“Don’t you want to know what happened?” he asked. “If only for your peace of mind … for the future, perhaps?”
Her lips tightened a moment, not a smile so much as a grimace. “I do know, Mr. Pitt. Perhaps I should have told my husband, but I did not. I knew it would …” she drew in a deep breath, “… it would hurt him, with no purpose. There is nothing we can do.”
Pitt was surprised and confused. He knew what Charlotte and Vespasia suspected had happened, where and when, and almost certainly by whom. But would Isaura respond this way if their suspicions were indeed correct?
“I can’t act without your permission, Senhora, but for the sake of the valued relationship between England and Portugal, I must discover what happened,” he said gently.
She blinked her dark eyes. “What happened? A young man who has a twisted soul raped my daughter, and then made light of it. He sought out opportunities to mock her in public with pretended courtesies, and when she retreated from him, he taunted her all the more, until in hysteria she backed away as far as she could, and beyond, crashing through a window to her death. I saw it, and was helpless to do anything to save her. That is what happened.” She stared at him, almost challengingly.
“Forsbrook?” He breathed the name rather than speaking it. He had known from Vespasia and Charlotte, who had witnessed Angeles’s final moments, and yet there was still a monstrousness about it.
“Yes,” Isaura said simply.
“Neville Forsbrook?” he repeated, to be certain. “You knew? When did it happen, and where?”
“Yes, Neville Forsbrook, the son of your famous banker who is responsible for so much investment for your countrymen,” she answered. “I knew because my daughter told me. It happened at a party she attended. Forsbrook was there, among many other young people. He found Angeles alone in one of the apartments looking at the art there. He raped her and left her terrified and bleeding. Here at home one of our maids found her weeping in her room and sent for me.”
“She said she had been raped, and who it was?” He hated pressing her. It seemed pointlessly cruel, and yet if he did not he would only have to come back later to ask.
“She was bleeding,” Isaura replied. “Her clothes were torn and she was bruised. I am a married woman, Mr. Pitt. I am perfectly aware of what happens between a man and a woman. If it is anything like love, or even a heat-of-the-moment weakness, a hunger, it does not leave bruises such as Angeles had.” She lifted her chin. “Do I know it was Neville Forsbrook? Yes, but I cannot prove it. Even if I could, what good would it do?”
She gave a tiny, hopeless shrug. “Angeles is dead. He would only say she was willing, a whore at heart. And his father would turn the goodwill of the people he knows against us. They would close ranks, and we would find ourselves outcast for making a fuss and exposing to the public what should have remained a private sin.”
Pitt did not argue. His mind raced to find a rebuttal, but there was none. Politically, socially, and diplomatically it would be a disaster. The most that would happen to Neville Forsbrook would be that he might marry less fortunately than otherwise. Even that was not certain. He might continue to make people believe that it was all the imagination of a hysterical young foreign girl who had stepped willingly into disgrace, like Eve, possibly even gotten pregnant, then blamed him for it. And there would be no way to prove him a liar.
Even the testimony of the maid who had found Angeles crying and bleeding would hardly be viewed as impartial. The girl’s humiliation would be painted in detail for everyone, and branded in their memories even more deeply than it was now. Isaura was right: they were helpless.
Forsbrook would never allow his son to be blamed, and he had the power to protect him. He would use it. Perhaps it was Pitt’s job to see that it did not come to such a thing.
What would he tell Castelbranco? That England was powerless to protect his daughter’s reputation, or bring to any kind of justice the young man who had raped her and driven her to her death? Not only that, but they felt it better not to try to seek any kind of justice,