both hands still on the knob, leaning against it. “It is a time to be deadly serious—I mean … grave.” She shut her eyes. “Oh, God!” she whispered. “I can’t get it right, can I?”
He was obliged to smile in spite of himself. “No,” he agreed gently. “It would seem not. Do you want to try again?”
“Thank you.” She opened her eyes wide. They were clear and very dark gray. “Are you all right? I know you had another visit from that policeman. He’s your brother-in-law, but …”
He meant to be discreet, not to burden her with the decisions he had to make, the uncertainties, the cost.
“You aren’t all right, are you?” she said softly. “Did Mallory do it?”
He could not lie. He had struggled for hours with what to do, what to say to Pitt, with the fear of what would happen, what his own conscience would do to him if he did nothing. Now the decision was taken from him.
“No, he didn’t,” he answered. “He couldn’t have.”
“Couldn’t he?” She was uncertain. She knew it was not necessarily good news. There was apprehension in her eyes, not relief.
He did not look away. “No. The chemical that was spilled across the conservatory path was wet at the time Unity was killed. It was on her shoes, but it wasn’t on his. I checked it all with the garden boy, and with Stander. I looked at all Mallory’s shoes. He’s still lying about her going in there to speak to him. I don’t know why. It is completely pointless. But he didn’t come out, so he couldn’t have been at the top of the stairs.”
“So it was Papa …” She looked stricken. It was a truth almost more than she knew how to bear.
He responded instinctively, reaching out and taking her hands in his.
“He believed it was me,” he said, dreading her response, the moment when she would pull away from him in revulsion, as she must. But he could not let the lie build itself between them. “Pitt found his journal and deciphered it. He really believed I had killed Unity …”
She looked puzzled. “Why? Because you knew her before?”
He felt a numbness creep through him, a prickling.
“You knew that?” His voice was hoarse.
“She told me.” A smile flickered over her face. “She thought I was in love with you, and she wanted to stop me from doing anything about it. She thought it would anger me or make me dislike you.” She gave a jerky little laugh. “She told me you had been lovers and that you had left her.” She waited for him to respond.
At that instant he would have given anything he possessed to be able to tell her it was untrue, the fabrication of a jealous woman. But one lie necessitated another, and he would destroy the only relationship he had which had a cleanness to it, an unselfishness not spoiled by appetite, illusion or deceit. When it was shattered, at least it would be by the past, not the present. He would not sacrifice the future for a few days, or hours, until Pitt broke it.
“I did leave her,” he admitted. “She aborted our child, and I was so horrified, and grieved, I ran away. I realized we did not love each other, only ourselves, our own hungers. That doesn’t justify any of it, or what I did afterwards. I didn’t set out to be dishonest, but I was. I had other loves, was innocent enough to believe a woman could share a man with another woman. And then when she was … vulnerable … to discover she couldn’t.” He still could not put the true words to it. “I should have known that. I could have, had I been honest. I was old enough and experienced enough not to have believed that lie. I allowed myself because I wanted to.”
She was staring at him unwaveringly.
He would like to have stopped, but he would only have to tell her later, begin all over again. Better to complete it now, no matter how hard it was. He let go of her hands. He would not allow himself to feel her pull away.
“I did not want the commitment of one love, of responsibility during the hard times as well as the easy ones,” he said, hearing his voice sounding flat and mundane for such terrible words. “It was your father who pulled me out of my despair after Jenny killed herself and I knew I was to