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Hester began by returning to see Winfarthing. She was obliged to wait nearly an hour before he finished treating patients, then he gave her his entire attention. As usual, his office was littered with books and papers. A very small cat was curled up on the most thoroughly scattered heap, as if it had intentionally made them into a bed for itself. It did not stir when Hester sat down on the chair nearest to it.
Winfarthing did not appear to have noticed. He looked tired and unhappy. His thick hair was standing up on end where he had run his fingers through it.
“I don’t have anything that will help,” he said before she had time to ask. “I’d have told you if I had.”
She recounted to him what they had learned about Dinah and about Zenia Gadney.
“Good God!” he said with amazement, his face crumpled in an expression of profound pity. “I would do anything for her that I could, but what is there? If she didn’t kill the woman, then who did?” His expression filled with disgust. “I have no great love for politicians, or respect, either, but I find it v
ery difficult to believe any one of them would cold-bloodedly murder Lambourn just to delay the Pharmacy Act. It will come sooner or later-probably sooner, whatever they do. Is there really so much money to be made in a year or two that it’s worth a man’s life? Not to mention a man’s soul?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she answered. “There has to be more to it, far more.”
He looked at her curiously. “What? Something that Lambourn knew and would have put in his report?”
“Don’t you think so?” She was uncertain now, fumbling for answers. She did not want Dinah to be guilty, or Joel Lambourn to be an incompetent suicide. Was that what was driving her, rather than reason? She saw the thought far too clearly in Winfarthing’s face, and felt the slight heat burn up her own cheeks.
“Lambourn’s suicide doesn’t make sense,” she said defensively. “The physical evidence is wrong.”
He ignored the argument. Perhaps it was irrelevant now anyway. “What are you thinking of?” he asked instead. “Something he discovered about the sale of opium? Smuggling? No one in Britain cares about the East India Company smuggling off the coast of China.” He snapped his fingers in the air in a gesture of dismissal. “China could be on Mars, for all it means to most of us-except their tea, silk, and porcelain, of course. But what happens there is nothing to the man in the street. Theft? In any moral sense it’s all theft: corruption, violence, and the poisoning of half a nation simply because we have the means and the desire to do it, and it’s absurdly profitable.”
“I don’t know!” Hester said again, a little more desperately. “There has to be something we do care about. We can butcher foreigners and find a way to justify it to ourselves but we can’t steal from our own, and we certainly can’t betray them.”
“And have we, Hester?” he said quietly. “What makes you think Lambourn discovered something like that? We all know that we introduced opium into China to pay for the luxuries we buy from them; we smuggle it into their country and it is killing them, an inch at a time. They go through caverns of the soul, measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. Read Coleridge-or De Quincey!”
“ ‘A sunless sea,’ ” she repeated. “That sounds like imprisonment, like drowning. How bad is real dependency on opium?”
He looked at her with sudden concentration, his eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask? Why now?”
“We don’t smoke it like the Chinese, we eat it, take it in medicines mixed with lots of other things,” she answered slowly. “It’s the only cure we have for the worst pain.”
“I know that, girl. What are you saying?”
“I met a woman in the docklands who runs a clinic for badly injured navvies and sailors. She showed me a syringe with a hollow needle that can put it straight into the blood, if you want to. That kills pain far more swiftly, and thoroughly. Less opium but more effect.”
Winfarthing nodded slowly. “And more dependency,” he growled. “Of course. Be careful, Hester. Be very careful. Opium addiction’s a wicked thing. You’re right, it’s a sea in which a million men can drown at once, and still each one do it alone. Give it just for pain, then just to get to the next day, finally to stave off the madness. Good men use it on others to ease unbearable suffering, evil ones to create a passion from which few escape.”
“Who has these needles?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“No. I don’t even know if there are many or few. I don’t know if it has anything to do with Dr. Lambourn’s death or not. No one seems to know what was in his report.”
Winfarthing sat up, his huge body stiff, his eyes wide. “Is that what you think this is about? Not the Pharmacy Act, or the Opium Wars, but someone creating a sickness only they can treat?”
“I don’t know,” she said again.
“My dear, people will call you a liar, a traitor to your country for even suggesting such things,” he said gently. “They will defend the perpetrators because it is not easy for us to admit that we have been deceived. No one gives up his delusion of self-worth willingly. Some prefer even to die.”
“Or to kill?” she said quickly. “Silence the voice that challenges their beliefs? It’s a very old thought, to punish a blasphemer, isn’t it? It could be an easy justification to make.”
“If somebody had been stoned I might accept that.” He shook his head. “To slit a man’s wrists and make him look like a suicide is not an act of righteous anger, Hester. It is cold-blooded; the sort of thing a man does to protect his own interests, not anyone else’s.”
She sat silently, picturing Joel Lambourn alone in the darkness on One Tree Hill.
“To do what was done to Zenia Gadney is the act of a man without even humanity,” Winfarthing went on. “And to do it in order to condemn someone else is beyond even a lunatic to justify.”
“I believe it was done out of self-interest to protect a fortune made, and still being made, in the opium business.” She refused to give up.
