and need as much as any truth.
There were things better not known.
He had not realized how hurt Tryphena was, how isolated she felt herself to be, how alone now that Unity had gone. Clarice had seen it. She was frightened, too, for her father and for Mallory, but she was kinder. She struck to defend, not to hurt for any pleasure in it. And she had certainly defended him. He had not expected her to. It gave him a sharp realization of pleasure that she should wish to.
He looked up as the clouds parted and a pale, three-quarter moon made him realize how dark it was. He could only just see the grass behind him, and the branches were black against the sky, the house a silhouette, the color gone.
Clarice surprised him. But then thinking back on the time he had known her, he had very seldom been able to predict what she was going to say or do. Her sense of the ridiculous was alarming. She would make outrageous remarks, laugh at embarrassing things, appalling things, see humor where no one else did.
He remembered individual instances, wincing at some of them, standing in the gathering darkness unaware that he was smiling. Once or twice he even laughed aloud. They were excruciating. Absurd. But when he thought of them, none he recalled had been made simply to draw attention to herself or to make herself seem superior. Certainly they were not always kind; if she thought someone a hypocrite, she exposed him without mercy. Laughter could destroy as well as heal.
He put his hands in his pockets and turned and walked back towards the house and the lights across the terrace. He went upstairs to his own room with the intention of studying. He preferred to be alone and it was the best excuse. However, when the door was closed and he picked up a book he found his eyes did not focus on the page. He was thinking about Mallory, and the more he turned over in his mind what Clarice had said, the more did it seem the likely answer. He knew he himself was not the father of Unity’s child, and he could not believe it was Ramsay. It was not that he imagined Ramsay to be too ascetic or too self-disciplined ever to feel the hungers for physical comfort, or that Unity could not possibly have tempted him. He believed that if Ramsay had yielded to such a thing, he would have felt so different afterwards that Dominic at least would have noticed. And frankly, he thought Unity would have been different also. The constant need to attain small victories over Ramsay would not have remained so sharp. She would have proved his vulnerability to both of them. It would never need testing again to that degree.
And when he looked back now, he could recall—even the day before she died—the look of pleasure in her face when she had found an error in one of his translations. It had been tiny, and something a second glance would have found and corrected, but her need to point it out had been there. And there were other instances. He could see her face in his mind’s eye so clearly, every expression of it familiar; it was difficult to realize she was dead. She had been so positive, so sure of everything she felt and thought she knew.
What did he feel now that she was gone? Certainly there was sadness. She had been so urgently alive. Any death was a loss, a diminishing. Death itself was a frightening change, a reminder of the fragility of all things, of all those one loved, above all of oneself.
But there was undeniable relief in him also. It was there in the relaxing of the muscles that had unconsciously been held tight for so long. There was even ease in the mind, in spite of the fears, as if a shadow had passed.
He stood up and went to the door. It could not simply be left, in the hope that they would settle to life as it had been before and somehow Pitt would find an answer and prove it. He might. He might allow his doubts of Dominic, and the evidence—and he was certainly clever enough to find it—to convince him of Dominic’s guilt.
He went along the passage and knocked on Mallory’s door. He was doing it in part for himself, but he also owed Ramsay all he could do to find