Seven Dials Page 0,116

times." She saw the anxiety in his face and hurried on before he could give expression to it. "I went in daylight. It was all perfectly all right! Thomas, he was very upset indeed." She remembered it with a shiver, not for the dirt or the despair, but for the pain that she had seen rack Sandeman so deeply.

Pitt was waiting, stiff, his tea forgotten and going cold in the cup.

"A priest?" he said curiously. "Why? Could he tell you anything?"

"No... not in words."

"What do you mean? If not in words, how? How?" he demanded.

"By his reaction," she replied. She sat down opposite him, ignoring the bread. It would come to no harm for a while. "Thomas, when I mentioned Martin's name he was filled with a horror so great that for several moments he barely recovered his composure enough to be able to speak to me." She knew her voice was thick with the emotion that came back to her in a rush-welling up inside her. "He knows something terrible," she said quietly. "But because it came to him in a confession, he cannot repeat it. Nothing I could say made any difference, even that Martin's life could be in danger." She waited, watching his face, longing for him to be able to take the burden of confusion from her, provide some other way she had not thought of in which she could still help.

"In danger from whom?" he asked.

"I don't know," she admitted. She told him very briefly what little she had been able to learn, and from it what she had deduced. "But whatever Martin said to him, Mr. Sandeman would not-" She stopped. Pitt's eyes were wide, his face pale and his body suddenly rigid as if caught in a moment of fear. "Thomas- What? What is it?"

"Did you say Sandeman?" he asked, his voice catching in his throat.

"Yes. Why? Do you know of him?" Without any clear thought, she felt his alarm as if she understood. "Who is he?" She did not want to learn something ugly of the priest. He had seemed to her a man of intense and genuine compassion, but she could not afford less than the truth, and to turn from it now would avail nothing. The fear would be just as lacerating as anything he could tell her. "Do you?" she said again.

"I don't know," he replied. "But in the army, Lovat had three friends with whom he spent most of his off-duty time: Garrick, Sandeman, and Yeats. You mentioned both Garrick and Sandeman as being in possible danger, or in distress. It is hard to believe that is coincidence."

"What about Yeats?"

"I don't know, but I think I need to find out."

"So Lovat's death did have something to do with Egypt and not necessarily with Ryerson?" she said, but surprisingly there was none of the lift of hope she would have expected only an hour ago.

"Possibly," he agreed. "But it still doesn't make any sense. Why now, years after leaving Alexandria? And what has Ayesha Zakhari to do with it? Lovat didn't want to marry her, it was just an infatuation. And from all I could learn, she wasn't in love with him either."

"Wasn't she?" she said skeptically.

He smiled. "No. She had really loved one man. He was utterly different from Lovat, a man of her own people, older, a patriot who was fatally flawed, and who betrayed her and everything they both believed in."

"I'm sorry," she said quietly, and she meant it. She had never met Ayesha Zakhari, and she knew very little about her, but she tried to imagine the bitterness of disillusion, and the magnitude of her pain. "But surely the fact that Lovat was shot in her garden can't be coincidence?" She looked at him steadily, seeing pity and reluctance in him, and a new, raw edge of feeling about the whole tragedy. She reached across and slid her hand over his.

He turned his over, palm up, and closed his fingers gently.

"I don't suppose it can," he agreed. "But I have to find Yeats, and if he is dead, then how it happened, and why."

"Ryerson's trial begins tomorrow," she said, watching his face.

"Yes, I know. I'll try to find Yeats today." He hesitated only a moment, then, letting go of her hand, pushed his chair back and stood up.

PITT STOOD on the steps in the sun, blinking, not so much at the soft, autumn sunlight as at what the stiff, sad-faced officer had told him.

Arnold Yeats