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“This close to a verdict, it may be impossible to turn things around, and that frightens me,” Rathbone went on. “Someone has committed two murders. I can’t believe that Lambourn’s death and Zenia Gadney’s are not connected. Amity Herne has lied on oath, but I don’t know why. Is it enmity against her brother, or against Dinah, or to justify her husband having
condemned Joel’s report? Or does she have some vested interest in blocking the bill herself?”
“I don’t know, either,” Monk admitted. “But Gladstone is right. No one is going to like us for opening up the horror of the Opium Wars!” He stopped in the street and stared at Rathbone. “But you’ll do it!”
“Oh, yes,” Rathbone said. Then, the moment the words were past his lips, he wondered if he had just committed himself to ruining his career.
CHAPTER 17
Monk was deeply shaken by what Gladstone had told him. Perhaps before his amnesia he had been aware of at least some of the shame of Britain’s part in the Opium Wars, but not the depth of the greed. The violence of it and the duplicity horrified him. There was arrogance in the assumption that any country had the right to smuggle such a poisonous substance to a less technically advanced people, and by weight of superior weaponry, conquer them. Then on top of all that, they had demanded reparation for what had been the results of their own savagery.
Had Britain been the victim, not the attacker, he would have burned with outrage at it. He would have condemned the invaders and thirsted for revenge.
But it was his own people who had been the barbarians, the people he had believed to be civilized, to have carried some core of honor, and a better system of beliefs, to races with a dimmer sense of what was right and with laws less just.
He sat in the glow of the firelight in his own house with the familiar pictures on the walls of the parlor, the books he had read and loved on the shelves. Scuff was asleep upstairs. Quietly he related to Hester what Mr. Gladstone had told him.
Eventually he stood up and turned on the lamps, watching her face as she listened to him. He saw the sadness in her as he described some of the details, although he did not include them all. Did she feel as ashamed as he did? She did not look as surprised as he had expected her to.
“Did you know all this?” He could not help asking her.
“No,” she said quietly. “But I have seen ignorance and stupidity before. To begin with, I tried not to believe it, or to find excuses, or reasons why it was not the way it seemed. In the end I had to accept that most of it was true; some of it was even understated. People lie to conceal their mistakes, and then make even worse ones to cover the lies.”
She looked at him with anxiety and a strange gentleness, as if she would have protected him from it. “Once I used to imagine that those in power were different, but most of them aren’t,” she went on. “No one likes to admit that their own people can be as greedy and cruel as any foreigners. We perform all kinds of contortions of the mind to make a reason why it isn’t really the way it looks, but we only fool the people who want to be fooled.”
“Maybe I knew, and forgot,” he said, thinking back to his struggle to learn about himself, to piece together the evidence of what kind of a man he was, the good and the bad. There was so much then that it would have been more pleasant to deny. Some of it-small cruelties, unnecessary ones-he had in the end been unable to avoid, and had learned to face, and regret. But there was a kind of comfort in that-honesty could be its own healing.
As if reading his thoughts, or perhaps thinking back and tracing the same path, Hester smiled at him. It was a moment of understanding that was amazingly sweet. All pain was shared, and melted away into something calmer.
He reached out and touched her gently, and her hand closed over his.
The silence came to a natural end.
“Do you think that Joel Lambourn discovered something during his research that was to do with more than the damage opium can cause if used without knowledge?” she asked. “Something outside that altogether, and far more dangerous?”
Monk had been puzzling about that himself. “I don’t see why his research would matter so much if all it contained was figures of opium misuse, deaths of children, and perhaps of addicts here and there,” he answered. “It might delay the Pharmacy Act a year or so, but other people will eventually find the same evidence. And there are other medicines that should be regulated as well. Opium importers will have to deal more honestly; apothecaries will have to take more care, measure and label acceptably. Many small traders will have to stop selling it. Thousands of people will lose a few pennies a week. Would any one of them murder Lambourn for that? And also murder Zenia Gadney in such a hideous way?”
“No,” she said gravely. “We have missed something. Or someone. Someone who has far more to lose than a small profit.”
“Gladstone suggested there were details that might ruin some people, if they came to be known,” Monk suggested, searching for an answer that made sense. “Is there some atrocity that Lambourn could have exposed that would ruin a reputation?”
Hester shook her head a little. “Why would he? He didn’t need to go into details of the smuggling or the violence to prove that opium in patent medicines can kill people because they don’t know what the dosage is. And isn’t that all he wanted to prove?”
“Perhaps he found out something else by accident?” Monk’s imagination was racing. His own ignorance appalled him. “Someone could be lying to hide … whatever it is … because they know humiliation is a bitterly painful thing to bear. Some people would rather die than be shamed-in fact, many people.”
“I know,” she said very quietly.
He watched her face, the sudden deep sorrow in it, and remembered too late that her father had committed suicide rather than bear the shame of the debt he owed because Joscelyn Gray had swindled him out of his money. That was the first case he had dealt with in his new life, which had begun after the amnesia. It was the case in which he and Hester had met, and he had not even thought of it in his talk of shame and suicide. He could not believe his own clumsiness.
“Hester …” What could he say? A tide of embarrassment burned hot up his face.
She smiled, tears in her eyes. “I wasn’t thinking of him,” she said gently. “He was unwise, he trusted an evil man, and I wasn’t there to help. I was too busy following my own somewhat self-concerned conscience in the Crimea. National shame is different.” She looked down at her lap. “Tomorrow I’ll go and see Winfarthing again, and perhaps one or two other people who might know more about the Opium Wars, and the way we fought them.”
“I don’t think you should …,” Monk began. Then he saw the level resolve in her eyes, and his words faded away. She would do it, whatever he said, for her own well-being, just as she had gone to the Crimea without her parents’ approval, and into the streets to create the clinic without his. It would have been very much more comfortable if she were to care more for her own well-being, or for his, certainly for her safety. But then the unhappiness would come in other ways, steadily mounting as she denied who she was and what she believed.
“At least be very careful!” he ended. “Think of Scuff!”
She hesitated, and colored a little. She drew in her breath as if to retaliate, then bit her lip. “I will,” she promised.
