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“What?” He looked totally startled, then the dull color spread up his cheeks, but he offered no explanation.
“The funeral was very High Church.” She knew she was hurting him, although not how.
“That was my father-in-law’s wish,” he said. He was not looking directly at her but somewhere a trifle to her left.
She was aware of feeling cold. The room was too chilly for comfort. Surely he had been sitting somewhere else when she had rung the doorbell. Was he keeping her there in the hope that the cold would persuade her to leave? If so, he had forgotten most of what he had learned about her. Did he really not remember the long, exhausting nights of labor and despair they and Callandra had spent together in Limehouse?
“And you conceded to it?” she asked with a lift of surprise.
“He is deeply grieved!” he replied a trifle sharply. “If it comforts him it does no harm, Hester.” It was a reproof, and she felt its sting.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “It is very generous of you. It did not seem your way, and it is an enormous expense.”
Now it was his turn to blush painfully. It startled her to see it. She had no idea what she had said to provoke it. He was obviously acutely embarrassed. He looked down at his hands as he answered. “None of it is my way, but if it helps him to go through the ritual, how could I deny him that? They were unusually close. She admired him intensely.” He raised his eyes to meet hers at last. “He had great physical courage also, you know? When he was still little more than a boy he was a mountaineer. There was an accident, and at great risk to his own life, he rescued the three other members of his party. Climbing was very fashionable then, and the incident became well-known. One of the men he rescued wrote a book about it.” He half smiled. “I think in a way Elissa was trying to live up to him.”
In spite of herself, Hester found her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He shrugged and shook his head a little.
“Was that why you allowed him to host the funeral meal also?” she asked.
He looked away again. “In part. They are a Liverpool family, not London. He has only been here a year or so, but he has many friends here, people I don’t know, and he wished them to be invited. As you saw, a great number came.”
Without thinking, she gazed around the room. Even in the meager light of the one lamp, she could see it was shabby. The fabric on the arms of the chairs was worn where hands and elbows rested. There was a track of faded color across the carpet from the door to each of the chairs. This was a room as one might furnish for the servants to sit in during the brief times free from their duties.
She looked again at Kristian, and saw with a rush of horror that his eyes were hot with shame. Why had he brought her to this room? Surely any other room would be better? Was it nothing to do with desiring her to leave? Was it conceivable. . She stared at him, and a flood of understanding opened up between them. “The rest of the house?” she said in almost a whisper.
He looked down at the floor. “This is the best,” he answered. “Apart from the hall and Elissa’s bedroom. The rest is empty.”
She was stunned, ashamed for herself and for him because she had exposed something immeasurably private. At the same time it was incomprehensible. Kristian worked harder than any other man she knew. Even Monk did not work consistently as long. A great deal of it was done without payment, she knew that from Callandra, who was very familiar with the hospital’s finances, but his ordinary hours were rewarded like any other doctor’s.
It flickered through her mind that he could even have given certain things away, but that would have been a noble thing to do. He would have looked her in the face and said it with pride, not down at the floor in silent misery.
“What happened?” She said the words hoarsely, conscious of a terrible intrusion. Had Elissa not been murdered, she would never have deepened such a pain by seeking explanation, but like probing for a bullet in torn flesh, it might be the only way towards healing.
“Elissa gambled,” he said simply. “It was only a little to begin with, but lately it became so she couldn’t help it.”
“Ggambled?” She felt as if she had been struck. Her mind staggered, trying to retain balance. “Gambled?” she repeated pointlessly.
“It became a compulsion.” His voice was flat, without expression. “At first it was just a little excitement, then, when she won, it took hold of her. Then it went on, even when she began to lose. You think the next time you will make it up again. Reason doesn’t have any part in it. In the end, all you think about is the next chance to test your luck, to feel the excitement in the mind, the blood beating as you wait for the card, or the dice, or whatever it is.”
She looked around the room, her throat tightening in misery for the emptiness of it. “But it can cost you everything,” she said, her voice choking in spite of herself. Anger boiled inside her at the futility of it. She turned to face him. “And you can’t ever win unless somebody else loses.”
This time his eyes did not waver. He was not evading the truth anymore, and there was a mark of defiance in him. “I know. If there were no real danger, no loss, it wouldn’t make the heart go faster and the stomach knot inside. If you are a real gambler, you must risk more than you can afford to lose. I don’t think it was even the winning that mattered anymore; it was the defying of fate and walking away.”
But she had not. She had lost. It had taken from her the warmth and beauty of her home, then even the necessities of it, and it had cost her husband grief, exhaustion and the comfort of a home he had labored to provide, and a shame that was almost insupportable. All social life had been swept away. He could not accept an invitation from anyone, because he could not return it. He was cut off, isolated, and surely terrified of ever-increasing debt he would not be able to meet. This would become public disgrace, perhaps eventually even the utter despair of debtor’s prison, as other bills of life could not be met and creditors closed in, angry and vengeful.
It was like a disease of the mind-a madness! Elissa was a woman he had once loved, perhaps still did, but there was a part of her he could not reach, and it was destroying both of them.
She did not want to think of it, still less to face it. But it was blazingly, luminously clear even to her, with all her friendship for Kristian and her love for Callandra, that he had a supreme motive for killing Elissa. It was so powerful, so totally understandable, that she did not deny to herself the possibility that in a moment of engulfing panic, as ruin faced him, he could have done it. She felt grieved and guilty and frightened, but above all she felt wrenchingly sorry.
“Did Pendreigh know?” she asked.
“No. She always man
aged to keep it from him. She only called on him when she was winning, and she managed to find excuses never to invite him here. I think that was easy enough. She used my work as excuse.” He shivered and pushed his hand over his brow, hard back, as if the pressure of it eased some pain inside. “She wouldn’t have to explain,” he went on, his voice husky. “She didn’t know much about it; I never really shared it with her. I brought her here from the passion and excitement of Vienna, and expected her to be happy in a domestic life amid people she did not know, and with no cause to fight, no admiration, no danger, no loyalties. .”
“There are plenty of battles to fight here,” she said softly. “Not at the barricades, not with plain enemies, and not always with any glory, but they are real.”
