. “You have a visitor.”
    He was startled. “I have?”
    “Yes.” She stepped back a little. “Mrs. Jerome.”
    The cold spread right through him. The familiarity of his home was invaded by futile and predictable tragedy. It was too late to avoid it. The sooner he faced her, explained the evidence as decently as he could to a woman, and made her understand he could do nothing, then the sooner he could forget it and sink into his own evening, into the safe, permanent things that mattered to him: Charlotte, the details of her day, the children.
    He stepped into the room.
    She was small, slender, and dressed in plain browns. Her fair hair was soft about her face and her eyes were wide, making her skin look even paler, almost translucent, as though he could see the blood beneath. She had obviously been weeping.
    This was one of the worst parts of crime: the victims for whom the horror was only beginning. For Eugenie Jerome, there would be the journey back to her parents’ house to live—if she was fortunate. If not, she would have to take whatever job she could find, as a seamstress, a worker in a sweatshop, a ragpicker; she might even end up at the workhouse or, out of desperation, in the streets. But all of that she would not yet even have imagined. She was probably still grappling with the guilt itself, still hanging on to the belief that things were the same, that it was all a mistake—a reversible mistake.
    “Mr. Pitt?” She stepped forward, her voice shaky. He was the police—for her, the ultimate power.
    He wished there was something he could say that would ease the truth. All he wanted was to get rid of her and forget the case—at least until he was forced to go back to it tomorrow.
    “Mrs. Jerome.” He began with the only thing he could think of: “We had to arrest him, but he is perfectly well and not hurt in any way. You will be permitted to visit him—if you wish.”
    “He didn’t kill that boy.” The tears shone in her eyes and she blinked without moving her gaze from his. “I know—I know he is not always very easy”—she took a deep breath, steeling herself for the betrayal—“not very easy to like, but he is not an evil man. He would never abuse a trust. He has far too much pride for that!”
    Pitt could believe it. The man he thought he had seen beneath that mannered exterior would take a perverse satisfaction in his moral superiority in honoring a trust of those he despised, those who, for entirely different reasons, despised him equally—if they gave him any thought at all.
    “Mrs. Jerome—” How could he explain the extraordinary passions that can suddenly arise and swamp all reason, all the carefully made plans for behavior? How could he explain the feelings that could drive an otherwise sane man to compulsive, wide-eyed self-destruction? She would be confused, and unbearably hurt. Surely the woman had more than enough to bear already? “Mrs. Jerome,” he tried again, “a charge has been made against your husband. We must hold him under arrest until it has been investigated. Sometimes people do things in the heat of the moment that are quite outside their usual character.”
    She moved closer to him and he caught a waft of lavender, faint and a little sweet. She had an old-fashioned brooch in the lace at her neck. She was very young, very gentle. God damn Jerome for his cold-blooded, bitter loneliness, for his perversion, for ever having married this woman in the