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“A physical sort?” He did not understand. He had not noticed Hester being particularly good at planning ahead—in fact, rather the opposite.
She saw his confusion and the doubt in him.
“Oh, I don’t mean of a type that would be any use to her,” she explained. “Not as a woman, anyway. She could never bide her time and manipulate people. She had no patience for that. But she could understand a battlefield. And she had the courage.”
He smiled in spite of himself. That was the Hester he knew.
But Florence was not looking at him. She was lost in memory, her mind in the so recent past.
“I am so sorry about Prudence,” she said, more to herself than to Monk, and her face was suddenly unbearably sad and lonely. “She had such a passion to heal. I can remember her going out more than once with field surgeons. She was not especially strong, and she was terrified of crawling things, insects and the like, but she would sleep out in order to be there when the surgeons most needed her. She would be sick with the horror of some of the wounds, but only afterwards. She never gave way at the time. How she would work. Nothing was too much. One of the surgeons told me she knew as much about amputating a limb as he did himself, and she was not afraid to do it, if she had to, if there was no one else there.”
Monk did not interrupt. The quiet sunlit room in London disappeared and the slender woman in her drab dress was the only thing he saw, her intense and passionate voice all he heard.
“It was Rebecca who told me,” she went on. “Rebecca Box. She was a huge woman, a soldier’s wife, nearly six feet tall she was, and as strong as an ox.” The smile of memory touched her lips. “She used to go out into the battlefield, ahead of the guns even, and pick up the wounded men far beyond where anyone else would go, right up to the enemy. Then she would put them across her back and carry them home.”
She turned to Monk, searching his face. “You have no idea what women can do until you have seen someone like Rebecca. She told me how Prudence first took off a man’s arm. It had been hacked to the bone by a saber. It was bleeding terribly, and there was no chance of saving it and no time to find a surgeon. Prudence was as white as the man himself, but her hand was steady and her nerve held. She took it off just as a surgeon would have. The man lived. Prudence was like that. I am so sorry she is gone.” Still her gaze was fixed on Monk’s as if she would assure herself he shared her feeling. “I shall write to her family and convey my sympathies.”
Monk tried to imagine Prudence in the flare of an oil lamp, kneeling over the desperately bleeding man, her strong steady fingers holding the saw, her face set in concentration as she used the skill she had so often watched and had thus learned. He wished he had known her. It was painful that where there had been this brave and willful woman now there was a void, a darkness. A passionate voice was silenced and the loss was raw and unexplained.
It would not remain so. He would find out who had killed her, and why. He would have a kind of revenge.
“Thank you very much for sparing me your time, Miss Nightingale,” he said a little more stiffly than he had meant. “You have told me something of her which no one else could.”
“It is a very small thing,” she said, dismissing its inadequacy. “I wish I had the remotest idea who could have wished her dead, but I have not. When there is so much tragedy and pain in the world that we cannot help, it seems incomprehensible that we should bring even more upon ourselves. Sometimes I despair of mankind. Does that sound blasphemous, Mr. Monk?”
“No ma’am, it sounds honest.”
She smiled bleakly. “Shall you see Hester Latterly again?”
“Yes.” In spite of himself his interest was so sharp he spoke before he thought. “Did you know her well?”
“Indeed.” The smile returned to her mouth. “We spent many hours working together. It is strange how much one knows of a person laboring in a common cause, even if one said nothing of one’s own life before coming to the Crimea, nothing of one’s family or youth, nothing of one’s loves or dreams, still one learns of another’s nature. And perhaps that is the real core of passion, don’t you think?”
He nodded, not wishing to intrude with words.
“I agree,” she went on thoughtfully. “I know nothing of her past, but I learned to trust her integrity as we worked night after night to help the soldiers and their women, to get food for them, blankets, and to make the authorities allow us space so the beds were not crammed side by side.” She gave an odd, choked little laugh. “She used to get so angry. I always knew if I had a battle to fight that Hester would be by my side. She never retreated, never pretended or flattered. And I knew her courage.” She hunched her shoulders in a gesture of distaste. “She loathed the rats, and they were all over the place. They climbed the walls and fell off like rotten plums dropping off a tree. I shall never forget the sound of their bodies hitting the floor. And I watched her pity, not useless, not maudlin, just a long slow ache inside as she knew the pain of others and did everything within her human power to ease it. One has a special feeling for someone with whom one has shared such times, Mr. Monk. Yes, please remember me to her.”
“I will,” he promised.
He rose to his feet again, suddenly acutely conscious of the passage of time. He knew she was fitting him in between one meeting and another of hospital governors, architects, medical schools, or organizations of similar nature. Since her return from the Crimea she had never ceased to work for the reforms in design and administration in which she believed so fervently.
“Whom will you seek next?” She preempted his farewell. She had no need to explain to what matter she was referring and she was not a woman for unnecessary words.
“The police,” he answered. “I still have friends there who may tell me what the medical examiner says, and perhaps what the official testimony is of other witnesses. Then I shall appeal to her colleagues at the hospital. If I can persuade them to speak honestly of her and of one another, I may learn a great deal.”
“I see. May God be with you, Mr. Monk. It is more than justice you must seek. If women like Prudence Barrymore can be murdered when they are about their work, then we are all a great deal the poorer, not only now, but in the future as well.”
“I do not give up, ma’am,” he said grimly, and he meant it, not only to match his determination with hers, but because he had a consuming personal desire to find the one who had destroyed such a life. “He will rue the day, I promise you. Good afternoon, ma’am.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Monk.”
5
JOHN EVAN was not happy with the case of Prudence Barrymore. He hated the thought of a young woman with such passion and vitality having been killed, and in this particular instance all the other circumstances also con
fused and troubled him. He did not like the hospital. The very smell of it caught in his throat even without his awareness of the pain and the fear that must reside here. He saw the bloodstained clothes of the surgeons as they hurried about the corridors, and the piles of soiled dressings and bandages, and every now and again he both saw and smelled the buckets of waste that were carried away by the nurses.
But deeper than all these was a matter disturbing him more because it was personal, something about which he not only could, but was morally bound to, do something. It was the way in which the investigation was being conducted. He had been angry and bitter when Monk had been maneuvered into resigning by events in the Moidore case and Runcorn’s stand on the issue. But he had grown accustomed to working with Jeavis now, and while he did not either like or admire him, as he did Monk, he knew that he was a competent and honorable man.
