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Livia accepted. Apparently the maid had been dismissed to wait for her in the carriage, or whatever other form of transport she had used. Either Livia wished this conversation to be private or the maid had declined to remain in such a place. Possibly it was both.
Breathing heavily, Bessie filled up the kettle again from a ewer on the floor and set it on the stove. “It’ll be a few minutes,” she warned grudgingly. She sensed condescension and resented it.
“Of course,” Hester agreed, then turned to Livia. “I really have no idea what happened to Mr. Baltimore,” she said gently. “I deal only with injury and illness here. I don’t ask questions.”
“But you must hear things!” Livia urged. “The police won’t tell me anything. They speak to my brother, but they say there was a woman involved, and she may have been hurt.”
Her black-gloved hands clenched and unclenched on her reticule. “Perhaps he saw a woman being attacked, and he tried to help her, and they set upon him?” Her eyes were eager, desperate. “If that were so, she might have come here, surely?”
“Yes,” Hester agreed, knowing the word was true but the thought was not.
“Then you would have seen her, or your woman would?” Livia half nodded toward Bessie, standing with her arms folded beside the stove.
“I would have seen her,” Hester conceded. “But several women come here every night, and they are all injured . . . or ill.”
“But that night . . . the night he was . . . killed?” Livia leaned forward a little across the table, in her eagerness forgetting her distaste. “Who was here then? Who was hurt, and might have seen his . . . murder?” Her eyes filled with tears and she ignored them. “Don’t you care about justice, Mrs. Monk? My father was a good and decent man, and generous. He worked so hard for what he had, and he loved his family! Doesn’t it matter to you that someone killed him?”
“Yes, of course it matters,” Hester responded, wondering how to answer the woman, little more than a girl, without overwhelming her with facts she could neither understand nor believe. “It matters when anyone is killed.”
“Then help us!” Livia pleaded. “You know these women. Tell me something!”
“No, I don’t know them,” Hester cut across her. “I do what I can for their injuries . . . that’s all.”
Livia’s eyes were wide, uncomprehending. “But . . .”
“They come in through that door.” Hester nodded to the street entrance. “Sometimes I have seen them before, sometimes I haven’t. They are either injured with cuts, bru
ises, or broken bones, or they are in a critical state of disease, most often syphilis or tuberculosis, but other things as well. I don’t ask more than their first names, merely for something to call them. I do what I can, and often that is not much. When they are well enough, they go away again.”
“But don’t you know how they were injured?” Livia pressed, her voice rising. “You must know what happened!”
Hester looked down at the tabletop. “I don’t need to ask. Either a customer lost his temper, or they kept a bit of the money for themselves and their pimps beat them,” she replied. “And now and again they took a bit of trade in someone else’s patch and got into a fight that way. The competition is pretty rough. Whatever it is, it really doesn’t make any difference to what I need to do.”
Livia obviously did not understand. It was a world, even a language, beyond her experience or imagination. “What is a . . . pimp?”
“The man who looks after them,” Hester replied. “And takes most of what they earn.”
“But why?” There was no comprehension in Livia’s eyes.
“Because it’s dangerous for a woman on her own,” Hester explained. “Most of them have no choice. The pimps own the buildings, in a way they almost own the streets. They keep other people from hurting the women, but if they think they’re lazy, or cheating them, then they beat the women themselves, usually not badly enough to scar their faces or make them unfit to work. Only a fool damages his own property.”
Livia shook her head as if to get rid of the idea. “Then who hurts them when they come here to you?”
“Customers, perhaps, who are drunk and don’t know their own strength, or just lose their tempers,” Hester said. “Other women sometimes. Quite often they come because of disease.”
“Lots of people get tuberculosis,” Livia pointed out. “All sorts of people. I had a cousin who died of it. She was only twenty-eight. They call it the White Death, don’t they.” That was a statement. “And the other is . . .” She would not speak the words. Her own embarrassment at the subject was too deep to allow such candor. At last she let herself look around the room at the whitewashed walls and the cupboards, some of them locked.
Hester saw her glance. “Carbolic, lye, potash, vinegar,” she said. “It’s good for cleaning. And tobacco. We keep that locked.”
Livia’s eyes widened. “Tobacco? You let people use tobacco? Even women?”
“For burning,” Hester explained. “It’s a good fumigant, especially if we have lice or ticks, or things like that.”
Livia’s face twisted as if she could smell the reek of it already. “I just want to know what they saw,” she begged. “What happened to my father?”
Hester studied her, the youth in the soft curves of her cheek and throat, the unlined skin, the earnest gaze. But already the shadow of grief had touched her; there was a hollowness, a papery quality around her eyes and a tightness to her mouth. The world was a different place from the one it had been three days before, and that innocence could not be found again.
Hester struggled for something to say that would stop this girl, for that is all she was in spite of her years, and send her back to her own life to believe whatever she wanted to. Unless there were a trial, she would never have to know what her father had been doing in Leather Lane. “Let the police find out, if they can,” she said aloud.
