“How the devil should I know?” Jimmy sounded frantic. “I’m sure Anna’s a rotten wife, and one can hardly blame him for being upset about George, but it’s as if he’s set out to despoil all of us as vengeance.”

“He doesn’t like women,” Pat said. “You must have noticed. He’s been on at me, at Victoria—at Fen, too, when you might think, if he wanted to carry on living in luxury at your expense, he wouldn’t have tried to ruin your engagement to an heiress. And when he was saying things about you and your father, his eyes kept flicking to the Countess. He was trying to hurt her.”

“I agree with that,” Bill said. “One of those woman-haters who won’t leave them alone.”

“I wish you had let Preston throttle him,” Jimmy said violently. “I wish he was dead. I swear I could stand over his body and laugh. I’ve never hated anyone so much in my life. It feels as though we’re trapped—buried in one of those Egyptian tombs from the pulp novels, you know, with the sand slowly pouring in to suffocate us.”

The Mertons exchanged glances. “Steady on,” Pat said.

“Less pulp, more planning,” Bill added.

“There’s no plan to make. There’s nothing to be done.”

Bill looked down at him, face twisted. “Why did you not tell me this before?”

“Do you think I want to dwell on it? That I’m proud of it?” Jimmy slapped his hand on the desk. “Look at us! My father’s at best a damned fool who’s helped ruin people, and as for Anna, would you want anyone knowing all that about your sister? The way she’s conducted herself—no decent person would receive her again.”

“Speaking as the sister in question, I’d be more concerned about finding out why Lady Anna is behaving as she is than complaining about it,” Pat said. “She doesn’t look like she’s living a life of pleasure.”

“It’s all horribly sordid, I grant you,” Bill said. “Did you think I’d care about that, you damned fool?”

“I care,” Jimmy said. “It’s filthy. You can’t know how filthy. And Maurice—any whiff of wrongdoing, of secrets, and he’s on it like a ferret down a rathole. I had to keep you away from it. I just wanted it to stop. I still want it to stop.”

Bill grabbed his hand, caught Pat’s eye, and gave a firm jerk of the head. She rose silently, slipping out of the room as Jimmy let out a sob, and returned to the little sitting room next door in thoughtful mood. She closed the door carefully behind her, but it didn’t quite muffle the sound of Jimmy weeping.

Bill came to join her perhaps twenty minutes later.