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“You are an arrogant and opinionated woman,” Monk said fiercely. “And quite the most overbearing I have ever met. And you will not start organizing my life as if you were some damned governess. I am not helpless nor lying in a hospital bed at your mercy.”
“Not helpless?” Her eyebrows shot up and she looked at him with all the frustration and impotent anger boiling up inside her, the fury at the blindness, complacency, cowardice and petty malice that had conspired to have Percival arrested and Monk dismissed, and the rest of them unable to see any way to begin to redress the situation. “You have managed to find evidence to have the wretched footman taken away in manacles, but not enough to proceed any further. You are without employment or prospects of any, and have covered yourself with dislike. You are sitting in a chocolate house staring at the dregs of an empty cup. And you have the luxury to refuse help?”
Now the people at all the tables in the immediate vicinity had stopped eating or drinking and were staring at them.
“I refuse your condescending interference,” he said. “You should marry some poor devil and concentrate your managerial skills on one man and leave the rest of us in peace.”
She knew precisely what was hurting him, the fear of the future when he had not even the experience of the past to draw on, the specter of hunger and homelessness ahead, the sense of failure. She struck where it would wound the most surely, and perhaps eventually do the most good.
“Self-pity does not become you, nor does it serve any purpose,” she said quietly, aware now of the people around them. “And please lower your voice. If you expect me to be sorry for you, you are wasting your time. Your situation is of your own making, and not markedly worse than mine—which was also of my own making, I am aware.” She stopped, seeing the overwhelming fury in his face. She was afraid for a moment she had really gone too far.
“You—” he began. Then very slowly the rage died away and was replaced by a sharp humor, so hard as to be almost sweet, like a clean wind off the sea. “You have a genius for saying the worst possible thing in any given situation,” he finished. “I should imagine a good many patients have taken up their beds and walked, simply to be free of your ministrations and go where they could suffer in peace.”
“That is very cruel,” she said a little huffily. “I have never been harsh to someone I believed to be genuinely in distress—”
“Oh.” His eyebrows rose dramatically. “You think my predicament is not real?”
“Of course your predicament is real,” she said. “But your anguish over it is unhelpful. You have talents, in spite of the Queen Anne Street case. You must find a way to use them for remuneration.” She warmed to the subject. “Surely there are cases the police cannot solve—either they are too difficult or they do not fall within their scope to handle? Are there not miscarriages of justice—” That thought brought her back to Percival again, and without waiting for his reply she hurried on. “What are we going to do about Percival? I am even more sure after speaking to Lady Moidore this morning that there is grave doubt as to whether he had anything to do with Octavia’s death.”
At last the waiter managed to intrude, and Monk ordered chocolate for her, insisting on paying for it, overriding her protest with more haste than courtesy.
“Continue to look for proof, I suppose,” he said when the matter was settled and she began to sip at the steaming liquid. “Although if I knew where or what I should have looked already.”
“I suppose it must be Myles,” she said thoughtfully. “Or Araminta—if Octavia were not as reluctant as we have been led to suppose. She might have known they had an assignation and taken the kitchen knife along, deliberately meaning to kill her.”
“Then presumably Myles Kellard would know it,” Monk argued. “Or have a very strong suspicion. And from what you said he is more afraid of her than she of him.”
She smiled. “If my wife had just killed my mistress with a carving knife I would be more than a trifle nervous, wouldn’t you?” But she did not mean it, and she saw from his face that he knew it as well as she. “Or perhaps it was Fenella?” she went on. “I think she has the stomach for such a thing, if she had the motive.”
“Well, not out of lust for the footman,” Monk replied. “And I doubt Octavia knew anything about her so shocking that Basil would have thrown her out for it. Unless there is a whole avenue we have not explored.”
Hester drank the last of her chocolate and set the glass down on its saucer. “Well I am still in Queen Anne Street, and Lady Moidore certainly does not seem recovered yet, or likely to be in the next few days. I shall have a little longer to observe. Is there anything you would like me to pursue?”
“No,” he said sharply. Then he looked down at his own glass on the table in front of him. “It is possible that Percival is guilty; it is simply that I do not feel that what we have is proof. We should respect not only the facts but the law. If we do not, then we lay ourselves open to every man’s judgment of what may be true or false; and a belief of guilt will become the same thing as proof. There must be something above individual judgment, however passionately felt, or we become barbarous again.”
“Of course he may be guilty,” she said very quietly. “I have always known that. But I shall not let it go by default as long as I can remain in Queen Anne Street and learn anything at all. If I do find anything, I shall have to write to you, because neither you nor Sergeant Evan will be there. Where may I send a letter, so that the rest of th
e household will not know it is to you?”
He looked puzzled for a moment.
“I do not post my own mail,” she said with a flicker of impatience. “I seldom leave the house. I shall merely put it on the hall table and the footman or the bootboy will take it.”
“Oh—of course. Send it to Mr.—” He hesitated, a shadow of a smile crossing his face. “Send it to Mr. Butler—let us move up a rung on the social ladder. At my address in Grafton Street. I shall be there for a few weeks yet.”
She met his eyes for a moment of clear and total understanding, then rose and took her leave. She did not tell him she was going to make use of the rest of the afternoon to see Callandra Daviot. He might have thought she was going to ask for help for him, which was exactly what she intended to do, but not with his knowledge. He would refuse beforehand, out of pride; when it was a fait accompli he would be obliged to accept.
“He what?” Callandra was appalled, then she began to laugh in spite of her anger. “Not very practical—but I admire his sentiment, if not his judgment.”
They were in her withdrawing room by the fire, the sharp winter sun streaming in through the windows. The new parlormaid, replacing the newly married Daisy, a thin waif of a girl with an amazing smile and apparently named Martha, had brought their tea and hot crumpets with butter. These were less ladylike than cucumber sandwiches, but far nicer on a cold day.
“What could he have accomplished if he had obeyed and arrested Percival?” Hester defended Monk quickly. “Mr. Runcorn would still consider the case closed, and Sir Basil would not permit him to ask any further questions or pursue any investigation. He could hardly even look for more evidence of Percival’s guilt. Everyone else seems to consider the knife and the peignoir sufficient.”
“Perhaps you are right,” Callandra admitted. “But he is a hot-headed creature. First the Grey case, and now this. He seems to have little more sense than you have.” She took another crumpet. “You have both taken matters into your own hands and lost your livelihoods. What does he propose to do next?”
“I don’t know!” Hester threw her hands wide. “I don’t know what I am to do myself when Lady Moidore is sufficiently well not to need me. I have no desire whatever to spend my time as a paid companion, fetching and carrying and pandering to imaginary illnesses and fits of the vapors.” Suddenly she was overtaken by a profound sense of failure. “Callandra, what happened to me? I came home from the Crimea with such a zeal to work hard, to throw myself into reform and accomplish so much. I was going to see our hospitals cleaner—and of so much greater comfort for the sick.” Those dreams seemed utterly out of reach now, part of a golden and lost realm. “I was going to teach people that nursing is a noble profession, fit for fine and dedicated women to serve in, women of sobriety and good character who wished to minister to the sick with skill—not just to keep a bare standard of removing the slops and fetching and carrying for the surgeons. How did I throw all that away?”
“You didn’t throw it away, my dear,” Callandra said gently. “You came home afire with your accomplishments in wartime, and did not realize the monumental inertia of peace, and the English passion to keep things as they are, whatever they are. People speak of this as being an age of immense change, and so it is. We have never been so inventive, so wealthy, so free in our ideas good and bad.” She shook her head. “But there is still an immeasurable amount that is determined to stay the same, unless it is forced, screaming and fighting, to advance with the times. One of those things is the belief that women should learn amusing arts of pleasing a husband, bearing children, and if you cannot afford the servants to do it for you, of raising them, and of visiting the deserving poor at appropriate times and well accompanied by your own kind.”
