would be British soldiers who would be sent to fight and die there if there was an armed revolt, just as there had been in the Sudan. She could remember the newspaper accounts of that well enough. She had known and liked a woman whose only son had been killed at Khartoum.
And if Suez fell, the repercussions of it would touch every life in Britain.
But it was still wrong to sacrifice an innocent man to the rope. If he was innocent? Aunt Vespasia wanted to believe he was, but that did not make it so. Even she could be mistaken. People did things that seemed unimaginable to others when they were in love.
Narraway stopped on the footpath, facing Pitt. "Garrick is safe enough for the foreseeable future, whatever that is. I'm less happy about Sandeman, but I think if he understands the dangers he will keep silent. If he wanted to be a martyr to soothe his own conscience, he would have done it before now. Staying in Seven Dials matters to him. It is his way of answering for his soul. I believe he will die before he will sacrifice that. And Yeats and Lovat are dead."
"Is it Ayesha?" Pitt said almost hesitantly. "For vengeance?"
"Probably," Narraway replied. "And God help me, I can't blame her... except for drawing Ryerson in. And perhaps she couldn't help that. It was chance that brought him there that night, exactly as she was disposing of the body. She couldn't have been sure he would help rather than calling the police-as, if he had an ounce of self-preservation, he would have."
"Why did she wait for fifteen years?" Charlotte interrupted. "If some of my family had been killed like that, I wouldn't."
Narraway looked at her with curiosity turning to interest. "Neither would I," he said with feeling. "Something must have made it impossible before-a lack of knowledge? Of help? Power? Assistance from someone, their belief, money?" He looked from one to the other of them for an answer. "What would make you wait, Mrs. Pitt?"
She thought only for a moment. A brewer's dray with six gray horses rumbled past, their huge feet heavy on the cobbles, manes tossing, brasses bright. "Not knowing about it," she said first. "Either not knowing it happened, or that my family was involved, or not knowing who did it or where to find them. Some situation that I couldn't leave-"
"What situation?" Narraway interrupted.
"Illness," she said. "Someone I had to nurse, a child or a parent? Or someone I had to protect, who might be hurt if I acted? Somebody implicated, maybe? A hostage to fortune of some kind."
He nodded slowly, and turned to Pitt, his eyebrows raised.
"Only not knowing," Pitt replied, and as he said it something tingled in his memory. "I knew of the fire, but the people I spoke to believed it was an accident, at least that is what they said. How did Ayesha learn that it wasn't?"
Narraway's face set hard. "That's a very good question, Pitt, and one to which I would like the answer, but unfortunately I have no idea where to begin looking. There is a great deal about this I would like to know. For example, is Ayesha Zakhari the prime mover, or is she acting with or for someone else? Who else knows about the massacre, and why did they not expose it in Egypt? Why wait, and why in London?" His voice dropped a little and became tight and hard with emotion he barely kept in control. "And above all, is personal revenge all they want, or is this just the beginning?"
Neither Pitt nor Charlotte answered him. The question was too big, the answer too terrible.
Pitt put his arm around Charlotte's shoulders, almost without thinking, and drew her closer to him, but there was nothing to say.
CHAPTER TWELVE
VESPASIA WAS IN the withdrawing room, arranging white chrysanthemums and copper beech leaves floating in a flat Lalique dish, when she heard angry voices raised in the hall. She turned in surprise just as the door flew open and Ferdinand Garrick pushed past the maid and stood on the edge of the Aubusson carpet, his face suffused with anger and something close to despair.
"Good morning, Ferdinand," she said coolly, indicating with a slight nod that the maid might leave. She would have put an edge of ice to it sufficient to stop the Prince of Wales in his tracks but for the reality of the emotion she recognized in him. It overrode all