AllFreeNovel
Share Us
of St. Giles were farther away than the quarrels and the gods of the Iliad, because they were beyond the horizons of the imagination. Sylvestra recalled herself. “Yes it is. I suppose I have become so accustomed to it I forget. You must have had very different experiences, Miss Latterly. I admire your courage and sense of duty in going to the Crimea. My daughter Amalia would particularly have liked to meet you. I believe you would have liked her also. She has a most enquiring mind, and the courage to follow her dreams.”
“A superb quality,” Hester said sincerely. “You have many reasons to be most proud of her.”
Sylvestra smiled. “Yes … thank you, of course, thank you. Miss Latterly …”
“Yes?”
“Does Rhys remember what happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Usually people do, but not always. I have a friend who had an accident and was struck on the head. He has only the vaguest flashes of his life before that day. At times a sight or a sound, a smell, will recall something to him, but only fragments. He has to piece it together as well as he can and leave the rest. He has re-created a good life for himself.” She abandoned the pretense of eating. “But Rhys was not struck on the head. He knows he’s home, he knows you. It is simply that night he may not recall, and perhaps that is best. There are some memories we cannot bear. To forget is nature’s way of helping us keep our sanity. It is a way for the mind to heal, when natural forgetting would be impossible.”
Sylvestra stared at her plate. “The police are going to try to make him remember. They need to know who attacked him and who murdered my husband.” She looked up. “What if he can’t bear to remember, Miss Latterly? What if they force him, show him evidence, bring a witness or whatever, and make him relive it? Will it break his mind? Can’t you stop that? Isn’t there a way we can protect him? There has to be!”
“Yes, of course,” Hester said before she really thought. Her mind was filled with memories of Rhys trying desperately to speak, of his eyes wide with horror, of his sweat-soaked body as he struggled in nightmare, rigid with terror, his throat contracted in a silent scream and pain ripping through him, and no one heard, no one came. “He is far too ill to be harassed, and I am sure Dr. Wade will tell them so. Anyway, since he cannot speak or write, there is little he can do except to indicate yes or no. They will have to solve this case by other means.”
“I don’t know how!” Sylvestra’s voice rose in desperation. “I cannot help them. All they asked me were useless questions about what Leighton was wearing and when he went out. None of that is going to achieve anything.”
“What would help?” Hester poured her cold tea into the slop basin and reached for the pot, politely offering it to Sylvestra as well. At Sylvestra’s nod, she refilled both cups.
“I wish I knew,” Sylvestra said almost under her breath. “I’ve racked my brain to think what Leighton would have been doing in a place like that, and all I can imagine is that he went after Rhys. He was … he was very angry when he left home, far angrier than I told that young man from the police. It seems so disloyal to discuss family quarrels with strangers.”
Hester knew she meant not so much strangers as people from a different social order, as she must consider Evan to be. She would not know his father was a minister of the church, and he had chosen police work from a sense of dedication to justice, not because it was his natural place in society.
“Of course,” she agreed. “It is painful to admit, even to oneself, of a quarrel which cannot now be repaired. One has to set it amid the rest of the relationship and see it as merely a part, only by mischance the last part. It was probably far less important than it seems. Had Mr. Duff lived they would surely have made up their differences.” She did not leave it exactly a question.
Sylvestra sipped her fresh tea. “They were quite unlike each other. Rhys is the youngest. Leighton said I indulged him. Perhaps I did. I … I felt I understood him so well.” Her face puckered with hurt. “Now it looks as if I didn’t understand him at all. And my failure may have cost my husband his life.…” Her fingers gripped the cup so tightly Hester was afraid she would break it and spill the hot liquid over herself, even cut her hands on the shards.
“Don’t torture yourself with that, when you don’t know if it is true,” she urged. “Perhaps you can think of something which may help the police learn why they went to St. Giles. It may stem from something that happened some time before that evening. It is a fearful place. They must have had a very compelling reason. Could it have been on someone else’s account? A friend in trouble?”
Sylvestra looked up at her quickly, her eyes bright. “That would make some sense of it, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. Who are Rhys’s friends? Who might he care about sufficiently to go to such a place to help? Perhaps someone who had borrowed money. It can happen … a gambling debt a young man dared not tell his family about, or a girl of dubious reputation.”
Sylvestra smiled; the smile was full of fear, but there was self-mastery in it also. “That sounds like Rhys himself, I’m afraid. He tended to find respectable young ladies rather boring. That was the principal reason he quarreled with his father. He felt it unfair that Constance and Amalia were able to travel to India to have all manner of exotic experiences, and he was required to remain at home and study, and marry well and then go into the family business.”
“What was Mr. Duff’s business?” Hester felt considerable sympathy with Rhys. All his will and passion, all his dreams, seemed to lie in the Middle East, and he was required to remain in London while his elder sisters had the adventures not only of the mind, but of the body as well.
“He was in law,” Sylvestra replied. “Conveyancing, property. He was the senior partner. He had offices in Birmingham and Manchester as well as the City.”
Highly respectable, Hester thought, but hardly the stuff of dreams. At least the family would presumably still have some means. Finances would not be an additional cause for anxiety. She imagined Rhys had been expected to go to university and then follow in his father’s footsteps in the company, probably a junior partnership to begin with, leading to rapid promotion. His whole future was built ahead of him, and rigidly defined. Naturally, it required that he make at the very least a suitable marriage, at best a fortunate one. She could feel the net drawing tight, as if it had been around her also. It was a life tens of thousands would have been only too grateful for.
She tried to imagine Leighton Duff and his hopes for his son, his anger and frustration that Rhys was ungrateful, blind to his good fortune.
“He must have been a very talented man,” she said, again to fill the silence.
“He was,” Sylvestra agreed with a distant smile. “He was immensely respected. The number of people who regarded his opinion was extraordinary. He could perceive both opportunities and dangers that others, some very skilled and learned men, did not.”
To Hester it only made his journey into St. Giles the harder to understand. She had no sense of his personality, apart from an ambition for his son and perhaps a lack of wisdom in his approach to pressing it. But then she had not known Rhys before the attack. Perhaps he had been very willful, wasting his time when he should have been studying. Maybe he had chosen poorly in his friends, especially his female ones. He could well have been a son overindulged by his mother, refusing to grow up and accept adult responsibility. Leighton Duff might have had every reason to be exasperated with him. It would not be the first time a mother had overprotected a boy and thereby achieved the very last thing she intended: left him unfit for any kind of lasting happiness, but instead a permanent dependent, and an inadequate husband in his turn.
Sylvestra was lost in her own thoughts, remembering a kinder past.
“Leighton could be very dashing,” she said thoughtfully. “He used to ride over hurdles when he was younger. He was terribly good at it. He didn’t keep horses himself, but many friends wanted him to ride for them. He won very often, because he had the courage … and, of course, the skill. I used to love to watch him, even though I was terrified he would fall. At that speed it can be extremely dangerous.”
Hester tried to picture it. It was profoundly at odds with the rather staid man she had envisioned in her mind, the dry lawyer drawing up deeds for property. How foolish it was to judge a person by a few facts, when there were so many other things to know. Perhaps the law offices were only a small part of him, a practical side which provided for the family life, and perhaps also the money for the adventure and imagination of his truer self. It could be from their father that Constance and Amalia had inherited their courage and their dreams.
“I suppose he had to give it up as he got older,” Hester said thoughtfully.
Sylvestra smiled. “Yes, I’m afraid so. He realized it when a friend of ours had a very bad fall. Leighton was so upset for him. He was crippled. Oh, he learned to walk again, after about six months, but it was only with pain, and he was no longer able to practice his profession. He was a surgeon, and he could not hold his hands steadily enough. It was very tragic. He was only forty-three.”
