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She did not bother to change her clothes to a dress suitable for afternoon visiting. Appearance was irrelevant. A hat was sufficient, and of course a coat. The weather was bitterly cold.
When the carriage was brought around to the front door she requested the footman to accompany her, and gave the coachman instructions to make the best speed he could, without jeopardizing the horses.
All the way through the wet, windy streets she weighed what she was going to say to Miriam. Certainly she would ask for privacy. Miriam might be kind enough to instruct that all other callers be invited to leave cards rather than intrude.
She would like to prepare her words, but experience had taught her that hardly any conversation went the way one had anticipated. Well-thought-out responses became irrelevant, even absurd. She had once been very close to Miriam, and in many ways the qualities she had cared for were still there: the quick humor, the love of beauty, the passion for life, the ability to feel others’ wounds as well as her own. But people can change. Old virtues could not always be relied on.
Despite the weather it was a pleasant journey and the classic Georgian façades of houses were graceful even under gray skies. The bare trees in the squares had their own beauty. The traffic was light: a closed-in carriage with a coat of arms on the door and a liveried coachman driving. An older couple walked arm in arm along the pavement, heads bent toward each other in conversation.
Beata arrived at the Clives’ house in Mayfair and was received by the footman with courtesy and well-concealed surprise. There was a fire in the morning room where she was greeted by Miriam. She looked as beautiful as ever in a deep forest-green gown, the warmth of her own coloring making it seem richer than it was.
“Beata! Are you all right? You look very pale,” she said with concern. “Has something happened?”
“Yes, it has.” Beata seized the opening without hesitation. “How sensitive of you to notice. May I ask you the favor that should anyone else call, they might be asked merely to leave a card? I need most urgently to beg your assistance.”
“Of course,” Miriam said immediately. “Would you like tea?”
“Thank you, that would be excellent.” She was not in the least thirsty, but she was cold. More important, tea gave the visit a nature of hospitality that would be less easy to break than mere conversation.
Miriam rang the bell. When the footman arrived she told him they were not to be interrupted, except by a tray of tea, which was to be brought, and then the parlor maid should withdraw.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, then left and closed the door behind him.
Beata began immediately. “Commander Monk has been arrested and charged with the murder of the customs man Pettifer,” she said. “Of course it is ridiculous. He was trying to save him and the man panicked and more or less drowned himself. But the charge springs from an old enmity, and will be desperately difficult to disprove.”
Miriam was startled. “Enmity with Pettifer? Isn’t that beneath Monk?”
“Of course it is. He was never even acquainted with Pettifer.” Beata tried to control her emotion and speak only with reason. “The enmity is with McNab.”
Miriam did not hide her surprise. “Really?”
Beata hesitated only a moment. “You know him. He called upon you when I was here. Do you honestly find it so difficult to believe?”
“I know him only as a professional acquaintance of Aaron’s, because of his position in the Customs service. Import and export requires Customs clearance all the time.” Miriam’s face was almost expressionless. Only the tiniest wavering in her glance betrayed uncertainty or perhaps deceit.
Beata retreated and approached from a different angle. “The enmity is very old. Many years ago, around the early fifties, McNab’s half brother committed a very violent and horrible crime. Monk caught him and he was tried and sentenced to death. McNab begged Monk to ask for clemency, and Monk refused. The young man was hanged. McNab has not forgiven Monk for that.”
Miriam was looking openly confused, but Beata thought she saw a shadow in her eyes of something else, something quite distinct that showed she understood very well.
This needed a great deal of care. If she mishandled the situation she might lose the chance for Miriam’s help. If she insisted at the wrong moment, or with the wrong words, she could make an enemy instead of a friend. Perhaps she should retreat again, show her own vulnerability, painful as that was.
How well did she really know Miriam? It had been twenty years since they had been young women together in gold rush California. Had they been friends by nature, or by circumstance? They had both lost husbands, and that alone had drawn them together. They had both found freedom impossible to women in the older, more rigidly civilized worlds. They had traveled to extraordinary places, of both beauty like the breathtaking Californian coastline, and desolation like the inland deserts where skulls of men and beasts littered the sand.
They had become inventive, creating the things they needed and could not buy. They had mixed with people they would never have spoken to on the east coast of America, let alone in England.
But how different had they been inside, in loneliness or hunger for a place where they belonged, where they did not need to imagine and create simply to survive?
Beata had returned to England, and married Ingram York, and regretted it bitterly. She had still to feel the deep happiness in the soul of knowing that she was truly loved. It was the most profound hunger there was.
Miriam had mourned her first husband, but she had been comforted and protected by the richest and most charismatic man on the entire west coast, and then courted by him. It seemed as if the hand of fate had given her everything she might have dreamed of…except children. But was that chance, or choice? Perhaps after losing Astley’s child with the shock of his death, she had not been able to have another? But she had love.
Beata would have had children, had she been able to, but not with Ingram. That thought was too horrible to entertain.
So had she anything in common with the woman in front of her, except memories of a unique time and place, twenty years ago? A friendship of sharing, born of necessity.
But they were going to hang Monk if no one managed to find a way out of this tightening noose. Whether she married Rathbone or not, whether she could find a way to be honest with him, and not drown him in her own ocean of pain and humiliation, was swept aside.
“However,” she said with sudden urgency, “Monk did not kill Pettifer on purpose. He had no motive, did not even know the man or that he worked for McNab. But there is only his word for it, or that of his own men, and a jury would weigh that with some skepticism.”
