“Yes, ma’am,” he conceded. She saw in his face that he was too aware of the gravity of the situation to make more than a token argument to satisfy conscience. He saw her to the omnibus stop again.
“I’ll be at the door in Keppel Street at six in the morning,” he said gravely. “We’ll take a hansom to the underground railway station, and a train to Whitechapel. Wear your oldest clothes, and boots that are comfortable for walking. And maybe you could borrow a shawl to hide your hair; it would make you less noticeable from the local women.”
She agreed with a sense of foreboding, and yet an anticipation inside her at the thought of seeing Pitt.
When she got home she ran up the stairs, washed her hair even though she would hide it under a shawl, and brushed it until it shone. She had not intended to tell Gracie, but she could not keep it secret. She went to bed early, and found herself too excited to sleep until long after midnight.
In the morning she woke late and had to hurry. There was barely time for a cup of tea. She drank it too hot and left half of it behind when Tellman knocked at the door.
“Tell Mr. Pitt we miss ’im terrible, ma’am!” Gracie said quickly, blushing a little, her eyes steady.
“I will,” Charlotte promised.
Tellman was on the step, the dark shape of a hansom looming behind him. He looked thin-shouldered, gaunt-faced, and she realized for the first time how much Pitt’s disgrace had affected him. He might loathe admitting it, but he was deeply loyal, both to Pitt himself and to his own sense of right and wrong. He might resent authority, see its faults and the injustices of differences in class and opportunity, but he expected the men who led him to observe certain rules within the law. Above all, he had not expected them to betray their own. Whatever his origins, Pitt had earned his place as one of them, and in Tellman’s world that had meant he should have been safe.
He might deplore the social conscience, or lack of it, among those of the officer class, but he knew their morality, at least he had thought he did, and it was worthy of respect. That was what made their leadership tolerable. Suddenly it was no longer so. When the fixed parts in the order of things began to crumble, there was a new and frightening kind of loneliness, a confusion unlike anything else.
“Thank you,” she said quietly as he walked across the damp footpath with her and handed her up into the cab. They rode in silence through the morning streets, the clear, gray light catching the windows of houses and shops. There were already many people about: maids, delivery boys, carters fetching fresh goods in for the markets. The first milk wagons were waiting at the ends of the streets and already queues were forming as they turned in towards the station.
The train as it roared through the black tunnel was far too noisy to allow conversation, and Charlotte’s mind was absorbed in anticipation of seeing Pitt. It had been only a matter of a few weeks, but it stretched behind her like a desert of time. She pictured how he would look: his face, his expression, whether he would be tired, well or ill, happy to see her. How much had the injustice wounded him? Was he changed by the anger he had to feel? That thought cut so deeply it caught her like a physical pain.
She sat bolt upright in the train seat. She did not realize, until Tellman moved beside her and stood up, gesturing to the door, how she had been clenching and unclenching her fingers until they ached. She stood up as the train lurched to a stop. They were at Aldgate Street, and they must walk the rest of the way.
It was broader daylight now, but the streets were dirtier, more congested with carts and wagons and groups of men on their way to work, some trudging, heads down, others shouting across to each other. Was there really a tension in the air, or did she imagine it because she knew the history of the place, and because she herself was frightened?
She kept close beside Tellman as they turned north out of the High Street. He had said they were going to Brick Lane, because Pitt would pass that way on his journey to the silk factory where he worked. This was Whitechapel. She thought about what the name meant literally, and how ludicrous a name it was for this grimy, industrial area with its narrow streets; dust; gray, broken windows; dogleg alleys; chimneys belching smoke; smells of drains and middens. Its history of horror lay so close beneath the surface it was sharp and painful in the heart.
Tellman was walking quickly, not to seem out of place among the men hurrying to the sugar factories, warehouses and yards. She had to trot to keep up with him, but perhaps here that was appropriate. Women did not walk beside their men at this time of day, as if they were courting couples.
There was a burst of raucous laughter. Someone smashed a bottle, and the thin tinkle of glass was startlingly unpleasant. She thought not of the loss of something useful, as she would at home, but of the weapon the jagged ends would make.
They were in Brick Lane now.
Tellman stopped. She wondered why. Then, with a lurch of her heart she saw Pitt. He was on the other side of the road, walking steadily, but unlike the other men, looking from side to side, listening, seeing. He was dressed shabbily; his coat was torn at the back, sitting crookedly as usual. And instead of his beautiful boots that Emily had given him, he had old ones with the left sole loose and string for laces. His hat was dented at the side of the brim. It was only by the familiarity of his walk that she recognized him before he turned and saw her.
He hesitated. He would not expect to see her here-he probably had not even been thinking of her-but perhaps something about the way she stood attracted him.
She started forward, and Tellman caught her arm. For an instant she resented it and would have torn herself loose, then she realized that running across the street would draw attention to her, and so to Pitt, and she allowed herself to be held back. People around here knew Pitt. They would ask who she was. How could he answer? It would start gossip, questions.
She stood with one foot on the curb, her face hot with embarrassment.
Her brief movement had been enough. Pitt had recognized her. He sauntered across the street, dodging between the carts, behind a dray and in front of a costermonger’s barrow. He reached them and after the merest nod to her, he spoke as if to Tellman.
“What are you doing here?” he said softly, his voice jagged with emotion. “What’s happened?”
She stared at him, memorizing every line of him. He looked tired. His face was freshly shaved but there was a grayness to his skin, and a hollowness around his eyes. She felt her chest tight with the ache to comfort him, to take him home to his own house, to warmth and a clean kitchen, the smells of linen and scrubbed wood, the quietness of the garden with its scent of damp earth and cut grass, doors that closed out the world for a few hours-above all, to hold him in her arms.
But far more urgent than that was the need to show people that he had been right, to prove it so they would have to acknowledge it, to heal the old wound of his father’s shame. She was angry, hurt, helpless, and she did not know what to say or how to explain herself to make him understand, so he would be as pleased to see her as she was just to be close to him, see his face and hear his voice.
“A lot’s happened,” Tellman was saying quietly. He only called Pitt “sir” if he was being insolent, so he had no need to guard his tongue for unintentional betrayal now. “I don’t know it all, so it would be better for Mrs. Pitt to tell you. But it’s things you have to know.”
Pitt caught the edge of fear in Tellman’s voice, and his anger evaporated. He looked at Charlotte.
She wanted to ask how he was, if he was all right, what his lodgings were like, if they were kind to him, was his bed clean, had he enough pillows, how was the food, was it enough. Most of all, she wanted him to know she loved him and missing him was more painful, more deeply lonely than she could have imagined, in every way: for laughter, for conversation, for sharing the good and bad of the day, for touching, just for knowing he was there.