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“No,” Rathbone said at last, “I suppose one doesn’t.” There was intense gentleness in his voice, and perhaps even remembered pain. He felt that for Miriam, perhaps because she was beautiful, and he hardly knew her. What would he feel for Beata? She did not wish pity. Thank God she had tested him only with the thought of someone else!
“And the shame!” she added fiercely, and instantly wished she had not.
He took her arm again and she did not move away.
“It is not her shame,” he replied. “It is his.”
Now she was fighting tears. Thank heaven the wind was harsh enough to explain them. “And hers, too,” she said huskily. “For not having seen what he was…”
“Beata, no one wears such a thing on his shirt front!”
“And having put up with it,” she added. She must say it now. She would never ever speak of this again.
“We do,” he said gently. “We put up with all kinds of things, hoping it will get better, that it won’t happen again, or that there will be something we can do.” He was chiding her, as if she were judging someone else too harshly.
“Do you think so? How do you know?” Then she blinked. That was a question she should not have asked. “I’m sorry, Oliver! That was…” She had no word for it.
He smiled. “Honest? I’m a criminal lawyer, Beata. I’ve defended a few people who were driven to kill, in self-defense. And I’ve prosecuted a few who richly deserved it. Although their stories also would make you weep. Most of us at one time or another, are guilty of ‘passing by on the other side,’ at the very least. We all have times when we are willing to see only what we can bear.”
“And you don’t despise them for tolerating it?” It was the last question, the last fear.
“That’s how fear works,” he answered. “Pain, humiliation, until you believe you deserve it, and it is inevitable. In the end the victim accepts that there is nowhere to which they could escape.”
They walked a few more paces in silence. Finally she had to speak.
“You must have seen some terrible things…you haven’t looked away. Pity hurts, too….”
“Very much,” he agreed. “But sometimes you win. Fighting helps, it really does.”
“And if you lose?”
“I don’t lose very often.”
“I know that. But when you do?” she insisted, turning to face him.
“Then it hurts terribly,” he said frankly, and she saw the fear in his eyes. “But please heaven, I learn from it.”
She wanted to tell him that Ingram York had never learned, but it would break the moment, and it was intensely important that she did not. Tentatively she slipped her arm through his.
He put his other hand over hers for a moment, then let it go again. It would not be wise to have others observe such a moment. But she glanced at him, and saw that he was smiling. Slowly they began to walk again.
MONK WALKED SLOWLY UP the hill toward his home. The night was intensely dark. The lights along the shore seemed hemmed in by wreaths of mist, and clouds blocked the moon.
But he knew the way so well that even the gaps in the cobbles seemed familiar.
So Piers Astley was dead, and had been for nearly twenty years. He had been murdered in the time Monk could no longer remember. In fact, it was even possible that Monk himself had been in San Francisco when it had occurred.
Astley had apparently been Aaron Clive’s chief lieutenant, if a military term were appropriate. Perhaps it was, in such a hectic age when power was extreme. Gold made fortunes in a week, a day, and violence was easy, and there was no law except whatever you provided in agreement with others, and such decency as was not tainted with gold.
What sort of man had Aaron Clive been then? Had his ease and apparent sophistication come with power? Or had he always possessed it? What Monk had heard suggested the latter. If anything, the extraordinary preeminence he had had in the gold rush seemed to have tarnished a little of it, overlaid the original modesty with a certain sense of entitlement. But was any man free from hubris, if circumstances gilded everything he touched? The great landed aristocracy of England certainly was not. Some saw their position as a call to duty. For others it was a birthright, to be used as they chose.
Monk turned the last corner and continued to climb. In a few minutes he would see the lighted windows of his home. Hester would be waiting for him. He would ask about her day at the clinic, and for a while he would put off his own decisions about McNab, the question of a plot to rob Clive, and the fact that Astley could have had no part in it.
Tired as he was, he increased his stride.
Hester opened the door before he had time to take out his own key. He stepped inside, finding himself smiling with the pleasure of seeing her. He pushed the door closed behind him and then took her in his arms, holding her so closely she gasped and pushed him away a couple of inches so she could breathe.
Then after tightening her arms about him just as fiercely, she stepped back and looked at him with her clear, unwavering gaze. She had been skirting around the issue for some time. Now she was characteristically blunt.
