Cardington Crescent Read Free Page A

asked, pulling back and starting for the kitchen. “Have you eaten?”
    “No, of course I haven’t,” he said wearily, following her. “But don’t bother cooking anything now.”
    Her eyebrows shot up, but this time she glanced at his face and bit her tongue. Behind her on the blackened and polished range the kettle was billowing clouds of steam.
    “Would you like cold mutton, pickle, and fresh bread?” she asked sweetly. “And a cup of tea?”
    He smiled in spite of himself. It would be easier, and pleasanter in the long run, to surrender.
    “Yes, I would.” He sat down, putting his jacket over the back of the chair.
    She hesitated, then decided it would be wiser to make the tea before saying anything more, but there was a little upward quirk at the corner of her mouth.
    Five minutes later he had three slices of crumbly bread, a pile of homemade chutney—Charlotte was very good at chutney and marmalade—several slices of meat, and a breakfast cup full of steaming tea.
    Charlotte had contained herself long enough. “Are you going to find out who she was?”
    “I doubt it,” he said, filling his mouth with food.
    She stared at him solemnly. “Won’t somebody report her missing? Bloomsbury is quite a respectable area. People who have parlormaids notice if they’re gone.”
    In spite of their six years of marriage and all the cases she had one way or another found herself involved in, she still carried with her remnants of the innocence in which she had grown up, protected from unpleasantness, imprisoned from the harshness and the excitement of the world, as young ladies of gentility should be. To begin with, Charlotte’s breeding had awed Pitt and, in her blinder moments, angered him. But mostly it disappeared in all the infinitely more important things they shared: laughter at life’s absurdities, tenderness, passion, and anger at the same injustices.
    “Thomas?”
    “My darling Charlotte, she doesn’t have to have come from Bloomsbury. And even if she did, how many maids do you suppose have been dismissed, for any number of reasons, from dishonesty to having been caught in the arms of the master of the house? Others will have eloped!—or been supposed to have—or lifted the family silver and disappeared into the night.”
    “Parlormaids aren’t like that!” she protested. “Aren’t you even going to ask after her?”
    “We have done,” he replied with a tired edge to his voice. Had she no idea how futile it was—and that he would already have done everything he could? Did she not know that much of him, after all this time?
    She bent her head, looking down at the tablecloth. “I’m sorry. I suppose you’ll never know.”
    “Probably not,” he agreed, picking up his cup. “Is that a letter from Emily on the mantelpiece?”
    “Yes.” Emily was her younger sister, who had married as far above herself as Charlotte had descended. “She is staying with Great-aunt Vespasia in Cardington Crescent.”
    “I thought Great-aunt Vespasia lived in Gadstone Park.”
    “She does. They’re all staying with Uncle Eustace March.”
    He grunted. There was nothing to say to that. He had a deep admiration for the elegant, waspish Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould, but Eustace March he had never heard of, nor did he wish to.
    “She sounds very unhappy,” Charlotte went on, looking at him anxiously.
    “I’m sorry.” He did not meet her eyes but fished for another piece of bread and the chutney dish. “But there’s nothing we can do. I daresay she’s bored.” This time he did look up, fixing her with something approaching a glare. “And you will go nowhere near Bloomsbury, not even to visit some long lost friend, either of yours or of Emily’s. Is that understood, Charlotte?”
    “Yes, Thomas,” she said with wide eyes. “I don’t think I know anybody in Bloomsbury, anyway.”

2
    E MILY WAS INDEED profoundly unhappy, in spite of the fact that she looked magnificent in a shimmering aquamarine gown