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“No—’cos I know ’oo were. ’E wouldn’t be daft enough ter have ’er in. She knew too much.” Her big face puckered. “Damn near as good as a doctor ’erself, she were. Knew more than any of them student doctors. She’d never ’ave believed they was operations for tumors and the like.”
“But you knew! Did the other nurses?”
“No—wouldn’t know stones from a broken leg, most of ’em.” There was contempt in her tone as well as a mild tolerance.
Hester forced herself to smile, although she felt it was a sickly gesture, more a baring of the teeth. She tried to invest her voice with respect.
“Sir Herbert must have trusted you very deeply.”
Pride lit Dora’s eyes. “Yeah—’e does. An’e’s right. I’d never betray ’im.”
Hester stared at her. It was not only pride in her eyes, it was a burning idealism, a devotion and a passionate respect. It transformed her features from their habitual ugliness into something that had its own kind of beauty.
“He must know how much you respect him for it,” Hester said chokingly. A flood of emotion shook her. She had wept more tears than she could remember over dead women who had not the strength left to fight disease and loss of blood because their bodies were exhausted with bearing child after child. She had seen the hopelessness in their eyes, the weariness, the fear for babies they knew they could not cherish. And sh
e had seen the tiny, starving creatures come into the world ill before they started, sprung from an exhausted womb.
In the pool of light on the stairs Dora Parsons was waiting, watching her.
And neither could Hester forget Prudence Barrymore, her eagerness and her passion to heal, her burning vitality.
“You’re right,” she said aloud in the silence. “Some women need a far better help than the law lets us give them. You have to admire a man who risks his honor, and his freedom, to do something about it.”
Dora relaxed, the ease washing through her visibly. Slowly she smiled.
Hester clenched her fists in the folds of her skirts.
“If only he did it for the poor, instead of rich women who have simply lost their virtue and didn’t want to face the shame and ruin of an illegitimate child.”
Dora’s eyes were like black holes in her head.
Hester felt the stab of fear again. Had she gone too far?
“ ’E didn’t do that,” Dora said slowly. “ ’E did poor women, sick women … them as couldn’t take no more.”
“He did rich women,” Hester repeated gravely, in little more than a whisper, her hand on the stair rail as if it were some kind of safety. “And he took a lot of money for it.” She did not know if that was true or not—but she had known Prudence. Prudence would not have betrayed him for doing what Dora believed. And Sir Herbert had killed her….
“ ’E didn’t.” Dora’s voice was plaintive, her face beginning to crumple like a child’s. “ ’E didn’t take no money at all.” But already the doubt was there.
“Yes he did,” Hester repeated. “That’s why Prudence threatened him.”
“Yer lyin’,” Dora said simply and with total conviction. “I knew her too, an’ she’d never ’ave forced ’im into marryin’ ’er. That don’t make no sense at all. She never loved ’im. She’d no time for men. She wanted to be a doctor, Gawd ’elp ’er! She’d no chance—no woman ’as, ’owever good she is. If you’d really knew ’er, you’d never ’ave said anything so daft.”
“I know she didn’t want to marry him,” Hester agreed. “She wanted him to help her get admittance to a medical school!”
Slowly a terrible understanding filled Dora’s face. The light, the element of beauty, left it and was replaced by an agony of disillusion—and then hatred, burning, implacable, corroding hatred.
“ ’E used me,” she said with total comprehension.
Hester nodded. “And Prudence,” she added. “He used her too.”
Dora’s face puckered. “Yer said ’e’s goin’ t’ get orf?” she asked in a low, grating voice.
“Looks like it at the moment.”
“If ’e does, I’ll kill ’im meself!”
Looking into her eyes, Hester believed her. The pain she felt would not let her forget. Her idealism had been betrayed, the only thing that had made her precious, given her dignity and belief, had been destroyed. He had mocked the very best in her. She was an ugly woman, coarse and unloved, and she knew it. She had had one value in her own eyes, and now it was gone. Perhaps to have robbed her of it was a sin like murder too.
