The Whitechapel Conspiracy

chapter TWO
"Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould," the footman announced without requiring to see her invitation. There was no servant of consequence in London who did not know her. She had been the most beautiful woman of her generation, and the most daring. Perhaps she still was. In some people's eyes she could have no equal.

She entered through the double doors and stood at the top of the stairs that led in a graceful curve down to the ballroom. It was already three-quarters full but the steady buzz of conversation lessened for a moment. She could command attention, even now.

She had never been a slave to fashion, knowing well that what suited her was far better than merely the latest craze. This season's slender waists and almost vanished bustles were wonderful, as long as one did not allow the sleeves to become too extravagant. She wore oyster satin with ivory Brussels lace at the bosom and sleeves, and of course pearls, always pearls at the throat and ears. Her silver hair was a coronet in itself, and her clear gray eyes surveyed the room for an instant before she started down to greet and be greeted.

Of course, she knew most of the people there who were over forty, just as they knew her, even if only by repute. There were friends among them, and enemies also. One could not stand for any beliefs at all, or even simple loyalties, and not earn someone's malice or envy. And she had always fought as she believed, not always wisely but always with a whole heart-and all her very considerable wit and intelligence.

The causes had changed over half a century. All life had changed. How could the arbitrary, adoring and unimaginative young Victoria have foreseen the beautiful, ambitious and amoral Lillie Langtry? Or how could the earnest Prince Albert have found anything to say to the scintillating and eccentric Oscar Wilde, a man whose writing was so compassionate and whose words could be so glitteringly shallow?

And there had been an age of change between then and now, terrible wars that killed countless men, and clashes of ideas that probably killed even more. Continents had been opened up and dreams of reform had been born and died. Mr. Darwin had questioned the fundamentals of existence.

Vespasia bowed her head very slightly to an elderly duchess but did not stop to speak. They had long ago said everything they had to say to each other, and neither could be bothered to repeat it yet again. Actually, Vespasia wondered why on earth the woman was even at this diplomatic reception. It seemed a remarkably eclectic group of people, and it took her a moment's thought to perceive what they could have in common. Then she realized that it was a certain value as entertainment... except for the duchess.

The Prince of Wales was easily recognizable. Apart from his personal appearance, with which she was perfectly familiar, having met him more times than she could count, the very slight distance of the people surrounding him made him more noticeable. There was a certain attitude of respect. No matter how funny the joke or how enjoyable the gossip, one did not jostle the heir to the throne or allow oneself to trespass upon his good temper.

Was that Daisy Warwick smiling across at him? A little brazen, surely? Or perhaps she assumed that everyone here tonight already knew their intimate relationship, and no one really cared. Hypocrisy was a vice Daisy had never practiced. Equally, discretion was a virtue she exercised selectively. Unquestionably she was beautiful and had a certain air of elegance about her that was worthy of admiration.

Vespasia had never desired to be a royal mistress. She thought the perils far outweighed any advantages, let alone pleasures. And in this instance she neither liked nor disliked the Prince of Wales, but she did rather like the Princess, poor woman. She was deaf, and imprisoned in a world of her own, but still she had to be aware of her husband's self-indulgences.

A far greater tragedy, which she shared with perhaps fewer other women, but still far too many, was the death of her eldest son earlier this year. The Duke of Clarence, like his mother, had also been severely afflicted with deafness. It had been a peculiar bond between them, drawing them closer in their almost silent world. She grieved alone.

A dozen feet from Vespasia, the Prince of Wales was laughing heartily at something told to him by a tall man with a strong, slightly crooked nose. It was a powerful face, intelligent and impatient, although at the moment its expression was alive with humor. Vespasia had not met this man but she knew who he was: Charles Voisey, an appeals court judge, a man of profound learning, widely respected among his peers, if also a trifle feared.

The Prince of Wales saw her and his face lit with pleasure. She was a generation older than he, but beauty had always charmed him, and he remembered her most ravishing years when he himself had been young and full of hope. Now he was tired of waiting, of responsibility without the respect and the reward of being monarch. He excused himself from Voisey and moved towards her.

"Lady Vespasia," he said with undisguised pleasure. "I am so pleased you were able to come. The evening would have lacked a certain quality without you."

She met his eyes for a moment before dropping a slight curtsy. She could still make it seem a gesture of infinite grace, her back ramrod straight, her balance perfect.

"Thank you, Your Royal Highness. It is a splendid occasion." It flickered through her mind just how splendid it was, like so many others these days, extravagant, so much food, the best wine, servants everywhere, music, chandeliers blazing with light, hundreds of fresh flowers. Nothing that could be imagined to add to the glamour was missing, nothing stinted.

There had been so many occasions in the past when there had been more laughter, more joy, and at a fraction of the cost. She remembered them with nostalgia.

But the Prince of Wales lived well beyond his means, and had done so for years. No one was surprised anymore at his huge house parties, shooting weekends, days at the races where fortunes were gambled, made and lost, at his gargantuan dinners or overgenerous gifts to favorites of one sort or another. Many no longer even commented on it.

"Do you know Charles Voisey?" he enquired. Voisey was at his elbow, courtesy demanded it. "Voisey, Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould. We have known each other longer than either of us cares to remember. We should telescope it all together." He gestured with his hands. "Take out all the tedious bits between and keep only the laughter and the music, the good dinners, the conversations, and perhaps a little dancing. Then we should be about the right age, shouldn't we?"

She smiled. "That is the best suggestion I have heard in years, sir," she said with enthusiasm. "I don't even mind keeping some of the tragedy, or even the quarrels-let us simply get rid of all the tedious hours, the exchanging of phrases that neither of us means, the standing around, the polite lies. That would take years away."

"You are right! You are right!" he agreed, conviction in his face. "I did not realize until this moment how much I had missed you. I refuse to allow it to happen again. I spend years of my life in duty. I swear I am not convinced that those I spend it with are any better pleased with it than I am! We make utterly predictable remarks, wait for the other to reply, and then move on to the next equally predictable response."

"I fear it is part of royal duty, sir," Voisey put in, "as long as we have a throne and a monarch upon it. I can think of no way in which it could be changed."

"Voisey is a judge of appeal," the Prince told Vespasia. "Which I suppose makes him a great man for precedent. If it has not been done before, then we had better not do it now."

"On the contrary," Voisey retorted. "I am all for new ideas, if they are good ones. To fail to progress is to die."

Vespasia looked at him with interest. It was an unusual point of view from one whose profession was so steeped in the past.

He did not smile back at her, as a less confident man might have done.

The Prince was already thinking of something else. His admiration for other people's ideas seemed highly limited.

"Of course," he dismissed airily. "The number of new inventions around is incredible. Ten years ago we would not have conceived what they could do with electricity."

Voisey smiled very slightly, his eyes on Vespasia's for an instant longer before he replied. "Indeed, sir. One wonders what may yet be to come." He was polite, but Vespasia heard the faintest thread of contempt in his voice. He was a man of ideas, broad concepts, revolutions of the mind. Details did not hold his regard; they were for smaller men, men whose view was conceived from a lower level.

They were joined by a noted architect and his wife, and the conversation became general. The Prince glanced at Vespasia with regret, a shred of humor, and then played his part in the trivialities.

Vespasia was able to excuse herself and moved on to speak to a politician she had known for years. He looked weary and amused, his face deeply lined, full of character. They had shared personal crusades in the past, triumph and tragedy, and a fair share of farce.

"Good evening, Somerset," she said with genuine pleasure. She had forgotten how fond of him she had been. His failures had been magnificent, as had his successes, and he had carried them both with grace.

"Lady Vespasia!" His eyes were alight. "Suddenly a breath of sanity!" He took the hand she offered, barely brushing it with his lips in a gesture rather than an act. "I wish we had a new crusade, but this is beyond even us, I think." He glanced around at the opulent room and the ever-increasing number of men and women in it, laughing together, diamonds blazing, light on silks and pale skin, swathes of lace, shimmering brocades. His eyes hardened. "It will destroy itself... if it doesn't see sense in the next year or two." There was regret in his voice, and confusion. "Why can't they see that?"

"Do you really think so?" She assumed for a moment that perhaps he was speaking for effect, a little dramatic overstatement. Then she saw the tightness of his lips and the shadow over his eyes. "You do..."

He turned to her. "If Bertie doesn't curtail his spending a great deal"-he inclined his head momentarily towards the Prince of Wales ten yards away, laughing uproariously at someone's joke-"and the Queen doesn't come back into public life and start courting her people again." There was another guffaw of laughter a few yards away.

Somerset Carlisle lowered his voice. "Lots of us suffer grief, Vespasia. Most of us lose something we love in our lives. We can't afford to give up-stop working because of it. The country is made up of a few aristocrats, hundreds of thousands of doctors, lawyers, and priests, a million or two shopkeepers and traders of one sort or another, and farmers. And dozens of millions of ordinary men and women who work from dawn to dusk because they have to, to feed those who depend on them, the old and the young. Men die, and women break their hearts. We go on."

Somewhere at the far end of the room the music started. There was a tinkle of glass.

"You can't lead people from more than a certain distance away," he went on. "She isn't one of us anymore. She has allowed herself to become irrelevant. And Bertie is too much one of us, with his appetites-only he isn't indulging them on his own money, as the rest of us have to!"

Vespasia knew that what he said was true, but she had not heard anyone else put it quite so boldly. Somerset Carlisle had an irresponsible wit and a high sense of the bizarre, which she knew only too well. She still felt a note of hysteria rise inside her when she thought of their past battles and the grotesque things he had done in his attempts to force through reform. But she knew him too well to think he was joking or exaggerating now.

" Victoria will be the last monarch," he said almost under his breath, a harsh edge of regret in his voice. "If some people have their way... believe me. There is unrest in the country more profound than anything we've had in two centuries or more. The poverty in some places is almost unbelievable, not to mention the anti-Catholic feeling, the fear of the liberal Jews who've come into London after the '48 revolutions in Europe, and of course there are always the Irish."

"Exactly," she agreed. "We've always had most of these elements. Why now, Somerset?"

He remained silent for several moments. People passed them. One or two spoke, and the others nodded in acknowledgment but did not intrude.

"I'm not sure," he said finally. "A mixture of things. Time. It's nearly thirty years since Prince Albert died. That's a long time to live without an effective monarch. We have a whole generation who are beginning to realize we can manage fairly well without one." He lifted one shoulder slightly. "I don't personally agree with them. I think the mere existence of a monarch, whether that monarch does anything or not, is a safeguard against many of the abuses of power, which perhaps we don't realize, simply because we have had that shield so long. A constitutional monarchy, of course. The prime minister should be the head of the nation, and the monarch the heart. I think it is very wise not to have both in the one figure." He gave a twisted, little smile. "It means we can change our minds when we find we are mistaken without committing suicide."

"It is also who we are," she said, equally softly. "We have had a throne for a thousand years, and the notion of it far longer. I don't think I care to change."

"Nor I." He grinned at her suddenly, lighting his face with a wild humor. "I am too old for it!" He was at least thirty-five years younger than she.

She gave him a look that should have frozen him at twenty paces, and she knew it would not.

They were joined by a slender man, little more than Vespasia's height, with a shock of dark hair threaded through with gray at the temples. He had very dark eyes, a long nose and a sensitive mouth, deeply lined at each side. He looked intelligent, wry, and weary, as if he had seen too much of life and his compassion for it was growing thin.

"Evening, Narraway." Carlisle regarded him with interest. "Lady Vespasia, may I present Victor Narraway. He is head of Special Branch. I'm not sure if that is supposed to be a secret or not, but you know a score of people you could ask, if it interested you. Lady Vespasia Cumming-Gould."

Narraway bowed and made the appropriate acknowledgment.

"Thought you'd be far too busy ferreting out anarchists to waste your time in chatter and dancing," Carlisle said dryly. " England safe for the night, is it?"

Narraway smiled. "Not all the danger is lurking in dark alleys in Limehouse," he replied. "To be any real threat it would have to have tentacles a great deal longer than that."

Vespasia watched him closely, trying to make some estimate in her mind as to whether he believed as Carlisle did, but she could not separate the amusement from the sadness in his eyes. A moment later he was making some remark about the foreign secretary, and the conversation swept past the subject and became trivial.

An hour later, with the strains of a waltz sweet and lilting in the background, Vespasia was enjoying an excellent champagne and a while seated alone, when she was aware of the Prince of Wales a dozen feet away from her. He was in conversation with a solidly built man of middle age with a pleasant, earnest face and a quiff of hair that was thinning markedly on the top. They seemed to be speaking of sugar.

"... do you, Sissons?" the Prince enquired. The expression on his face was polite but less than interested.

"Mostly through the Port of London," Sissons replied. "Of course, it is a very labor-intensive industry."

"Is it? I admit, I had no idea. I suppose we take it for granted. A spoonful of sugar for one's tea, and so on."

"Oh, there is sugar in scores of things," Sissons said with feeling. "Cakes, sweet pastries, pies, even some things we might have supposed to be savory. A sprinkle of sugar improves the taste of tomatoes more than you would believe."

"Does it really?" The Prince raised his eyebrows slightly in an attempt to look as if the information were of value to him. "I had always thought of salt for that."

"Sugar is better," Sissons assured him. "It is mostly labor that adds to the cost, you see?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Labor, sir," Sissons repeated. "That is why the Spitalfields area is good. Thousands of men needing work... an almost endless pool to call upon. Volatile, of course."

"Volatile?" The Prince was still apparently lost.

Vespasia was aware of others within earshot of this rather pointless exchange, and also listening. Lord Randolph Churchill was one of them. She had known him in a slight way most of her life, as she had known his father before him. She was conscious of his intelligence and his dedication to his political beliefs.

"A great mixture of people," Sissons was explaining. "Backgrounds, religions and so on. Catholics, Jews, and of course Irish. Lot of Irish. The need to work is about all they have in common."

"I see." The Prince was beginning to feel he had said enough to satisfy courtesy and might be excused for leaving this exceedingly dull conversation.

"It must be profitable," Sissons continued, urgency rising in his voice, his face pink.

"Well, I imagine with a couple of factories, you are in a position to know." The Prince smiled pleasantly, as if to conclude the matter.

"No!" Sissons said sharply, taking a step forward as the Prince took one away. "Actually three factories. But what I meant was not that it was profitable but that there is a great obligation upon me to make it so, otherwise over a thousand men will be thrown out of work, and the chaos and injury that would result from that would be appalling." His words were tumbling out at increasing speed. "I could not even venture a guess as to where that would end. Not in that part of the city. You see, there is nowhere else for them to go."

"Go?" The Prince frowned. "Why should they wish to go?"

Vespasia felt herself cringing. She had a very vivid idea of the soul-destroying poverty of parts of London, most especially the East End, of which Spitalfields and Whitechapel were the heart.

"I mean for work." Sissons was becoming agitated. It was plain in the beads of sweat on his brow and lip, which were glistening in the lights. "Without work they will starve. God knows, they are close enough to it now."

The Prince said nothing. He was clearly embarrassed. It was a most unseemly subject in this gorgeous, lavish display of pleasure. It was poor taste to remind men with glasses of champagne in their hands, and women decked with diamonds, that within a few miles of them thousands had not food and shelter for the night. It made them uncomfortable.

"It is necessary I stay in business!" Sissons's voice rose a trifle, carrying above the hum of other conversations and the beat of the distant music. "I have to make sure I collect all my debts... so I can keep on paying them."

The Prince looked bewildered. "Of course. Yes... it must be. Very conscientious, I am sure."

Sissons swallowed. "All of them... sir."

"Yes... quite so." The Prince was looking decidedly unhappy now. His desire to escape this absurd situation was palpable.

Randolph Churchill took the liberty of interrupting. Vespasia was not surprised. She knew his relationship with the Prince of Wales was long and had varied. It had been one of extreme hatred over the Aylesford affair in 1876, when the Prince had actually challenged him to a duel with guns-to be fought in Paris, such a thing being illegal in England. Sixteen years ago the Prince had publicly refused to enter the house of anyone who received the Churchills. Consequently they had been almost entirely ostracized.

Eventually it had all died down, and Jennie Churchill, Randolph 's wife, had so charmed the Prince-apparently enough to become one of his many mistresses-that he willingly dined at their home in Connaught Place and gave her expensive gifts. Randolph was back in favor. As well as being appointed leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer, two of the highest offices in the land, he was the closest personal confidante of the Prince, sharing sporting and social events, giving advice and receiving praise and trust.

Now he stepped in to relieve a tedious situation.

"Of course you have to... er... Sissons," he said cheerfully.

"Only way to conduct a business, what? But this is a time for enjoyment. Have some more champagne; it's excellent." He turned to the Prince. "I must congratulate you, sir, an exquisite choice. I don't know how you do it."

The Prince brightened considerably. He was with one of his own, a man he could trust not only politically but socially.

"It is rather, isn't it? Did well there."

"Superbly," Churchill agreed, smiling. He was a beautifully dressed man of average height with regular features and a very wide, turned-up mustache which gave him a distinguished air. His manner was one of unquenchable pride. "I fancy it calls for something succulent to eat, to complement it. May I have something sent for you, sir?"

"No... no, I'll come with you." The Prince grasped the chance to escape. "I really ought to speak to the French ambassador. Good fellow. Do excuse us, Sissons." And he turned and went with Churchill too rapidly for Sissons to do anything but mutter something unheard and take his leave.

"Mad," Somerset Carlisle said softly at Vespasia's elbow.

"Who?" she enquired. "The sugar man?"

"Not so far as I know." He smiled. "Tedious in the extreme, but if that were insanity, then I should lock up half the country. I meant Churchill."

"Oh, of course," she said casually. "But you are far from the first to say that. At least he knows which side his advantage lies, which is an improvement on the Aylesford situation. Who is that very intense-looking man with the gray hair?" She half looked into the distance to indicate who she meant, then back again at Carlisle. "I don't recall having seen him before, and yet he exudes a kind of passion which is almost evangelical."

"Newspaper proprietor," Carlisle replied. " Thorold Dismore. I doubt he would approve your description of him. He is a republican, and a convinced atheist. But you are quite right, there is something of the proselyte about him."

"I have never heard of him," she replied. "And I thought I knew the newspaper proprietors in London."

"I doubt you'd read his paper. It's good quality, but he is not averse to allowing his opinions to shine through rather clearly."

"Indeed?" She raised her eyebrows questioningly. "And why should that prevent me from reading them? I have never imagined people reported the news unfiltered through their own prejudices. Are his any more powerful than usual?"

"I think so. And he is not averse to advocating action in their cause."

"Oh." She felt it as a breath of chill, no more. She should not have been surprised. She looked across at the man more closely. It was a strong face, sharp, intelligent, moved by powerful emotion. She would have judged him a man who yielded no ground to anyone, and whose overt good nature might very easily mask a temper that could be ugly if roused. But first impressions could be mistaken.

"Do you wish to meet him?" Carlisle asked curiously.

"Perhaps," she replied. "But I am quite sure I do not wish him to know that I do."

Carlisle grinned. "I shall make sure he does not," he promised. "It would be grossly presumptuous. I shall certainly not allow him to affect airs above his station. If it is contrived at all, he will believe it was his idea and he is profoundly grateful that I have accomplished it for him."

" Somerset, you verge on the impertinent," she answered, aware that she was very fond of him. He was brave, absurd, passionate about his beliefs, and beneath the flippant exterior, pleasingly unique. She had always loved eccentrics.

***

It was after midnight and Vespasia was beginning to wonder if she wished to stay much longer, when she heard a voice which dissolved time, hurling her back about half a century to an unforgettable summer in Rome: 1848, the year of revolutions throughout Europe. For a wild, euphoric time-all too brief-dreams of freedom had spread like fire across France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. Then one by one they had been destroyed. The barricades had been stormed, the people broken, and the popes and kings had taken back their power. The reform had been overturned and trampled under the feet of soldiers. In Rome it had been the French soldiers of Napoleon III.

She almost did not turn to look. Whoever it was, it could only be an echo. It was memory playing a trick, an intonation that sounded the same, some Italian diplomat, perhaps from the same region, even the same town. She thought she had forgotten him, forgotten the whole tumultuous year with its passion, its hope and all the courage and pain, and in the end the loss.

She had been back to Italy since then, but never to Rome. She had always found a way to avoid that, without explaining why. It was a separate part of her life, an existence quite different from the realities of her marriage, her children, of London, even of her recent adventures with the extraordinary policeman Thomas Pitt. Who could have imagined that Vespasia Cumming-Gould, the ultimate aristocrat who could trace her blood to half the royal houses of Europe, could join forces with a gamekeeper's son who had become a policeman? But then worrying what others thought crippled half the people she knew, and denied them all manner of passion and joy, and pain. Then she did turn. It was not really a thought so much as a reaction she could not help.

A dozen feet away stood a man almost her own age. He had been in his twenties when she met him, slender, dark, lithe as a dancer, and with that voice that filled her dreams.

Now his hair was gray, he was a little heavier, but the bones were still the same, the sweep of his brows, the smile.

As if he had felt her stare, he turned towards her, for a moment ignoring the man he was speaking with.

His recognition of her was instant, with no moment of doubt, no hesitation.

Then she was afraid. Could reality ever be equal to memory? Had she allowed herself to believe more than had really happened? Was the woman of her youth even remotely like the woman she was today? Or would she find time and experience had made her too wise to be able to see the dream anymore? Did she need to see him in the passion of youth, with the Roman sun on his face, a gun in his hand as he stood at the barricades, prepared to die for the republic?

He was coming towards her.

Panic drenched her like a wave, but habit, the self-discipline of a lifetime, and absurd hope prevented her from leaving.

He stopped in front of her.

Her heart was beating in her throat. She had loved many times in her life, sometimes with fire, sometimes with laughter, usually with tenderness, but never anyone else as she had loved Mario Corena.

"Lady Vespasia." He said the words quite formally, as if they were merely acquaintances, but his voice was soft, caressing the syllables. It was, after all, a Roman name, as he had told her, teasingly, so long ago. The Emperor Vespasian was no hero.

It was her correct title. Should she reply equally correctly? After all they had shared, the hope, the passion, and the tragedy, it seemed like a denial. There was no one else listening.

"Mario..." It was strange to say his name again. Last time she had whispered it in the darkness, tears choking her throat, her cheeks wet. The French troops were marching into Rome. Mazzini had surrendered to save the people. Garibaldi had gone north towards Venice, his pregnant wife fighting beside him, dressed as a man, carrying a gun like everyone else. The Pope had returned and undone all the reforms, wiped out the debt, the liberty, and the soul in one act.

But that was all in the past. Italy was united now; that much at least had come true.

He was searching her eyes, her face. She hoped he would not say she was still beautiful. He was the one man to whom it had never mattered.

Should she say something to forestall him? A trite word now would be unbearable. But if she spoke, then she would never know. There was no time left for games.

"I have often imagined meeting you again," he said at last. "I never thought it would happen... until today." He gave the tiniest shrug. "I arrived in London a week ago. I could not be here without thinking of you. I quarreled with myself whether I should even enquire for you, or if dreams are best left undisturbed. Then someone mentioned your name, and all the past returned to me as if it were yesterday, and I had no power to deny myself. I thought you would be here." He glanced around the magnificent room with its smooth pillars, its dazzling chandeliers, the swirl of music and laughter and wine.

She knew exactly what he meant. This was her world of money, privilege, all of it passed down by blood. Perhaps in some distant past it had been earned, but not by these men and women here now.

She could so easily pick up the old battles again, but it was not what she wanted. She had believed as desperately as he had in the revolution in Rome. She had labored and argued for it too, worked all day and all night in the hospitals during the siege, carried water and food to the soldiers, in the end even fired the guns beside the last defenders. And she had understood why, in the end, when Mario had had to choose between her and his love of the republic, he had chosen his ideals. The pain of it had never completely left her, even after all these years, but had he chosen otherwise it would have been worse. She could not have loved him the same way, because she knew what he believed.

She smiled back at him, a little bubble of laughter inside her.

"You have an advantage. I would never, in even my silliest dreams, have thought to find you here, all but shoulder to shoulder with the Prince of Wales."

His eyes were soft, old jokes remembered, absurdities within the tears. "Touche," he acknowledged. "But the battlefield is everywhere now."

"It always was, my dear," she answered. "It is more complicated here. Few issues are as simple as they seemed to us then."

His gaze did not waver. "They were simple."

She thought how little he had changed. It was only the superficial things: the color of his hair, the faint lines on his skin. Inside he might be wiser, have a few scars and bruises, but the same hope burned just as strongly, and all the old dreams.

She had forgotten love could be so overwhelming.

"We wanted a republic," he went on. "A voice for the people. Land for the poor, houses for those who slept in the streets, hospitals for the sick, light for the prisoners and the insane. It was simple to imagine, simple to do when we had the power... for a brief spell before tyranny returned."

"You hadn't the means," she reminded him. He did not deserve to be patronized by less than the truth. In the end, whether the French armies had come or not, the republic would have fallen because those with the money would not give enough to keep its fragile economy going.

Pain flashed into his face.

"I know." He glanced around the marvelous room in which they stood, still full of music and the chatter of voices. "The diamonds in here alone would have secured us for months. How much do you think these people are served in these banquets in a week? How much is overeaten, how much thrown away because it wasn't needed?"

"Enough to feed the poor of Rome," she answered.

"And the poor of London?" he asked wryly.

There was a bitterness of truth in her reply. "Not enough for that."

He stood staring silently at the throng, his face weary with the long battle against blindness of heart. She watched him, knowing what he thought all those years ago in Rome, and saw beyond doubt that he was thinking the same now. Then it had been the Pope and his cardinals, now it was the Prince and his courtiers, admirers, hangers-on. This was the Crown of Britain and its Empire, not the three-tiered crown of the Pope, but everything else was the same, the splendor and the indifference, the unconscious use of power, the human frailty.

Why was he in London? Did she want to know? Perhaps not. This moment was sweet. Here in this noisy, superficial glamour of the ballroom she could feel the heat of the Roman sun on her face, see the dust, sense the glare in her eyes-and imagine under her feet the stones that had rung to the steps of legions who had conquered every corner of the earth and shouted "Hail Caesar!" as they marched, eagles high, red crests bright. She was back where Christian martyrs had been thrown to the lions, gladiators had fought, St. Peter had been crucified upside down, Michelangelo had painted the Sistine Chapel.

She did not want the past overwhelmed by the present. It was too precious, too deeply woven into the fabric of her dreams.

No, she would not ask.

Then the moment slipped past, and they were no longer alone. A man named Richmond greeted them pleasantly, introducing his wife, and the moment after, Charles Voisey and Thorold Dismore joined them and conversation became general. It was trivial and mildly amusing until Mrs. Richmond made some comment about ancient Troy and the excitement of Heinrich Schliemann's discoveries. Vespasia forced her attention to the present and its trivia.

"Remarkable," Dismore agreed. "Extraordinary persistence of the man."

"And the things they discovered," Mrs. Richmond enthused. "The mask of Agamemnon, the necklace probably worn by Helen. It makes them all real in a way I had never imagined... actual flesh and blood, just like ordinary people. It is the oddest sensation to take them out of the realms of legend and make mortals of them, with lives that leave physical remains, artefacts behind."

"Probably." Voisey sounded cautious.

"Oh, I think there's little doubt!" she protested. "Have you read any of those marvelous papers by Martin Fetters? He's brilliant, you know. He makes it all so immediate."

There was a moment's silence.

"Yes," Dismore said abruptly. "He is a great loss."

"Oh!" Mrs. Richmond colored deeply. "I had forgotten. How terrible. I am sorry. He... fell..." She stopped, clearly uncertain how to continue.

"Of course he fell!" Dismore said tartly. "God knows how any jury came to the conclusion they did. It's patently absurd. But it will go to appeal, and it will be reversed." He looked at Voisey.

Richmond turned to look at him as well.

Voisey stared back.

Mario Corena was puzzled.

"Sorry, Corena, can't give an opinion," Voisey said tersely. His face was pale, his lips pinched. "I shall almost certainly be one of the judges to sit when it comes to appeal. But this much I do know, that damned policeman Pitt is an ambitious and irresponsible man with a grudge against those of better birth and fortune than himself. He's determined to exercise the power his position gives him, just to show he can. His father was deported for theft, and he's never got over it. This is some kind of revenge against society. The arrogance of the ignorant when they are given a little responsibility is terrifying."

Vespasia felt as if she had been slapped. For a moment she had been at a loss for words. She heard the anger in Voisey's voice, saw the heat in his eyes. Her own anger was equal.

"I was not aware you were acquainted with him," she said icily. "But then I am certain a member of the judiciary such as you are would not judge any man, regardless of his birth or status, other than on the most carefully tested evidence. You would not allow other men's words or deeds to weigh with you, least of all your own feelings. Justice must be equal to all, or it is no justice at all." Her voice dripped sarcasm. "Therefore I must presume you know him far better than I do."

Voisey's skin was so pale the freckles on it stood out. He drew in his breath but did not speak.

"He is a relative of mine, by marriage," Vespasia finished. A very distant relative, but she had no need to add that. Her great-nephew, now dead, had been Pitt's brother-in-law.

Mrs. Richmond was astounded. For a moment she found it almost amusing, then she realized how seriously everyone else was taking it; the emotion was charged in the air like a coming storm.

"Unfortunate," Dismore said in the silence. "Probably the fellow was doing his duty as he saw it. Still, no doubt at all the appeal will reverse the verdict."

"Ah... yes," Richmond added. "No doubt at all."

Voisey kept his discretion.