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When she arrived at the trading house she controlled her urgency as well as she could, but the head clerk still looked at her dubiously, chewing his lip as he considered whether he would give permission for one of his employees to stop work and speak with her.
She smiled. “Please?” she said with as much charm as she could muster. “I was the nurse who looked after him when he lost his leg at Sebastopol. I'm trying to find another man, or at least learn where to look, and I think Mr. Fenneman could help me.”
“Well … yes, of course,” the head clerk said nervously. “I … I suppose a few moments wouldn't hurt. Sebastopol? Really? He never said, you know.”
“People don't like talking about it,” she explained. “It was pretty dreadful.”
“I've heard others talk,” he argued.
“So have I,” she agreed. “Usually they were not there, they only heard about it from tales. The ones who saw it say nothing. I don't actually like talking about it myself, and I only experienced the aftermath, searching among the dead for those still alive that we might be able to help.”
The head clerk shuddered, his face a little paler. “I'll fetch Mr. Fenneman for you.”
Fenneman appeared a few moments later. He was thinner than the last time she had seen him, and of course no longer in army uniform. He had a wooden peg fitted to the stump of his lost leg, a little above the knee, and he moved with one crutch, balancing quite efficiently. She still felt a little sick when she remembered the agile young man he had been, and the desperate struggle she had had to save him. It had been she who had actually sawn through the bone in the shattered remnants of his leg, unable even to render him unconscious during the agony of it. But she had stopped the bleeding, and with help, gotten him from the battlefield to the hospital.
Now his face lit with pleasure at seeing her. “Miss Latterly! Fancy finding you here in London! Mr. Potts said as I could help you. I'd be happy to, in any way I can.” He stood in front of her, smiling, leaning sideways a little to level his weight on his crutch.
She wondered whether to ask if there was somewhere he could sit, and decided against it. He sat at his work, and it might insult him, obliquely, if she took such notice of his disability as to instantly suggest that he could not stand.
“It's good to see you looking so well,” she said instead. “And with a good job.”
He blushed, but it was with self-conscious pleasure.
“I'm looking for information about a man who died about the turn of the year,” she hurried on, aware that the head clerk would be watching the seconds tick by. “His name was Durban. He was commander of the River Police at Wapping, and I believe you grew up in Shadwell. He never spoke about himself, so I hardly know where to begin to look for his family. Can you suggest anyone who might help me?”
“Durban?” he said thoughtfully. “Can't say I know anything about his family, or where he came from, but I heard he was a good man. But Corporal Miller, d'you remember him? Little man, with red hair, and we called him Dusty, but then we call all Millers ‘Dusty.’ “He smiled at the recollection. In spite of his lost leg, his memories of the companionship in army life were still good. “I can give you the names of two or three others, if you like?”
“Yes, please,” she accepted quickly. “And where I can find them, if you know that.”
He swung around on his crutch and moved rapidly back to the bench where he worked. He wrote on a sheet of paper, dipping his quill in the inkwell and concentrating on his penmanship. He returned several moments later and handed her the sheet covered with beautiful script letters. He was watching her, pride in his face, anxious to see if she observed his achievement.
She said the names and addresses, and looked up at him. “Thank you,” she said sincerely. “I know now if I ever want a job as a clerk not to come here. This standard is something I couldn't achieve. Seeing you has lightened a dark day for me. I'll go and look for these men. Thank you.”
He blinked a little, uncertain what to say, and ended by simply smiling back.
It took her the rest of the day and half the next one, but she gained bits and pieces from all the men whose names Fenneman had given her, and gathered a picture of Durban's own account of his youth. Apparently he had been born in Essex. His father, John Durban, had been headmaster of a boys’ school there, and his mother a happy and contented woman about the home and the schoolhouse. It had been a large family: several sisters and at least one brother, who had been a captain in the merchant navy, travelling the South Seas, and the coast of Africa. There was no hint of darkness at all, and Durban's own official police record was exemplary.
The village of his birth was only a few miles away along the Thames Estuary. It was still barely past noon. She could be there by two o'clock, find the schoolhouse and the parish church, look at the records, and be home before dark. She felt a twinge of guilt at the whisper of caution that drove her to do it. This was Durban's own account. She would never have doubted him before the trial, and the questions Rathbone had awoken in her.
But the lean, intelligent face of Oliver Rathbone kept coming back into her mind, and the necessity to check, to prove, to be able to answer every question with absolute certainty.
She spent the money and traveled in a crowded carriage out to the stop nearest the village, and then walked the last couple of miles in the wind and sun, the water of the Estuary glinting bright to the south. She went to the schoolhouse, and to the church. There was no record whatsoever of anyone named Durban—no births, no deaths, no marriages. The schoolhouse had every headmaster's name on its board, from 1823 to the present date. There was no Durban.
She felt sick, confused, and very afraid for Monk. As she walked back towards the railway station and the journey home, the road was suddenly hard, her feet hot and sore. The light on the water was no longer beautiful, and she did not notice the sails of the barges coming and going. The ache inside herself for the lies and the disillusion ahead outweighed such peripheral, physical things. And the question beat in her mind, over and over—Why? What did the lies conceal?
In the morning, feet still aching, she was at the clinic on Portpool Lane, intensely relieved that Margaret was not present, who perhaps just now found their meetings as unhappy as Hester did.
She had visited all the patients they currently had, and attended to a little stitching of wounds and the repair of a dislocated shoulder, when Claudine came into the room and closed the door behind her. Her eyes were bright, and she was slightly flushed. She did not wait for Hester to speak.
“I've got a woman in one of the bedrooms,” she said urgently. “She came in last night. She has a knife wound and bled rather badly …”
Hester was alarmed. “You didn't tell me! Why didn't you have me see her?” She rose to her feet. “Is she …?”
“She's all right,” Claudine said quickly, motioning for Hester to sit down again. “She's not nearly as bad as I let her think she is. I spread the blood on to a lot of clothes so it would look dreadful, and she would be afraid to leave.”
“Claudine! What on earth …?” Now Hester was frightened not only for the woman, but for Claudine's sanity.
Claudine interrupted her, her face even more flushed. “I needed to speak to you privately before you go to her.
