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“Very impressive,” Percival said sarcastically, but there was a brief flicker of something in his face, rapid as the sunlight let through the trees by a turning leaf, then gone again. “But since you are not there, and everyone else is busy covering their own petty sins, serving their grievances, or else obliged to Sir Basil, we’ll never know—will we?”
“Hester Latterly isn’t.” Instantly Monk regretted he had said it. Percival might take it for hope, which was an illusion and unspeakably cruel now.
“Hester Latterly?” For an instant Percival looked confused, then he remembered her. “Oh—the terribly efficient nurse. Daunting woman, but you’re probably right. I expect she is so virtuous it is painful. I doubt she knows how to smile, let alone laugh, and I shouldn’t think any man ever looked at her,” he said viciously. “She’s taken her vengeance on us by spending her time ministering to us when we are at our most vulnerable—and most ridiculous.”
Monk felt a deep uprush of rage for the cruel and unthinking prejudice, then he looked at Percival’s haggard face and remembered where he was, and why, and the rage vanished like a match flame in a sea of ice. What if Percival did need to hurt someone, however remotely? His was going to be the ultimate pain.
“She came to the house because I sent her,” Monk explained. “She is a friend of mine. I hoped that someone inside the household in a position where no one would pay much regard to them might observe things I could not.”
Percival’s amazement was as profound as anything could be over the surface of the enormous center of him, which knew nothing but the slow, relentless clock ticking away his days to the last walk, the hood, the hangman’s rope around his neck, and the sharp drop to tearing, breaking pain and oblivion.
“But she didn’t learn anything, did she?” For the first time his voice cracked and he lost control of it.
Monk loathed himself for stupidly giving this knife thrust of hope, which was not hope at all.
“No,” he said quickly. “Nothing that helps. All sorts of trivial and ugly little weaknesses and sins—and that Lady Moidore believes the murderer is still in the house, and almost certainly one of her family—but she has no idea who either.”
Percival turned away, hiding his face.
“What did you come for?”
“I’m not sure. Perhaps simply not to leave you alone, or to think no one believes you. I don’t know if it helps, but you have the right to know. I hope it does.”
Percival let out an explosion of curses, and swore over and over again until he was exhausted with repeating himself and the sheer, ugly futility of it. When he finished Monk had gone and the cell door was locked again, but through the tears and the bloodless skin, there was a very small light of gratitude, ease from one of the clenched and terrible knots inside him.
On the morning Percival was hanged Monk was working on the case of a stolen picture, more probably removed and sold by a member of the family in gambling debt. But at eight o’clock he stopped on the pavement in Cheapside and stood still in the cold wind amid the crowd of costers, street peddlers of bootlaces and matches and other fripperies, clerks on errands, a sweep, black-faced and carrying a ladder, and two women arguing over a length of cloth. The babble and clatter rolled on around him, oblivious of what was happening in Newgate Yard, but he stood motionless with a sense of finality and a wounding loss—not for Percival individually, although he felt the man’s terror and
rage and the snuffing out of his life. He had not liked him, but he had been acutely aware of his vitality, his intensity of feeling and thought, his identity. But his greatest loss was for justice which had failed. At the moment when the trapdoor opened and the noose jerked tight, another crime was being committed. He had been powerless to prevent it, for all the labor and thought he had put into it, but his was not the only loss, or even necessarily the main one. All London was diminished, perhaps all England, because the law which should protect had instead injured.
Hester was standing in the dining room. She had deliberately come to collect an apricot conserve from the table for Beatrice’s tray at precisely this time. If she jeopardized her position, even if she lost it and were dismissed, she wanted to see the faces of the Moidores at the moment of hanging, and to be sure each one of them knew precisely what moment this was.
She excused herself past Fenella, uncharacteristically up so early; apparently she intended to ride in the park. Hester spooned a little of the conserve into a small dish.
“Good morning, Mrs. Sandeman,” she said levelly. “I hope you have a pleasant ride. It will be very cold in the park this early, even though the sun is up. The frost will not have melted at all. It is three minutes to eight.”
“How very precise you are,” Fenella said with a touch of sarcasm. “Is that because you are a nurse—everything must be done to the instant, in strict routine? Take your medicine as the clock chimes or it will not do you good. How excruciatingly tedious.” She laughed very slightly, a mocking, tinkly sound.
“No, Mrs. Sandeman,” Hester said very distinctly. “It is because in two minutes now they will hang Percival. I believe they are very precise—I have no idea why. It can hardly matter; it is just a ritual they keep.”
Fenella choked on a mouthful of eggs and went into a spasm of coughing. No one assisted her.
“Oh God!” Septimus stared ahead of him, bleak and unblinking, his thoughts unreadable.
Cyprian shut his eyes as if he would block out the world, and all his powers were concentrated on his inner turmoil.
Araminta was sheet white, her curious face frozen.
Myles Kellard slopped his tea, which he had just raised to his lips, sending splashes all over the tablecloth, and the stain spread out in a brown, irregular pattern. He looked furious and confused.
“Oh really,” Romola exploded, her face pink. “What a tasteless and insensitive thing to have said. What is the matter with you, Miss Latterly? No one wishes to know that. You had better leave the room, and for goodness’ sake don’t be so crass as to mention it to Mama-in-law. Really—you are too stupid.”
Basil’s face was very pale and there was a nervous twitch in the muscles at the side of his cheek.
“It could not be helped,” he said very quietly. “Society must be preserved, and the means are sometimes very harsh. Now I think we may call the matter closed and proceed with our lives as normal. Miss Latterly, you will not speak of it again. Please take the conserve, or whatever it is you came for, and carry Lady Moidore’s breakfast to her.”
“Yes, Sir Basil,” Hester said obediently, but their faces remained in the mirror of her mind, the misery and finality of it like a patina of darkness upon everything.
11
