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“It would be perfect,” Monk answered.
Orme thanked him warmly as soon as the door was closed. “ ’Ope it comes afore Mr. Argyll gets back,” he added. “Wouldn’t be decent to eat it in front of ’im, specially if Mrs. Argyll comes too. Don’t reckon as she will, though. Most ladies take bad news ’ard.”
The sandwiches arrived and were consumed ravenously, just before Argyll returned. But Orme was mistaken in his second guess: Jenny Argyll chose to see them. She came in ahead of her husband, a handsome woman with eyes and mouth startlingly like those of her dead sister, but darker hair and not the same high cheekbones. Now she too was bleached of color and her eyelids were puffy from weeping, but she was remarkably well composed, given the circumstances. She was wearing a dark red woollen dress with a wide skirt and her hair was elaborately coiffed in a style that must have taken her lady’s maid at least half an hour to accomplish. She regarded Monk with civility but no interest at all.
Argyll closed the door behind them and waited until his wife was seated.
Monk expressed his condolences again.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Argyll said briefly. “My husband says that Mary fell off Westminster Bridge. Toby was with her. Perhaps he tried to stop her and failed. Poor Toby. I think he still loved her, in spite of everything.” The tears filled her eyes again but she ignored them and her face remained under control. It was impossible to tell what the effort cost her. She did not look at her husband, nor did she reach to touch him.
Monk should have accepted the answer implicit in her words, and yet in spite of all sense he refused to. When Hester’s father had shot himself because of the unanswerable debt he had been cheated into, she had returned from the Crimea, where she had been serving as a military nurse, and redoubled her efforts to strengthen her family and to fight all the wrongs she encountered. It had been her resolve that had strengthened Monk to struggle against the burden that had seemed impossible to him. She was acid-tongued—at least he had thought so—opinionated and unwise in her expression of it, hasty to judge and quick-tempered, but even he, who had found her so irritating, had never doubted her courage or her iron will.
Of course he had seen the passion, the laughter, and the vulnerability in her since then. Was he imagining in Mary Havilland something she had never possessed? Whatever the cost to Mrs. Argyll, he wanted to know.
“I understand that your father met his death recently,” he said gravely. “And that Miss Havilland found it very difficult to come to terms with.”
She looked at him wearily. “She never did,” she answered. “She couldn’t accept that he took his own life. She wouldn’t accept it, in spite of all the evidence. I’m afraid she became…obsessed.” She blinked. “Mary was very…strong-willed, to put it at its kindest. She was close to Papa, and she couldn’t believe that something could be so wrong and he would not confide in her. I’m afraid perhaps they were not as…as close as she imagined.”
“Could she have been distressed over the breaking of her betrothal to Mr. Argyll?” Monk asked, trying to grasp on to some reason why a healthy young woman should do something so desperate as plunge over the bridge. And had she meant to take Argyll with her, or was he trying, even at the risk of his own life, to save her? Did he still love her so much? Or was it out of guilt because he had abandoned her, possibly for someone else? They really did need the surgeon to ascertain if she had been with child. That might explain a great deal. It was a hideous thought, but if he would not marry her, perhaps she had felt suicide the only answer, and had determined to take him with her. He was, in a sense, the cause of her sin. But that would be true only if she were with child and certain of it.
“No,” Mrs. Argyll said flatly. “She was the one who broke it. If anything, it was Toby who was distressed. She…she became very strange, Mr. Monk. She seemed to take against us all. She became fixed upon the idea of a dreadful disaster that was going to happen in the new sewer tunnels that my husband’s company is constructing.” She looked very tired, as if revisiting an old and much-battled pain. “My father had a morbid fear of enclosed spaces, and he was rather reactionary. He was afraid of the new machines that made the work far faster. I imagine you are aware of the urgency of building a new system for the city?”
“Yes, Mrs. Argyll, I think we all are,” he answered. He did not like the picture that was emerging, and yet he could not deny it. It was only his own emotion that drove him to fight it, a completely irrational link in his mind between Mary Havilland and Hester. It was not even anything so definite as a thought, just words used to describe her by a landlady who barely knew her, and the protective grief over the suicide of a father.
“My father allowed it to become an obsession with him,” she went on. “He spent his time gathering information, campaigning to have the company alter its methods. My husband did everything to help him see reason and appreciate that deaths in construction are unavoidable from time to time. Men can be careless. Landslips happen; the London clay is dangerous by its nature. The Argyll Company has fewer incidents than most others. That is a fact he could have checked with ease, and he did. He could point to no mishaps at all on this job, in fact, but it did not calm his fears.”
“Reason does not calm irrational fears,” Argyll said quietly, his voice hoarse with his own emotion, unable to reach towards hers. Perhaps he feared that if he did, they might both lose what control they had. “Don’t harrow yourself up anymore,” he went on. “There was nothing you could have done then, or now. His terrors finally overtook him. Who knows what another man sees in the dark hours of the night?”
“He took his life at night?” Monk asked.
It was Argyll who answered, his voice cold. “Yes, but I would be obliged if you did not press the matter further. It was thoroughly investigated at the time. No one else was in the least at fault. How could anyone have realized that his madness had progressed so far? Now it appears that poor Mary was also far more unstable than we knew, and it had preyed upon her to the point where she herself could not exercise her human or Christian judgment anymore.”
Jenny turned to look at him, frowning. “Christian?” she challenged him. “If anyone is so sunk in despair that they feel death is the only answer for them, can’t we have a little…pity?” There was anger in her eyes.
“I’m sorry!” Argyll said quickly, but without looking at her. “I did not mean to imply blasphemy against your father. We shall never know what demons drove him to such a resort. Even Mary I could forgive, if she had not taken Toby with her! That…that is…” He was unable to continue.
The tears spilled over his cheeks and he turned away, shadowing his face.
Jenny stood up, stiff and unsteady. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Monk. I think there is little of any use that we can tell you. Perhaps you would excuse us. Pendle will see you to the door.” She went to the bell rope and pulled it. The butler appeared almost immediately and Monk and Orme took their leave, after having given Mr. Argyll a card and requested that he formally identify the bodies the following day, when he was a little more recovered.
“Poor devil,” Orme said with feeling when they were outside on the icy footpath again. Mist was veiling the streetlamps as if in gauze. A frail sickle-shaped moon sailed between the stars, high above the rooftops. “Both of ’em lost family in the one night. Funny ’ow an instant can change everything. D’you think she meant to?”
“Go over herself, or take him?” Monk asked, beginning to walk down towards the Westminster Bridge, where they would be more likely to find a hansom. He was still hoping it had been an accident.
“Not sure as I know,” Orme replied, keeping step with him. “Din’t look to me as if she were trying to jump. Facing the wrong way, for a start. Jumpers usually face the water.”
Monk felt a rush of warmth even though the slick of moisture on the footpath was turning to ice under his feet. He was not going to let go of hope, not yet.
Monk reached home before nine o’clock. His return was far later than it would have been on a more usual day, but there was little that was routine in his new job. Even his best effort might not be enough; second best certainly would not. Every day he learned more of the skills, the knowledge, and the respect that Durban had had. He admired the qualities that had earned that respect, and they awed him. He felt continually a step behind Durban. No, that was absurd. He was yards behind him.
He knew people and crime; he knew how to smell fear, how to probe lies, when to be confronting, and when to be oblique. However, he had never known how to inspire the love and loyalty of men under his command. They’d admired his intelligence, his knowledge, and his strength, and they’d been frightened of his tongue, but they did not like him. There’d been none of the fierce honor and friendship he had sensed from the beginning between Durban and his men.
He had crossed the river by ferry—there were no bridges this far down—and he was on the south bank now, where he and Hester had moved after accepting the new job. They could hardly live in Grafton Street anymore. It was miles from police headquarters in Wapping.
He walked up Paradise Street. The lamps misted and he could smell the river and hear the occasional foghorn as the mist drifted across the water. There was ice on the thin puddles in the street. It was still strange to him, nothing familiar.
He put his key into the lock in the door and pushed it open.
