The Angel Court Affair (Thomas Pitt 30) (11 page)

‘Why do you believe anyone would take her?’ he asked. ‘What have the threats been? What started them off?’

‘That’s obvious,’ she said impatiently. ‘New ideas always stir up passions. People won’t change if they are terrified of it. If you didn’t know that, what are you doing as a policeman?’

He decided to be just as blunt. Clearly she had no respect for authority, especially English authority, which had so signally failed to protect the woman she had accepted as her spiritual leader. He could not blame her for that.

‘What am I doing? I’m looking for an Englishwoman who has adopted Spain for her home, and created a new branch of religion that is stirring up powerful emotions. Some of her followers think she is a saint, other people that she is deluded and dangerous at a time when the whole world is on the brink of chaos. If she has been taken violently there is no sign of it, no evidence, and no one has made any demand for ransom. If, on the other hand, she went willingly with someone she knows . . .’

Henrietta’s face hardened in lines of anger and she drew in her breath to interrupt him.

He ignored her.

‘. . . and was then tricked, or held against her will,’ he went on. ‘Then I need to know a lot more of how people feel about her, about faith in general and in particular, if I am to find her before she is badly hurt, perhaps even killed.’

Gradually she relaxed, but her eyes never moved from his. ‘What do you want from me?’ she asked.

He sat back more comfortably in the chair. ‘Mr Brundage listened to Melville Smith speak yesterday evening. He said it was good, but Sofia’s message had been considerably blunted, made easier to follow. Is that true?’

Her reaction was instant, but so masked that had he not been watching intently he would not have seen it. There was contempt, disgust, and a shadow he thought was fear. Fear of what? The discovery of something? Of Smith’s involvement in Sofia’s disappearance? Or of losing the faith she herself needed? He understood how that might mean more to her than worldly comfort or safety. She was a fierce woman, with a past he could not guess at. Was she a weary idealist who had at last found a faith she could believe?

‘Was Mr Brundage wrong?’ he demanded of her silence.

‘What can I tell you?’ she returned, still challenging, evasive.

‘You can tell me if Mr Smith is now saying what he really believes, and perhaps seizing the chance to take over leadership . . .’ He stopped at the blazing anger in her eyes, and then also saw the change as she realised they both knew that it was true, and that saving Sofia, her reputation and perhaps her life was more important than preserving a false appearance of unity.

She lowered her eyes. ‘Perhaps,’ she said quietly. ‘He is very practical. He would rather have many people beginning their journey towards faith than a few who accept it all.’

‘And Sofia would rather have the few?’ Pitt asked curiously.

She looked up. ‘You can have everybody, if you make the gate wide enough, and the climb so shallow.’ Her contempt was scalding.

‘Do you like Melville Smith?’ he asked.

She gave a very slight shrug of her wide, gaunt shoulders. ‘No. But that is irrelevant. I don’t like him because he is a harsh judge, in all the dark, painful things that matter to me. And perhaps I am the same to him. We will smooth the rough places in each other . . . if we survive it!’ The amusement was bright in her eyes for an instant.

‘But he is ambitious?’ Pitt pressed.

‘For the faith, or for himself?’ she quibbled. An obvious part of her was savouring the exchange. Perhaps it was a relief to quarrel openly with someone and not have to care if she hurt him.

‘You’ve already answered the first,’ he pointed out.

She smiled suddenly, and he saw an echo of the beautiful woman she had once been. ‘And the second also,’ she told him.

‘And Sofia?’ he asked. ‘You say he is softening the message, robbing it of truth. Was she an even harsher judge than he, then?’

‘You didn’t listen, did you!’ It was an accusation filled with memories of some old wound. She was explaining to him only because she saw no alternative. ‘The way is hard. Life is hard, if you want anything of real value – knowledge, passion, love. If you hunger for all there is, then you have to learn wisdom. You have to fight all the battles, not just some of them. You can’t pick and choose the easy bits.’ She bit her lips until it must have hurt, but her eyes were full of tears.

‘But no matter how far you fall, there is a way to get up again. Sofia knew that, and she helped. She never blamed. She understands hope, and price.’

‘And Melville Smith does?’ he asked in little above a whisper.

‘Oh, yes. There are places of the soul he dare not go.’

He changed the subject. ‘And Ramon? Is he ambitious?’

Now she was angry again, swiftly and deeply. The truce was over.

‘Ramon is a good man!’ she said between her teeth. ‘If you suspect him of harming her, or of altering a word of her teachings, then you are a fool! We cannot afford stupidity. Sofia’s life may be in danger. Religious zealots can convince themselves that any atrocity is acceptable if it follows whatever you tell yourself is the work of God.’ She closed her eyes momentarily. Seeing the pain in her, the white skin stretched across the knuckles of her hands, Pitt could imagine the scenes that might be playing across her imagination.

‘Tell me,’ he asked.

She opened her eyes and looked at him, weighing her decision.

‘Ramon grieves for the dead in his family who sinned according to the Church in his own land,’ she said finally, her voice filled with pity. ‘Perhaps it was no more than the sin of doubt – and who can help that, if they are honest? We all stumble, in our different ways.’

He did not speak his answer because he knew she could see it in his face.

‘He cannot bear that they should be shut out because they fell now and then, because they doubted and feared, and wanted above all to be loved.’ Her voice dropped even lower. ‘We believe because we need to. If it is not true, then the darkness is unbearable. Do not hurt Ramon. It would not only be wicked, it would be pointless.’

‘What do you know of Barton Hall?’ Again Pitt changed the subject. ‘Why was it so important to Sofia that she see him? Would she have gone away voluntarily before speaking with him?’

The watchfulness was back in Henrietta’s face, an indecision.

He waited.

‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually. ‘I don’t know what she wanted with him, only that it was desperately important to her. She feared something too terrible to share with any of the rest of us. She said it was for our own sakes.’

Ramon was frightened. He hid it well, but Pitt had seen fear too often not to know it with familiarity that tugged at him where he himself had known it. Old ghosts were back again from times he had thought forgotten. It was the fear of losing someone you trusted, of being left alone.

In that moment Pitt was certain Ramon had not hurt Sofia. But had he feared she would be attacked, even assassinated, and he had taken her against her will in order to save her life? She had not struck Pitt as a woman willing to be martyred if it were avoidable. She was far from finishing her preaching.

Why was he convinced of that? He might have imagined the hunger for life he thought he felt in her. She was completely alien to him in all her beliefs, attitudes, the very fibre of her life.

Then he realised he was wrong.

How many times had he rescued Charlotte from an impossible situation because she was on a crusade for some cause, and had taken a risk from which she could not escape? The passion was the same, the outrage at pain and injustice, the blind belief that she could and should do something about it.

‘Do you know why Señora Delacruz wished so much to speak with Mr Hall?’ Pitt asked. ‘He does not seem to me to be likely to change his opinions, or his judgement, and I don’t believe Señora Delacruz is naïve enough to think that he would.’

‘It was nothing to do with reconciliation,’ Ramon agreed quietly. ‘It was something she wished to help him with, or at least to try. She did not tell me what it was. She trusted me, but she did not wish me to know it, for my own protection.’

‘She was afraid of it?’ Pitt asked.

‘Yes. I think she was,’ Ramon admitted.

Pitt searched his face and saw no guile in it at all, not even the faint amusement at self-knowledge that Sofia may have been making excuses, because whatever it was did not fit with the honour he believed of her. Pitt had a sudden glimpse of the burden of living up to other people’s conception of your strength and honour, of unfailing courage. It would be instinctive to protect them from the reality you knew to be within yourself. It was surely right to do it with children – was this not what he was trying to do with Jemima – but what of the disillusion if Sofia’s words were hollow and her actions self-serving?

Where did you stop? When did you allow the first dream to be broken? Or did it just happen, and you tried afterwards to mend what you could?

Could Sofia have gone of her own accord, just to escape the weight of living up to everyone else’s unbearable need? He could understand that with a shiver that for a moment took his breath away.

‘Thank you,’ he said to Ramon. ‘You have given me an awareness of thoughts that had not occurred to me. Would she have gone away willingly before seeing Mr Hall?’

Ramon bit his lip and breathed in and out again several times before answering. When he spoke his voice was hoarse and there was no colour left in his face. ‘No, señor, she would not.’

Pitt was late home, after going through the threatening letters yet again. He still found himself disturbed by the anger in them, the hatred generated by those who professed to worship a God of universal mercy and a love for all mankind.

‘It’s fear,’ Charlotte said quietly. They were sitting in their usual chairs in the parlour, a brisk fire burning in the hearth, and the curtains drawn against the sudden, hard spring rain and the wind that drove it against the glass. Daniel was upstairs in his room, his head buried in the
Boy’s Own
Paper
with its stories of honour and adventure. Jemima was having supper with her aunt, Emily Radley, and her cousins. She would very probably stay the night, which pleased Pitt more than it should have. He could delay any further answers at least for a day. He imagined Charlotte had arranged it so.

‘We all have dreams too precious to look at often, in case they’re not quite what we thought,’ she went on. A momentary shadow crossed her face. ‘I don’t want Sofia to have been hurt, but I realise I would rather that than find proof I can’t deny that she was actually a fraud.’ She smiled. ‘What she said was frightening and different, but it was beautiful. I would like it to be true . . . I think. Certainly, I don’t want it soiled so I don’t have the choice any more.’

Pitt thought of Ramon and his fierce defence of mercy. He loved those in his family who had lived and died out of grace with the faith he grew up with. He needed the tenderness, the hope that Sofia gave him. In fact he could not bear to live without it. In defending her he was clinging on to the most precious thing he knew, a spiritual survival.

And Henrietta needed something also, a mercy perhaps for herself, and everyone else she had known who was like her. To destroy that hope would take away her courage to live.

What did Melville Smith need, other than to be valued, respected, perhaps to be leader rather than one of the many followers of a woman? Did that offend his own sense of his manhood, of that order of things that some of the angriest letters had expressed?

Charlotte was waiting for him to speak again. Ever since they had first met, at the time of the murders in Cater Street, they had found it easy to talk to each other, to explain possibilities, to disagree without rancour.

‘How much do you believe what Sofia teaches?’ he asked. ‘Really?’ He wanted to know, not to understand the case, but because it intruded into his own life, his thoughts and above all the memories that suddenly would not stay silent in his mind. Mostly they were of his mother. There were so many things he had not said to her. He had not thought of the words until it was too late.

She had not allowed him to be there for her when she was ill, and knew she was dying. She had closed him out, to protect him. But he didn’t want to have been protected. How could she have got that so wrong? Was that how he had seemed? Incapable of understanding, watching with her, beside her, through her pain?

In spite of all his efforts to block it out, the day he returned and heard the news came back to him now, sitting quietly beside his own fire. He could remember the light from the windows slanting across the hallway of the big manor house, and Sir Arthur Desmond’s voice gentle and full of grief. He could smell the floor polish, and the scent of flowers in the big vases on the side table.

Did he want there to be an eternity where it could all be put right, pain forgotten, guilt healed, where there was laughter and friendship rather than some amorphous existence in spirit? Sofia’s idea of eternal learning and creating seemed so much better, filled with purpose, even joy!

Charlotte had considered for several minutes before she replied, and when she did, her words were measured.

‘It makes more sense than what I can remember when I was growing up,’ she said. ‘That was comfortable, if rather boring. The music was marvellous and the light through the stained-glass windows. I think a lot of it was the sense of timelessness. People had worshipped God there for a thousand years, maybe longer.’

A log settled in the fire and sent up a shower of sparks. Outside the wind gusted, and then was quiet again.

‘I suppose if you accept something long enough,’ she went on. ‘And everybody around you does, you come to believe that it must be true.’ She looked at him with a brief smile. ‘If we change, we lose all that. We’re sort of . . . adrift . . .’

She stopped for a moment but he did not interrupt.

‘I don’t understand it,’ she admitted. ‘At least not the parts that Sofia Delacruz challenges. I just chose not to think about it.’ She looked at him earnestly. ‘I remember being taught about Thomas Cromwell, in the religious struggles during the Reformation, signing away his freedom to be Protestant, and then later being burned alive for his change of mind. He thrust the hand that had held the pen into the flames himself, to pay for that denial.’ She winced. ‘I’ve burned myself on the flat iron once or twice. It really hurts. I admire a faith so powerful, and I’m also frightened of it. If you would burn your own living flesh, and bear the pain without screaming, what else would you do?’