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“What are you going to do?” she asked quietly.
“Go home and get a shirt,” he replied with a twisted smile. “There isn’t anything else we can do, my dear. There’s no case to prosecute or defend anymore. If Mrs. Stonefield wishes me to act for her in the matter of formally acknowledging her husband’s death, then of course I will do so. First we must deal with this matter, which I imagine the judge will do when court reconvenes tomorrow morning.”
“Is there something which worries you?” Monk said suddenly, looking at her closely. “What is it?”
“I … I don’t think I am quite certain …” She frowned in concentration, but seemed unwilling to add more.
“Then come to my house and dine,” Rathbone invited her, and included Monk with a gesture. “That is, if you do not have to return with Lady Ravensbrook, or go back to Limehouse?”
“No.” She shook her head. “The typhoid is past its worst. In fact, there have been no new cases for over two days, and many of those who are left are beginning to recover. I … I would like to think further on Caleb Stone.”
Before even considering it they ate a surprisingly good meal. Rathbone’s house was warm and quiet, furnished in the discreet fashion of half a century earlier, the excellent chair lines of the Regency. It made for comfort and a sense of space.
Hester had not thought she would wish to eat at all, but when the meal was placed before her, and she had not had to take any part in its preparation, she found that she was, after all, quite hungry.
When the last course was completed Rathbone sat back and looked across at her.
“Well, what is it that worries you? Are you afraid it was suicide? And if it was, does it really matter? Who would it help to prove it, even if we could?”
“Why would he commit suicide now?” she asked, fumbling through the ideas jumbled in her mind, the memory of the wounds she had seen and the small, very sharp knife, almost like a scalpel, lying with the very end of its blade in Caleb’s neck and its silver handle in the sheet of blood beside him. “His defense had not even begun!”
“Perhaps he had no hope it could succeed?” Monk suggested.
“You don’t believe that,” Rathbone said instantly. “Could he have killed himself in remorse? Perhaps hearing the evidence somehow brought it back to him. Or more likely it was seeing Ravensbrook, and knowing the grief it had brought him, and of course Genevieve.”
“Genevieve?” Monk’s eyebrows rose. “He loathed her. She was part of all that he despised in Angus: the comfortable, pious wife with her smiling, complacent face and her total ignorance of the tragedy and reality of the kind of life he led, the poverty and the hardship and the dirt.”
“You don’t know anything about Genevieve, do you?” Hester looked from one to the other of them, and saw the blank incomprehension in their faces. “No, of course you don’t. She grew up in Limehouse.…”
Rathbone was astonished. He sat quite still, except for a slight parting of his lips.
Monk, on the other hand, gave a snort of disbelief and moved his hand sharply to dismiss the idea as preposterous, knocking his elbow against his empty wineglass and clinking it against its neighbor.
“Yes, she did!” Hester said sharply. “I’ve just spent nearly a month in Limehouse, and I know the people she grew up with. They remember her. Her name used to be Ginny Motson.”
Monk looked astonished. His face was almost expressionless with surprise.
“I assume you wouldn’t say that unless you were sure beyond question?” Rathbone said gravely. “This is not gossip, is it?”
“No, of course it isn’t,” Hester answered, the scene over the mistake clear in her mind. “She told me herself, when she realized I had guessed.”
They sat silently for several minutes, turning over those new and amazing thoughts. The butler came in and removed the last of the dishes and brought the port, offering it to Monk and Rathbone. He bowed civilly to Hester, but disregarded her otherwise. She puzzled him, and his uncertainty showed in his face.
“It would explain a number of things,” Monk conceded at last. “Her dread of poverty, above all. No woman who had not known it should fear it as she does. I thought it was simple love of comfort. I’m glad it isn’t.”
Hester smiled. She knew Monk’s vulnerability where certain women were concerned. He had been a startlingly poor judge of character before, but she did not refer to that. It was a precisely delicate subject just now.
“Then was it Angus, or perhaps Caleb, who taught her to carry herself like a lady, and speak like one?” Rathbone mused. “If it were Caleb, then that may have been the catalyst which turned his rivalry with Angus into hatred. She met Angus when he came to see Caleb, and perhaps she fell in love with him, or less attractively, saw a chance to get out of the poverty and squalor of Limehouse into something far better, and she took it.”
“And you think Caleb might have loved her?” Hester said, raising her eyebrows. “So much that after he had killed Angus, for having taken her away from him, he now felt such remorse, on looking at her face in the courtroom, that he killed himself halfway through the trial? And Lord Ravensbrook allowed him to, and is prepared to conceal it? No.” She shook her head sharply. “She told me she was never Caleb’s woman, and I believe her. She had no reason to lie, and I don’t think she did. Anyway, it makes no sense. If what you are saying were true, he would have written whatever it was he sent for the paper and ink to say. Unless, of course, you think Lord Ravensbrook took it? But why would he?”
Rathbone regarded his port, shining ruby red in the candlelight, but did not touch it.
“You’re right,” he conceded. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“And I don’t see Caleb Stone taking his own life out of remorse, honestly,” Monk added. “There was more than hatred in him. I don’t know what, a terrible emotion that clawed at his heart or his belly, or both, but there was a wild humor in it, a kind of pain that was far subtler than remorse. And does it matter now?” He looked from one to the other of them, but the shadow in his eyes and the sense of unhappiness in him answered the question more vividly than words could have done.
No one bothered to affirm it. It was tangible in the air, the quiet candlelight of the dinner table gleaming on unused silver and winking in the blood-red colors of the untouched port glasses.
