Resurrection Row by Anne Perry Page A

give it if she did not understand the truth, or at least as much of it as he knew himself.
    “Why?” He repeated her question as if he found it strange.
    “Yes.” She sat down opposite him at the scrubbed table. “Why do you mind if they do a postmortem?”
    He realized he had not told her about his connection with the family and assumed that that was why she was confused. She could see the thoughts crossing his mind and was surprised how easily she read them. In Cater Street he had seemed mysterious, private, and out of reach.
    She allowed the mistake.
    “Oh,” he acknowledged his omission. “I forgot to explain—I know Lady Alicia Fitzroy-Hammond, the widow. I met her at a ball some little time ago; we became—” He hesitated, and she knew he was debating whether to tell her the truth or not; not from any sensitivity to old feelings, because he had never been aware of them, but from a habitual delicacy in discussing such things. One did not speak freely of a relationship with a recent widow, still less of another man’s wife. Personal emotion of any sort was hinted at, rather than named.
    She smiled very slightly, allowing him to flounder.
    He met her eyes, and memory was too strong for him. “—friends,” he finished. “In fact, I hope to marry her—when a decent time has passed.”
    She was glad she had been prepared for it; somehow it would have been a shock if it had come without any warning. Was her resentment for Sarah’s memory, or for her own, a final shedding of girlhood dreams?
    She forced her mind back to the disinterment. “Then why do you mind there being a postmortem?” she asked frankly. “Are you afraid it will uncover something wrong?”
    His face colored, but he remained looking at her fixedly. “No, of course not! It is the suspicion! If the police demand a postmortem, that means they must have a strong belief there is something to discover. In any event, they were wrong.”
    She was surprised. Pitt had not told her it had been done. “You mean it is over?” she asked.
    His eyebrows went up. “Yes. You didn’t know?”
    “No. What did they find?”
    He looked angry and unhappy. “They made it worse than before. It made their suspicions obvious, without proving anything. Alicia consented to it because Thomas told her it would put an end to all the speculation. But the answer was equivocal. It could have been natural heart failure, or it could have been an overdose of digitalis. And an overdose could have been accidental—his mother keeps it for her heart—or it could have been murder.”
    Of course she knew he would say this, but now that he had, she did not know how to answer. She asked the obvious question.
    “Is there any reason to suppose it was murder?”
    “The damned corpse was dug up twice!” he said furiously, his helplessness breaking through in anger. “That isn’t exactly common, you know! Especially in that sort of society. Good God, Charlotte, have you forgotten what suspicion of murder did to us in Cater Street?”
    “It stripped off the facade, so we saw all the weak and ugly things we had learned to hide from ourselves and each other,” she said quietly. “What are you afraid you will see here?”
    He stared at her, something close to dislike in his face. She would have expected it to hurt her, and yet it did not, not closely, inside herself where real pain lived; rather, it was the distant ache one feels for someone unknown, whose misfortune one has seen before and known to expect.
    “I’m sorry.” She meant it, not as an apology but as an expression of regret, even sympathy. “I really am sorry, but I don’t know of anything I can say or do to help.”
    His anger vanished. He was caught; he knew all the disillusion, the malice, and the fear that almost inevitably would follow, and he was afraid.
    He was still looking for an escape. “Can’t they leave it now?” he said quietly, his voice tight, his hands white on the wooden tabletop. “Alicia