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“Or the Baroness Brigitte von Arlsbach,” Monk went on relentlessly. “And regrettably, also yourself.”
“Me? I have no interest in foreign politics,” Wellborough protested. He looked genuinely taken aback. “It matters not a jot to me who rules in Felzburg or whether it is part of Germany or one of a score of independent little states forever.”
“You manufacture arms,” Monk pointed out. “War in Europe offers you an excellent market—”
“That is iniquitous, sir!” Wellborough said furiously, his jaw clenched, his lips thinned to invisibility. “Make that suggestion outside this room and I shall sue you myself.”
“I have made no suggestion,” Monk replied. “I have merely stated facts. But you may be quite certain that people will make the inference, and you cannot sue all London.”
“I can sue the first person to say it aloud!”
Monk was now quite relaxed. He had at least this victory in his hand.
“No doubt. But it would be expensive and futile. The only way to prevent people from thinking it is to prove it untrue.”
Wellborough stared at him. “I take your point, sir,” he said at last. “And I find your method and your manner equally despicable, but I concede the necessity. You may question whom you please in my house, and I shall personally instruct them to answer you immediately and truthfully … on the condition that you report your findings to me, in full, at the end of every day. You will remain here and pursue this until you come to a satisfactory and irrefutable conclusion. Do we understand each other?”
“Perfectly,” Monk replied with an inclination of his head. “I have my bag with me. If you will have someone show me to my ro
om, I shall begin immediately. Time is short.”
Wellborough gritted his teeth and reached for the bell.
Monk thought it both polite and probably most likely to be efficient to speak first to Lady Wellborough. She received him in the morning room, a rather ornate place furnished in the French manner with a great deal more gilt than Monk cared for. The only thing in it he liked was a huge bowl of early chrysanthemums, tawny golds and browns and filling the air with a rich, earthy smell.
Lady Wellborough came in and closed the door behind her. She was wearing a dark blue morning dress which should have become her fair coloring, but she was too pale and undoubtedly surprised and confused, and there was a shadow of fear in her eyes.
“My husband tells me that it is possible Prince Friedrich really was murdered,” she said bluntly. She must have been in her mid-thirties, but there was a childlike unsophistication about her. “And that you have come here to discover before the trial who it was. I don’t understand at all, but you must be wrong. It is too terrible.”
He had come prepared to dislike her because he disliked and despised her husband, but he realized with a jolt how separate she was, pulled along in his wake, perhaps unable through circumstance, ignorance or dependence to take a different course, and that this lack had little to do with her will or her nature.
“Unfortunately, terrible things sometimes do happen, Lady Wellborough,” he replied almost without emotion. “There was a great deal at stake in his returning to his own country. Perhaps you were not aware how much.”
“I didn’t know he was going to return,” she said, staring at him. “Nobody said anything about it to me.”
“It was probably still secret, if it was finally decided at all. It may have been only on the brink of decision.”
She still looked anxious and a little confused.
“And you think someone murdered him to prevent him going home? I thought he couldn’t anyway, after he deliberately abdicated. After ail, he chose Gisela instead of the crown. Is that not what it was all about?” She shook her head and gave a little shrug, still standing in the middle of the floor, refusing or unable to be comfortable, as if it might prolong an interview in which she was unhappy.
“I really can’t believe he would have returned without her, Mr. Monk, even to save his country from unification into a greater Germany, which people say will almost certainly happen one day anyway. If you had seen them here you wouldn’t even have had such an idea.” Her voice dismissed it as ridiculous; there was even regret in it and a note of envy. “I’ve never known two people to love each other so much. Sometimes it was almost as if they spoke with one voice.” Her blue eyes were focused on something beyond his head. “She would finish what he was saying, or he would finish for her. They understood each other’s thoughts. I can only imagine what it would be like to have such utter companionship.”
He looked at her and saw a woman who had been married several years, beginning to face the idea of maturity, the end of dreams and the beginning of the acceptance of reality, and who had newly realized that her own inner loneliness was not necessarily a part of everyone’s life. There were those who had found the ideal. Just when she had accepted that it did not exist, and came to terms with it, there it was, played out in front of her, in her own house, but not for her.
And then the thought of Hester came to him with startling vividness, the sense of trust he knew towards her. She was opinionated and abrasive. There was much in her that irritated him like torn skin, catching every touch. The moment he thought it was healed, there it was again. But he knew her courage, her compassion and her honesty better than he knew his own. He also knew, with a sense of both anger and infinite value, that she would never intentionally hurt him. He did not want anything so precious. He might break it. He might lose it.
But she might hurt him irreparably, beyond her power to help, if she loved Rathbone other than as a friend. That was something he refused to think about.
“Possibly,” he said at last. “But it is most important, for reasons Lord Wellborough no doubt explained to you, that we learn the truth of precisely what did happen and find proof of it. The alternative is to have the investigation of it forced upon us at the trial.”
“Yes,” she conceded. “I can see that. You have no need to labor the point, Mr. Monk; I have already instructed all the staff to answer your questions. What is it you believe I can tell you? I have been called by the Princess Gisela’s solicitors to testify to Countess Rostova’s slander.”
“Naturally. During their stay here, did Count Lansdorff see Friedrich alone for any length of time?”
“No.” It was plain from her face she understood the implication. “Gisela did not allow him to have visitors. He was far too ill.”
“I mean before the accident.”
