“In what way?” Constance asked.
“Allways.”
Constance waited, but that seemed to be all her mother had to say on the matter. She leaned forward. “Ma, you need to be more specific than that. He’s up to something and we need to know what.”
“What you need is to keep out of his business,” Juliet retorted.
“Why? What do you know about him?”
“Nothing for thirty years, but people don’t change that much.”
“Then what happened when he was young? He said he wanted to marry you.”
Juliet shrugged, though her mask of carelessness did not quite work. “Hesaidhe did. He said a lot of things. He appears tobea lot of things. A perfect gentleman in every way, witty, knowledgeable, observant, remembers everything he ever hears—a bit like you. But he ain’t your father, so never think it.”
Constance, who had thought it for a heady few minutes in Venice, said impatiently, “I don’t. I’m too young. What did he do to you?”
Juliet’s painted eyebrows flew up. “To me? Nothing. But I once saw thisgentleman beat up two others quite brutally, and haul one off in a waiting carriage.”
“To the police?”
“There was no police force in those days, but no, not to the law at all. A man was found dead that night, two streets away.”
“You can’t know it was the same man,” Constance argued.
“He sounded it by the description in the newspaper. A foreigner, he was.”
“Did you ask Kellar about it?”
“He brushed it off, claimed he’d been attacked, which might be true, but he was too damned efficient about the business for a gentleman.”
“Is that why you refused to marry him?”
Juliet actually blushed, a rare enough sight to knock Constance completely off balance. “No. I was young and stupid enough to find it exciting. He was, you know. A bit like your Solomon in his own way, understated, if you grasp my meaning? I actually liked the element of danger… I was too sheltered in those days to understand what it meant.”
“So why didn’t you marry him?”
Juliet waved that aside.
“I need to know, Ma,” Constance said. “If it wasn’t violence, what was it? Did he lie? Manipulate? Steal? Entertain other women?”
“I did see him with another woman once. He didn’t introduce us, but I wasn’t jealous by nature. No, it was my own pride. He assumed I would go to America with him, when the Foreign Office posted him there. I was only a penniless companion, but he’d no right to assume. I let him go alone. Actually, I didn’t think he would. But he did.”
Constance hesitated. Her mother had never been so open, never told her anything about her past before. “He said he wrote to you and you never answered.”
Juliet’s gaze flickered. In among the surprise, there might have been regret. “Never got any letters,” she said with studied carelessness. “I’d been flung out of the house by then for immoral behavior.”
“With him?”Of course it was.
Constance had grown up believing her mother had been born into the same world as she, a world of squalid poverty, prostitution, andsurvival by any means, most of them criminal. But Juliet had been well enough born to be companion to a lady, and her fall was similar to several other women whom Constance had helped over the years. Elizabeth Maule for one, and she called Lizzie her friend. Juliet, she had despised and loved in equal measure.
“The first of many,” said her mother.
“Why did you not come with me to the establishment?” Constance blurted.
To her surprise, Juliet actually answered. “Because I wanted you out of that trade, and because I had my own business.”
“And pride. Again.”
