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“So you know it?” Evan said with a smile.
Duke flushed. “I know of it, Mr. Evan. That is not the same thing.” But his annoyance betrayed that he perceived it was.
“Then you will know that it is densely populated,” Evan continued, “with people who are most unlikely to offer us any assistance. There is a great deal of poverty there, and crime. It is not a natural place for gentlemen to go. It is crowded, dirty and dangerous.”
“So I have heard.”
“You have never been there?”
“Never. As you said, it is not a place any gentleman would wish to be.” Duke smiled more widely. “If I were to go searching cheap entertainment, I would choose the Haymarket. I had imagined Rhys would do the same, but possibly I was wrong.”
“He has never been to the Haymarket with you?” Evan asked mildly.
For the first time Duke hesitated.
“I hardly think my pleasures are any of your concern, Mr. Evan. But no, I have not been with Rhys to the Haymarket, or anywhere else, for at least a year. I have no idea what he was doing in St. Giles.” He stared back at Evan with steady, defiant eyes.
Evan would have liked to disbelieve him, but he thought it was literally true, even if there was an implicit lie embedded in it somewhere. It was pointless to press him on the subject. He was obviously not willing to offer anything, and Evan had no weapon with which to draw him out against his will. His only tactic was to bide his time and look as if he were content with it.
“Unfortunate,” Evan said blandly. “It would have made our task shorter. But no doubt we shall find those who do. It will take more work, more disruption to others, and I daresay more investigation of private lives, but there is no help for it.”
Duke looked at him narrowly. Evan was not sure if he imagined it, but there seemed a flicker of unease.
“If you want to wait in the morning room, there may be a newspaper there, or something,” Duke said abruptly. “It’s that way.” He indicated the door to his left, Evan’s right. “I expect when Papa comes home he’ll see you. Not that I imagine he can tell you anything either, but he did teach Rhys at school.”
“Do you imagine Rhys might have confided in him?”
Duke gave him a look of such incredible contempt no answer was necessary.
Evan accepted the invitation and went to the cold and very uncomfortable morning room. The fire had long since gone out and he was too chilly to sit. He walked back and forth, half looking at the books on the shelf, noticing a number of classical titles, Tacitus, Sallust, Juvenal, Caesar, Cicero and Pliny in the original Latin, translations of Terence and Plautus, the poems of Catullus, and on the shelf above, the travels of Herodotus and Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian war. They were hardly the reading a waiting guest would choose. He wondered what manner of person usually sat there.
What he really wanted was to ask Kynaston about Sylvestra Duff. He wanted to know if she had a lover, if she was the sort of woman to seize her own desires even at the expense of someone else’s life. Had she the strength of will, the courage, the blind, passionate selfishness? But how did you say that to anyone? How did you elicit it from him without his wish?
Not by pacing the floor alone in a cold room, thinking about it. He wished he had Monk’s skill. Monk might have known how to proceed.
He went to the fireplace and pulled the bell rope. When the maid answered he asked if he could see Mrs. Kynaston. The maid promised to enquire.
He had no picture in his mind, but still Fidelis Kynaston surprised him. He would have said at a glance that she was plain. She was certainly over forty, nearer to forty-five, and yet he found himself drawn to her immediately. There was a composure in her, an inner certainty which was integrity.
“Good evening, Mr. Evan.” She came in and closed the door. She had fair hair which was fading a little at the temples, and she wore a dark gray dress of simple cut, without ornament except for a very beautiful cameo brooch, heightened by its solitary presence. The physical resemblance to her son was plain, and yet her personality was so utterly different she seemed nothing like him at all. There was no antagonism in her eyes, no contempt, only amusement and patience.
“Good evening, Mrs. Kynaston,” he said quickly. “I am sorry to disturb you, but I need your help, if you are able to give it, in endeavoring to learn what happened to Rhys Duff and his father. I cannot question him. As you may know, he cannot speak and is too ill to be distressed by having the subject even mentioned to him. I dislike raising it with Mrs. Duff more than I am obliged to, and I think she is too deeply shocked at present to recall a great deal.”
“I am not sure what I know, Mr. Evan,” she answered with a frown. “The imagination answers why Rhys may have gone to such an area. Young men do. They frequently have more curiosity and appetite than either sense or good taste.”
He was surprised at her candor, and it must have shown in his expression.
She smiled, a lopsided gesture because of the extraordinariness of her face.
“I have sons, and I had brothers, Mr. Evan. Also, my husband is the principal of a school for boys. I should indeed have my eyes closed were I to be unaware of such things.”
“Did you not find it difficult to believe that Rhys would go there?”
“No. He was an average young man, with all the usual desires to flout convention as he thought his parents considered it, and yet to do exactly what all young men have always done.”
“His father before him?” he asked.
Her eyebrows rose. “Probably. If you are asking me if I know, then the answer is that I do not. There are many things a wise woman chooses not to know, unless the knowledge is forced upon her, and most men do not force it.”
