AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He pressed his hands over his eyes. “Not for her. I did nothing to help her find them. I was too drawn into my own work. I expected her to change. You should never expect that. . people don’t.”
She struggled for something to say, a way of denying it to offer some comfort. But there was an element of truth in it, and that was all he could see. All the ways in which Elissa could have found causes worth all her efforts, he would see only as excuses for his own failure to make her happy.
“Perhaps we all have something of that hunger in us,” she said at last. “But when we love someone we do learn to change its direction. I went to the Crimea to nurse, but I also went for the adventure. It’s wonderful to be so very alive, even if some of it is horror and rage, and grief. Not to have lived is the worst death of all.” She smiled briefly. “I was going to say that we have the right to make those dreams only for ourselves, not for others, but there’s hardly anything we do that doesn’t take others along with us, in some way. If I’d stayed at home my family’s lives would have been different, and their deaths.” It hurt to say that. She had never allowed herself even to think it before. Perhaps life would be different for Charles if she had been there to share the burden instead of leaving him alone with the loss of a brother, then a father. Only now, sitting quietly in this room with Kristian Beck, did she try to imagine how Charles had coped with all that grief, trying to think of anything to say or do to ease his mother’s sorrow.
Did he blame himself that he had failed and she had died, too? Did Imogen ever even think of that? Hester was furious with her, and then with herself. She had not been there either. Love, loyalty, the bonds of family should mean more than simply writing good letters now and again.
She lifted her hand and touched Kristian’s arm. “I’m so sorry. I can’t say that I know how you feel. Of course I don’t, no one does who has not been where you are. But I know what pain is, and the knowledge afterwards that you might have added to it, and I am truly sorry.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly. He bit his full lower lip, bringing blood to it. “I’m not sure I can say I am glad you came, but I am certainly glad you care.” His eyes were soft, a profound honesty in them, and a depth of emotion she preferred not to name.
It was pointless offering to do anything for him. All anyone could do was find the truth and pray it did not hurt him any more profoundly. No one could lift the darkness yet, or share it.
She stood up and excused herself, and he collected his hat and coat and walked through the fog with her along Haverstock Hill towards the City until he found a hansom for her, but they did not speak again.
All the way home through the fog-choked streets her mind whirled around the new knowledge she had stumbled on so insensitively. She blamed herself for the pain she had caused, and yet it was woven into every part of the life of the dead woman. Elissa Beck was nothing like the person any of them had imagined. Monk had said she was beautiful, not just attractive but hauntingly, unforgettably beautiful. Kristian himself had said she was brave. Now it seemed she was also driven by a compulsion which devoured not only her own happiness but Kristian’s as well. He was taken to the brink of ruin, and had she lived, surely it would soon have been beyond it into an abyss.
How would Callandra feel when she knew-and there would be no way of protecting her from it-that Kristian had had an urgent, compelling motive to kill his wife?
When she arrived home Monk was in the sitting room, pacing the floor.
“Where have you been?” he demanded. “It’s after ten o’clock! Hester. .” He stopped abruptly, staring at her face. “What’s happened? What is it? You look awful!”
“Thank you!” she said, deciding in that instant that she could not tell him what she had learned. It was too difficult, too vulnerable. “It has not been a pleasant day.”
“Of course it hasn’t been pleasant,” he responded. “But you looked a lot better at the funeral. What’s happened since then? You’re as white as paper!”
“I’m tired.” She started to walk past him.
He put out his hand and grasped her arm, not hard, but firmly enough to stop her and swing her slightly around. “Hester! Where have you been?” His voice was not rough, but there was no yielding in it, no acceptance of denial.
“I went to see Kristian,” she replied, intending to tell him only that much.
His eyes narrowed. “Why? You’ve already seen him.”
She hesitated. How little could she tell him and be believed? “I was concerned for him.”
“So you went to his house, after the funeral of his wife?” he said with open disbelief. “Didn’t it occur to you that he might wish to be alone?”
She was stung by his belief in her insensitivity, partly because she had been intrusive exactly as he accused. “Yes, of course it did! I didn’t go imagining I could comfort him. I went because I needed to know. .” Then she stopped. She did not want to tell him yet what she had seen. He would know that Kristian could be guilty, then sooner or later he would have to tell Runcorn.
“What?” he said sharply. “What did you need to know?”
She was angry at being caught, having either to tell him the truth or to think of a convincing lie that would not stand between them forever. Or she could simply refuse to answer. “I would prefer to speak about it at another time,” she said a little primly.
“You would what?” he said incredulously, his grasp tightening on her arm.
“Let go of me, William. You are bruising me,” she said coldly.
He loosened his grip without removing his hand. “Hester, you are deliberately being evasive. What have you discovered that is so ugly that you are prepared to compromise yourself for it?”
“I’m. .” she began, then the truth of what he was saying bit more deeply. She was compromising herself, and also the trust between them. He would find out soon anyway. She was not really protecting Kristian by hiding what she knew from Monk. If Kristian had killed his wife, nothing would protect him, or Callandra; and if he had not, then only the whole truth would do any good.
She looked at Monk’s face and met his eyes squarely. “I went to find out why the funeral meal was held in Pendreigh’s house, not Elissa’s own home,” she answered.
“And why was it?” he said softly, a shadow in his face.
“Because Elissa gambled,” she replied. “Compulsively. Kristian has hardly anything left, no furniture, no carpets, no resident servants, nothing but her bedroom and one shabby sitting room, without a fire.”
