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Hester glanced at Gabriel.
He smiled ba
ck, his eyes bright, his right hand closing tightly on the chair arm. They could hear Perdita’s feet going down the stairs and Mrs. Hanning’s heavier tread a moment after.
None of them spoke. Again the silence filled the room so overwhelmingly Monk could hear a horse’s hooves on the road beyond the garden wall and the echo of a dropped tray somewhere far below them in the house, presumably the kitchen. He even thought he heard the front door open and close. Footsteps returned up the stairs. They all faced the door.
Perdita appeared, looking first at Gabriel, then at Hester.
“I was terribly rude, wasn’t I?” she said shakily. “I should never have said that to her about being a good companion. Her husband is dead, isn’t he?” She gulped her breath and sniffed loudly. Now that Mrs. Hanning was gone she no longer had the courage or the anger to hold herself up.
“Well …” Gabriel started.
“Yes, you were rude,” Hester agreed with a smile. “I daresay that is the first time a lieutenant’s wife has ever insulted her with impunity. It will do her the world of good.” She swung around. “Won’t it, Gabriel?”
He was uncertain whether to relax, as if it might be too soon—now that the moment of effort was past and quite different control was called for, a different self-mastery. He looked from Hester to Perdita as if he was seeing some aspect of his wife for the first time. Their relationship had altered. They had to begin again, discover, find the measure of things they used to take for granted.
“Yes …” Gabriel said tentatively. “Yes—I…” He laughed a little huskily. “Meeting her gives me a new feeling for John Hanning. I perceive things about him I didn’t before.”
“What was he like?” Perdita asked quickly. “Tell me about him.”
“Well—well, he was …”
Hester took Monk by the arm and led him out of the room, leaving Gabriel to tell Perdita about John Hanning: his nature, his weaknesses and strengths, how he fought, what he loved or hated, his memories of boyhood and home, and how he died in Gwalior during the Mutiny.
Outside on the landing Hester looked at Monk, searching his eyes.
He looked back at her, long and steadily. It was not uncomfortable; neither was daring the other to look away. For once there was no challenge between them, no sense of battle. There was no need for any kind of explanation.
She smiled slowly.
He put his arm around her shoulders, feeling the warmth of her through the thick gray-blue stuff dress. She was stiff and too thin, but then that was how she was. She had been thin the very first time he had seen her in the church with her sister-in-law. He had thought Josephine so much the more beautiful then. She probably still was, and until this moment he had forgotten her.
“How can I help with your case?” she asked, moving away and opening the door to the sitting room.
“I don’t suppose you can,” he answered, following her in. “Zillah Lambert seems to be a perfectly normal pretty young woman who flirts a little but whose reputation is blemishless. I don’t even know what to look for.”
Hester sat down on one of the chintz-covered chairs and concentrated.
He remained standing, staring at the window and the budding branches moving in the wind, and the chimneys beyond.
“You still think Melville discovered something about her?” she asked.
“No, I don’t think so at all. I think he just decided he couldn’t face the prospect of marriage, the intimacy of it, the loss of his privacy, the responsibility for another human being, the—the sense of being crowded, watched, depended upon … just the”—he spread his hands—“the sheer … oppression of it!”
“Some people quite enjoy being married,” she said.
He heard the warning tone in her voice. For an instant, staring at her, he hovered between anger and laughter. Laughter won.
She stared at him. “What is so funny?” she demanded, her eyes flashing.
“Don’t force me to explain!” he retorted. “You don’t need it, Hester. You understand me perfectly—just as I understand you. None of it needs saying. I want to find something for Rathbone to use to help Melville out of this idiotic mess. I don’t say Melville deserves it. That isn’t the point anymore. He won’t marry Zillah Lambert. He probably won’t marry anyone. He has behaved like a fool; he doesn’t deserve to be ruined for it. Rathbone won’t use anything I find in court, simply to make Lambert negotiate before it is all too late.”
She took a deep breath. She was sitting upright, still as if she had a ruler to her back. “Is it possible one of her flirtations went too far, overbalanced into something a trifle irresponsible?”
“How would I know?”
“Well, her parents wouldn’t discuss it,” she said with certainty. “Her father would probably have no idea, but her mother would. Mothers can read their daughters quite frighteningly well. I don’t know why it is, but we all tend to imagine our parents were never young or in love.” She shrugged. “Which is probably stupid, when you come to think of it. If there is anybody at all one can be absolutely certain had some experience of intimacy, it is one’s mother. Otherwise one would not be here. But at fifteen or sixteen we never see it. I thought my mother the most old-fashioned and tepid of creatures alive.” She smiled to herself, her thoughts far away. “I wanted to wear a red dress. There was this young man I thought was marvelous. He had ginger hair and a wonderful mustache….”
