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"She refused to tell me anything," he said clearly. "Except that she was not there when Treadwell was killed. I don’t think she even knew he was dead. When I told her that, she was so horrified she was almost incapable of speech. She all but fainted."
"So she knows something about it!" Hester said instantly.
That was an unwarranted leap of deduction, and yet he had made exactly the same one. He looked across at her and smiled bleakly.
"So you have learned no new facts," she said.
"There’s the fact that Mrs. Whitbread was prepared to fight to defend her, and risk the police coming after her instead," he pointed out. "And the fact that almost certainly Robb will find her, sooner or later." He did not want to tell Hester about Robb’s opinion of him. It was painful, a dark thing he preferred she did not know.
"So, what was she like?" she asked again.
He did not make any evasions or comments on the obscurity of feminine logic.
"I’ve never seen anyone more afraid," he said honestly. "Or more anguished. But I don’t believe she will tell me—or anyone else—what happened or why she is running. Certainly, she won’t tell Lucius Stourbridge."
"What are you going to do?" Her voice was little more than a whisper, and her eyes were full of pity.
He realized he had already made his decision.
"I will tell Stourbridge that I found her and she is alive and well, and that she says she had no part in Treadwell’s death, but I will not tell him where she is. I daresay she will not be there by the time I report to him anyway. I warned her that Robb was close behind me." He did not need to add the risk he took in so doing. Hester knew it.
"Poor woman," she said softly. "Poor woman."
5
IT WAS the sixth day of Monk’s enquiry into Miriam Gardiner’s flight. Hester had gone to sleep thinking about her. She wondered what tragedy had drawn her to such an act that she could not speak of it, even to the man she was to marry.
But it was not that which woke her, shaking and so tense her head throbbed with a stiff, sharp pain. She had an overwhelming sense of fear, of something terrible happening which she was helpless to prevent and inadequate to deal with. It was not a small thing, or personal to herself, but of all-consuming proportions.
Beside her, Monk was asleep, his face relaxed and completely at peace in the clear, early light. He was as oblivious of her as if they had been in separate rooms, different worlds.
It was not the first time she had woken with this feeling of helplessness and exhaustion, and yet she could not remember what she had been dreaming, either now or before.
She wanted to wake Monk, talk to him, hear him say it was all of no importance, unreal, belonging to the world of sleep. But that would be selfish. He expected more strength from her. He would be disappointed, and she could not bear that. She lay staring at the ceiling, feeling utterly alone, because it was how she had woken and she could not cast it away. There was something she longed to escape from, and she knew that was impossible. It was everywhere around her.
The light through the chink in the curtains was broadening across the floor. In another hour or so it would be time to get up and face the day. Fill her mind with that. It was always better to be busy. There were battles worth fighting; there always were. She would speak to Fermin Thorpe again. The man was impossible to reason with because he was afraid of change, afraid of losing control and so becoming less important.
It would probably mean more of the interminable letters, few of which ever received a useful answer. How could anyone write so many words which, when disentangled from their dependent clauses and qualifying additions, actually had no meaning?
Florence Nightingale was confined to her home—some said, even to her bed—and spent nearly all her time writing letters.
Of course, hers were highly effective. In the four years since the end of the war she had changed an enormous number of things, particularly to do with the architecture of hospitals. First, naturally, her attention had been upon military hospitals, but she had won that victory, in spite of a change of government and losing her principal ally. Now she was bending her formidable will towards civilian hospitals and, just as Hester was, to the training of nurses. But it was a battle against stubborn and entrenched interests that held great power. Fermin Thorpe was merely one of many, a typical example of senior medical men throughout the country.
And poor Florence’s health had declined ever since her return. Hester found that hard to accept, even to imagine. In Scutari, Florence had seemed inexhaustible—the last sort of woman on earth to succumb to fainting and palpitations, unexplained fevers and general aches and weaknesses. And yet, apparently that was now the case. Several times her life had been despaired of. Her family was no longer permitted to visit her in case the emotion of the occasion should prove too much for her. Devoted friends and admirers gave up their own pursuits to look after her until the end should come, and make her last few months on earth as pleasant as possible.
Time and again this had happened. And lately, if anything, she seemed to be recovered and bursting with new and vigorous ideas. She had proposed a school for training nurses and was systematically attacking the opposition. It was said nothing delighted her as much as a set of statistics which could be used to prove the point that clean water and good ventilation were necessary to the recovery of a patient.
Hester smiled to herself as she remembered Florence in the hot Turkish sun, determinedly ordering an army sergeant to bring her his figures on the dead of the past week, their date of admittance to the hospital and the nature of their injuries and cause of death. The poor man had been so exhausted he had not even argued with her. One pointless task was much like another to him, only his pity for his fellows and his sense of decency had made him reluctant to obey. Florence had tried to explain to him, her pale face alight, eyes brilliant, that she could learn invaluable information from such things. Deductions could be made, lessons learned, mistakes addressed and perhaps corrected. People were dying who did not need to, distress was caused which could have been avoided.
The army, like Fermin Thorpe, did not listen. That was the helplessness which overwhelmed her—injury, disease and death all around, too few people to care for the sick, ignorance defeating so much of even the little they could have done.
What an insane, monstrous waste! What a mockery of all that was good and happy and beautiful in life!
And here she was, lying warm and supremely comfortable in bed
with Monk asleep beside her. The future stretched out in front of her with as bright a promise as the day already shining just beyond the curtain. It would be whatever she made of it. Unless she allowed the past to darken it, old memories to cripple her and make her useless.
She still wanted to wake Monk and talk to him—no, that was not true, what she wanted was that he should talk to her. She wanted to hear his voice, hear the assurance in it, the will to fight—and win.
