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“Ah—thank you.” Hope surged back up again. “Is there anything else you know? About the family, for example? The widow? The daughters? In what circumstances do they find themselves now?”
The clerk’s face fell.
“I’m sorry, sir, I have no idea.
I daresay you would have to travel to Norfolk for that.”
“Yes, of course. Thank you. I am enormously obliged to you.” And indeed he was. He raced out of the building and flung himself into the first vacant hansom that passed, shouting to the driver to take him to the police station, where he could find John Evan and tell him what he now knew.
But he was obliged to wait nearly three hours before Evan returned from the case he was on, by which time it was long after dark and had begun to rain. They sat together in the coffee shop, warming themselves with hands around hot mugs, sipping slowly at the steaming liquid, a babble of noise around them and constant movement as people came and went.
“Buckingham!” Evan said with surprise. “I don’t recall the name.”
“But there must be a case concerning a Buckingham!” Monk insisted. “Try eight years ago specifically.” It was a cry of desperation. Terror gripped inside him that his wrong against Drusilla had been personal … and unforgivable not only to her but to himself as well.
“I went back over all your cases,” Evan said with pain in his eyes. “There was no Buckingham that I can remember, either charged or accused. But of course I’ll try again. I’ll look specifically for the name.”
“Perhaps I’d better go to Norfolk.” Monk stared beyond Evan without seeing the thronged room or hearing the laughter. “That’s where they lived.”
“Why would you have gone to Norfolk?” Evan was puzzled. “You only dealt with London cases. If it happened there, the local police would have handled it, not you.” He shrugged very slightly, and shivered as if someone had opened an outside door, although the coffee shop was almost too hot, with its crowded atmosphere and steaming drinks, and the fire leaping in the hearth. “I suppose it could have started in London, and there have been witnesses—and suspects, for that matter—in Norfolk. I’ll try.” He frowned, knowing he was speaking only for comfort. “Don’t worry, if it’s there, I’ll find it.”
And if it is not, Monk thought, then any injury to her was personal, and how in God’s name do I learn that? How will I ever know my own view of it, why I did whatever it was, what I thought or felt, what there is in mitigation for me?
He finished his coffee and stood up. He had not the heart even to meet Evan’s eyes. What would he think or feel when he knew the truth, what bitter disillusion and sense of betrayal? He was so afraid of it, it was as if it had already happened.
“Thank you,” he said with his voice choking in his throat. He wanted to add more, but could think of nothing. “Thank you.”
Hester was also deeply afraid for Monk, not for what he might have done—she had not concerned herself with that—but for the ruin it would bring him when Drusilla made her charges public. The fact that she could not prove them was immaterial. She had chosen her time and place to be melodramatic with great skill. Not a man or woman emerging from the party in North Audley Street would forget the sight of her pitching headlong out of the moving cab, her clothes torn, screaming that she had been assaulted. Whatever reason told them, they would relive the emotions, the horror and the sense of outrage. And they would be totally unprepared to accept that they had been duped. It would make them foolish, and that would be intolerable.
Something must be done to help him, something practical and immediate. There was little use trying to limit the damage after it was done.
She and Callandra had talked about it sitting late at night in the small room in the Limehouse hospital, in the few moments when they were not either working or asleep. Callandra was deeply distressed, even in the face of the disease and death around her, and Hester realized with a quick uprush of pleasure how fond she must be of Monk. Callandra’s regard for him was far more than mere interest, and the adding of a new dimension to her life.
But she had been able to offer no practical counsel.
Now Hester sat in the warmth and clean, sweet-smelling comfort of Enid’s bedroom in Ravensbrook House and watched Enid’s frail form, at last peacefully asleep. Genevieve had gone home, weary with grief and the mounting anxiety and loneliness of her loss, dreading the trial of Caleb which must shortly begin.
Hester tidied a few things which were hardly out of place, then returned to her seat. It was so different from just a few days ago. Then Monk faced no greater danger than failing on a case which had seemed hopeless from the beginning. Two weeks ago Enid had been delirious and fighting for her life. She had tossed from side to side, moaning in pain as her body ached and her mind wandered in nightmare and delusion, mixing past and present and distorting everything.
Hester smiled in spite of herself. One heard some very strange things in a sickroom. Perhaps that was one of the reasons certain people were wary of taking nurses rather than a lady’s maid, who presumably already knew a great many of her mistress’s secrets.
Enid had rambled about many things, snatches of thoughts, old griefs and loneliness, longings she had never realized and perhaps would never have given words in her conscious mind. There had been fear in her, and half-guessed-at disillusion. She had also referred more than once to letters which were quite openly declarations of love. Hester hoped Enid had not kept them. She doubted very much they were from Lord Ravensbrook. Nothing in what she had seen of him suggested such fluency or ease of expression. He seemed a very formal man, even stilted when it came to speaking of feelings—which did not, of course, mean that his emotions were less, or that his physical expression of them was not as profound as any other man’s.
She had debated whether to mention it to Enid, and warn her that she was capable of indiscretion in her illness, and therefore perhaps in her sleep, if she should ever become feverish again. Then she had decided it might be seen as an impertinence and place a barrier of embarrassment between them. If Enid had managed so far to conduct her marriage without such a disaster, then it might very well continue so, without Hester’s advice.
She looked across at Enid’s sleeping form now. She seemed utterly at peace; in fact, there was a very slight smile on her face, as if she dreamed of something pleasant.
Perhaps she was thinking of some of those past letters. They might still give her happy memories, days when she knew she was admired, found beautiful. Love letters were strange; they could do so much good, if kept discreetly … and in the wrong hands so much damage.
Hester had received very few herself, and most of them had been formal, more a statement of ardent hope than any real understanding or knowledge of her nature. Only those from soldiers had had any meaning, and they were romantic, heartfelt, but in some measure cries of desperation and loneliness from young men far from home in an alien and dreadful circumstance, and who simply found a gentle touch and a listening ear, a single spark of beauty in the midst of pain and loss, and the fear of loss. She had treasured them for what they were, not reading into them more.
She winced with embarrassment as she recalled one she had received long ago, before the Crimean War had even begun, from a young man her father had considered a very acceptable suitor. It had been couched in ardent terms, and far too familiar, in her opinion. It had stated a love which had appalled her, because he did not even see her, only what he could turn her into. She prickled with discomfort even now at the thought of it. She had never wanted to meet the man again.
In fact, she could remember vividly the next time they had met. It had been at the dinner table in her father’s home—her mother was quite unaware of her feelings, and had sat smiling at the foot of the table, blandly staring at her across a sea of linen and crystal, making optimistic remarks about domestic happiness, while Hester squirmed, her face scarlet, willing to give anything at all to be elsewhere. She could still feel that wretched young man’s eyes on her, and the thoughts she imagined must be in his mind as he sat there. In some ways it had been one of the worst evenings of her life.
If only he had not written, she would never have suffered so much. She might even have found him quite tolerable. He was not personally displeasing, quite intellig
ent, not too opinionated—in fact, altogether an agreeable person.
