“No, Charles. Certainly not.” Louisa tried to back away.
He laughed and pulled her to him, holding her for a moment. Then he kissed her, released her, and regained the ice, skating away. Louisa looked pink, but a smile played on her lips, and her dark eyes shone.
Charles called to his sister over his shoulder, “Don’t be all day.”
Mary fitted her skates over her boots and adjusted the straps. Then she pulled on her mittens, stood, and swayed. She clutched at Louisa’s arm for temporary support, took a step, and her right skate fell off. She refastened it. It slipped off a second time, followed by the left.
“My dear, they simply don’t fit.” Louisa looked over her shoulder at the rental kiosk. “Can you exchange them for another pair?”
Mary gathered them up and dumped them on the bench. “They were the smallest size they had. That prig of a clerk will be happy to see me back, tail between my legs. ‘We don’t carry skates for ladies, madam.’ I wanted to throw them at him.”
Mary looked out at the crowd on the lake. Then she dropped on the bench in defeat and leaned over to retie a bootlace that had come undone.
“Don’t you get sick of it, Lou?” Mary said, tugging at the lace. “Everything women can’t do—the blank busyness of our days. We’re never allowed to stretch or look around. The world slaps blinders on us and sends us down a narrow path.”
“You manage to go your way well enough,” Louisa said.
Mary looked up, surprised, feeling the sting in the remark.
Louisa moved Mary’s skates and sat next to her. More mildly, she said, “Besides, once you’re married, and you have your own house and a husband to look after—”
“And become nothing but a broodmare. Good for spawning his heirs.”
Too late, Mary wanted to bite back her words. For ten years, her sister-in-law had tried and failed to carry a pregnancy to term. Her third miscarriage in the fall had brought Mary home from Paris. She wondered if Louisa’s heart would always beat for a child or if the yearning would die away.
Mary contemplated her sister-in-law behind lowered lids. It had been more than ten years since Charles had fiddled with the focus of his opera glasses and brought dark-eyed, flame-haired Louisa Upton into view. He claimed he never heard another note of the performance.
Is Charles happy with his prize?Mary wondered. Louisa didn’t share the family passion for art and had little to add when the conversation turned to painting. As the years passed, her brother had less and less to say to his wife. Yet Louisa was an intelligent woman who was widely read and fluent in French. Mary envied her skill while she was living in Paris. Her sister-in-law should have married into a family of novelists, not painters.
Louisa’s great tragedy was the empty nursery, but Mary didn’t think it mattered much to Charles. None, one, or a brood of ten, it was all the same to her amiable brother. He was impossible to disappoint or provoke.
And yet. . .
Since Mary’s return from Paris, she’d sensed something amiss with her brother. She looked up and sought his figure on the lake. Charles circled, retracing the same small loop, his hands clasped in the small of his back. Even from a distance, Mary saw his change in mood. It was as if the noonday sun had vanished in an eclipse. She read dejection in the slope of his shoulders, his bowed head, his gaze fixed on the ice.
“Lou . . . is something wrong with Charles?”
Louisa gripped her hand. “You’ve noticed it, too?”
“What’s troubling him?”
“I wish I knew. Charles is away most evenings, dining at that club of his. And it’s been months since he—” Louisa flushed and looked away.
Oh dear,Mary thought. She was trying to think of something to say when a splintering crack shot across the park.
Louisa gasped. “What was that?”
The sun-splashed afternoon collapsed in a confusion of shouts and screams.
* * *
Tennant held the door, and Julia entered the police station ahead of him. She felt as if a photographer had set off his flash powder, freezing an image in place. A pair of constables fell silent and stared. The sergeant perched on a high stool behind the duty desk halted over his ledger, pen poised. Julia straightened her spine and approached a wiry, hatchet-faced man in a police inspector’s tunic. He frowned at his open pocket watch.
Tennant said, “Inspector Evans, this is Doctor Lewis.”
He snapped the case shut and nodded. “Let’s get this over with.”
Thirty minutes later, Evans stood aside as a constable led the teary Annie O’Neill back to a holding cell. Tennant closed an oak door markedPRISONERS ONLYbehind her.
