she have any idea what he was doing there or who had shot him?"
"No," Ryerson answered immediately. "She assumed he had come to see her, but that much was obvious. There could be no other reason for his being there at that hour. I asked her if she knew what had happened, and she said she did not." There was finality in his voice, and belief that defied sense.
"She had not invited him there, or given him reason to believe he would be welcome?" Pitt pressed, uncertain what tone to adopt. It annoyed him to be deferential, the situation was absurd, and yet his instinct was to believe him, even to feel some sympathy.
Ryerson's lips tightened. "She would hardly invite him at the same time she was expecting me, Mr. Pitt. She is a woman of high intelligence."
There was no time to afford niceties. "Women have been known to contrive that lovers should be made jealous, Mr. Ryerson," Pitt responded, and saw Ryerson wince. "It is a very old strategy, and can work well," he continued. "She would naturally deny it to you."
"Possibly," Ryerson said dryly, but there was no anger in his voice, rather a kind of patience. "But if you knew her you would not bother with such a suggestion. It is absurd, not only because of her character, but were she to have done such a thing, why in heaven's name would she then shoot him?"
Pitt had to agree that there was no sense in it, even allowing for temper, passion, or accident. If Ayesha Zakhari was convincing enough to have planned such a thing in advance, then she was far too clever to have behaved so idiotically afterwards.
"Could Lovat in some way have threatened her?" he asked aloud.
"She did not let him in, Mr. Pitt," Ryerson answered. "I don't know if there is any way of proving it, but he was never in the house."
"But she was outside," Pitt remarked. "In the garden she would have had little defense."
"You are suggesting she took her gun with her." Ryerson's lips were touched briefly with the tiniest smile. "That would seem to be excellent defense. And if she shot him because he threatened her, or even attacked her, then that is self-defense and not murder." Then the light vanished from his eyes. "But that is not what happened. She went outside only after she heard the shot, and she found him already dead."
"How do you know that?" Pitt said simply.
Ryerson sighed and his face pinched so minutely not a single feature altered, simply the vitality died inside him. "I don't know it," he said quietly. "That is what she told me, and I know her infinitely better than you do, Mr. Pitt." The words were invested with sadness and an intensity of emotion so raw Pitt was embarrassed by it. He felt intrusive, and yet he had no choice but to be there. "There is an inner kind of honesty in her like a clear light," Ryerson went on. "She would not stoop to deceive, for her own sake, for the violence it would do to her nature, not for the sake of anyone else."
Pitt stared at him. Ryerson was worried; there was even a flicker of real fear, tightly controlled, at the back of his eyes, but it was not for himself. Pitt had never seen the Egyptian woman. He had imagined someone beautiful, lush, a woman to satisfy a jaded appetite, to flatter and yield, to tease but only for her own ends. She would be the ultimate mistress for a man with both money and power, but who would marry only to suit his political or dynastic ambitions, and seek the answer to his physical needs elsewhere. Such a man would not look for love or honor; he would not even think of it. And he would expect to pay for his pleasures.
Now it occurred to Pitt with startling force that perhaps he was wrong. Was it conceivable that Ryerson loved his mistress, not merely desired her? It was a new thought, and it altered his entire perception. It made Ryerson a better man, but also perhaps a more dangerous one. Pitt's charge from Narraway, and therefore from the prime minister, was to protect Ryerson from involvement in the case. If Ryerson was behaving from love, and not self-interest, then he would be far more difficult to predict, and impossible to control. A whole ocean of danger opened up in front of Pitt's imagination.
"Yes..." he