by Anne Perry
There had been no personal letters except from his sister, Beth, and he had obviously been remiss in writing back to her. Now he searched through them again, but there was nothing in the same hand as Drusilla’s letter. Admittedly there was nothing else personal.
He put them all back. It was a sparse record for a lifetime. There was no sense of identity in it, no feeling for the nature and personality of a man. There must be so much that he did not know, and probably never would. There must have been loves and hates, generosities, injuries, hopes, humiliations and triumphs. They were all wiped out as if they had never happened.
Except that for everyone else they were still there, sharp and real, still carrying all their emotion and pain.
How could he have known a woman like Drusilla, with her vitality, beauty, wit and charm, and simply have forgotten her so totally that even on seeing her again, being so happy with her, he still had no hint of memory? Nothing was familiar. Rack his brain as he might, there was no chord, no flash of even momentary recollection.
He stared out of the window at the street. It was still gray, but the carriage lamps were no longer lit.
It would be a delusion to think she would not proceed. Of course she could prove nothing. Nothing had happened. But that was immaterial. She could make the charge, and it would be sufficient to ruin him. His livelihood depended on his reputation, on trust.
He had no other skills. Perhaps she knew that?
What had he done to her? What manner of man was he—had he been?
Hester was still taking her turn nursing Enid Ravensbrook, who was now beginning the long, slow journey to recovery but still needed constant attention, or she could slip into relapse.
The same morning that Monk received his letter from Drusilla, Hester returned from the makeshift hospital to Ravensbrook House, tired and thoroughly miserable. She ached from lack of sleep, her eyes stung as if she had grit or dust in them, and she was heartsick of the sights and sounds and smells of distress. So many people had died. The bare few who had recovered gave it all meaning, but it was small in the sight of so much loss. And no matter how hard Kristian tried, what arguments he put up in the local government council, nothing was done. They were frightened of the disease, frightened of the cost of new sewers, frightened of innovation or change, of new inventions which might not work, of old ones which had already failed, and of blame no matter what they did. It was an exhausting struggle, and almost certainly doomed to failure. But neither he nor Callandra could give up.
Hester had watched them day after day marshaling new arguments and returning to battle. Each evening they had retired defeated. The only good to come of it was the tenderness they shared with each other, and even that was fraught with pain. After the fever they would part again, to see each other only occasionally, formally, perhaps in meetings of the board of governors of the hospital where Kristian worked and Callandra gave her help voluntarily. These meetings would be in front of all the other governors, or if they were fortunate, perhaps a chance encounter in a corridor with the constant expectation of interruption. They would speak of anything and everything but themselves. In all probability it would always be so.
Hester was welcomed in by the parlormaid and told that a supper was prepared if she wished it, after she had seen Lady Ravensbrook and Mrs. Stonefield.
She thanked the girl and went upstairs.
Enid was propped up in bed, leaning against a pile of pillows. She looked gaunt, as if she had not eaten or slept in days. There were bruised hollows around her eyes and her skin looked discolored and paper-fragile. Her hair hung in lank strings around her shoulders and she was so thin the bones seemed in danger of hurting the flesh stretched across them. But she smiled as soon as she saw Hester.
“How are they?” she asked, her voice still weak, only lifted by the eagerness inside her. “Is it easing at all? How about Callandra? Is she all right? And Mary? And Kristian?”
Hester felt some of the tension slip away from her. The room was warm and comfortable. There was a fire in the hearth. It was a different world from the coldness and the dirt of the hospital, the guttering candles and the smell of too many people unwashed, close together in their pain.
Hester sat on the edge of the bed.
“Callandra and Mary are still well, though very tired,” she replied. “And Kristian is still fighting the council, but I don’t think he has won a yard of ground. And yes, I think the fever is lessening a little. Certainly there are fewer deaths. We sent two people home today, both well enough to leave.”
“Who are they? Did I know them?”
“Yes,” Hester said with a broad smile. “One is the little boy you were so fond of, the one you thought could never survive.…”
“He’s all right?” Enid said in amazement, her eyes lighting. “He’s recovered?”
“Yes. He went home today. I don’t know what gave him the strength, but he survived.”
Enid leaned back against her pillows, a great sweetness in her face, almost a radiance. “And the other?” she asked.
“A woman with four children,” Hester answered. “She went home to them today as well. But how are you? That’s what I came to know.”
It was a question only of friendship. She would make her own determination. The improvement in Enid was great. Her eyes were clearer, her temperature down to normal, but the fever had wasted her and she looked at the very end of her strength.
Enid smiled. “Very impatient to feel better,” she confessed. “I hate feeling so weak. I can barely lift my hands to feed myself, much less comb my hair. It’s absurd. I lie here uselessly. There is so much to do, and I am spending three quarters of my life asleep.”
“It is the best thing,” Hester assured her. “Don’t fight against it. It is nature’s way of healing you. You will be better the faster if you submit to it.”
Enid clenched her teeth. “I hate to surrender!”
“Military tactics.” Hester leaned forward conspiratorially. “Never fight when you know your enemy has the advantage. Pick a time, don’t let him do it for you. Retreat now, and return when the advantage is yours.”
“Ever thought of being a soldier?” Enid asked with a giggle which turned into a cough.
“Frequently,” Hester replied. “I think I could make a better fist of it than many who do it now. Certainly I could barely do worse.”
“Don’t let my husband hear you say that!” Enid warned happily.
Hester’s reply was cut off by Genevieve’s appearance. She looked less harassed than when Hester had seen her last, although she must have been tired, and Hester knew from Monk’s remark that there had been no good news.
She greeted her, and after an exchange of necessary information regarding Enid, they both left to partake of the meal which had been set for them in the housekeeper’s sitting room.
“The fever is definitely abating in Limehouse,” Hester said conversationally. “I only wish we could do something to prevent it coming back again.”
“What could anyone do?” Genevieve asked with a frown. “The way people live, it is bound to arise every so often.”
“Change the way they live,” Hester replied.
Genevieve smiled, bitterness and a kind of revulsion in it, not untouched by both anger and pity.
“You’d have more luck trying to stop the tide from turning.” She speared a piece of meat in her steak and kidney pudding and put it in her mouth, then spoke again the moment after she had swallowed it. “You can’t change people. Oh, one or two, maybe, but never thousands. They’ve lived like that for generations, never enough to eat, the bread’s full of alum, the milk’s half water.” She gave a sharp laugh. “Even the tea is better for poisoning the rats than for humans drinking. Only working men get things like pigs’ trotters or kippers, the rest of the family does without. Nobody has fruit or vegetables. Everybody in the street, in two streets, has to queue with pails for water from the wells, and half of them are contaminated by sewers, cesspits
or middens. Even if they didn’t use the one pail for everything!” Her voice was angry, bitter and racked with emotion. “They’re born with disease, and they die with it. A few sewage pipes aren’t going to change that!”
“Yes they can,” Hester said slowly, her mind dizzy with the force of Genevieve’s passion, bewildered by its suddenness and ringing sincerity. “It’s the drains and the middens where the problem lies.”
Genevieve’s lip curled. “It’s the same thing!”
“No it isn’t!” Hester argued, leaning forward across the table. “If there were proper water-carrying sewers built, then—”
“Water?” Genevieve looked amazed and horrified. “Then it would go everywhere!”
“No it wouldn’t—”
“Yes it would! I’ve seen that, when the tide turns, or there’s a heavy rain, it all backs up, the middens overflow, the gutters run sewage! Even when it goes down again what it leaves behind sits in piles on the pavements! You can shovel it off!”
“Where?” Hester said slowly, an incredible idea taking form in her mind, something so ludicrous it could even be true, wild and absurd as it seemed.
“What?” Genevieve’s face colored painfully. She fumbled for words and found none. “Well—perhaps I haven’t seen. I should have said I had heard.…” She bent as if to resume eating her food, but only toyed with it, pushing it around with her fork.
“Caleb lives in Limehouse, doesn’t he?” Hester remembered.
“I believe so.” Genevieve’s body tensed and her hands stopped moving her fork. “Why? I certainly haven’t heard it from him. I only met him once or twice. I barely even knew him!” The fear and the horror were sharp in her face, and a loathing too great for words.
Hester felt ashamed for having brought up the name of the man who had taken so much from her. Instinctively she put out her hand and touched Genevieve’s where it lay on the table.
“I’m sorry. I wish I had not spoken of him. There must be pleasant things for us to discuss. I met Mr. Niven in the hall yesterday as I was leaving. He seems a very gentle man, and a good friend to you.”
Genevieve flushed. “Yes, he is,” she admitted. “He was very fond of Angus, in spite of the … the business misfortunes which befell him because of Angus’s greater skill. He really is quite able, you know. He has learned from his incautious judgments.”
“I’m glad,” Hester said sincerely. She had liked Niven’s face, and she certainly liked Genevieve. “Perhaps he will yet find a position where he can mend his situation.” Genevieve looked down. There was an awkwardness in her, but her short chin was set in determination, and there was tenderness and grief in her wide mouth.
“I … I am considering offering him the management of my business … that is … that is, of course, if I am permitted to.” She gazed at Hester. “You must think me very cold. No one has yet proved what happened to my husband, although I know in my heart. And here I am discussing who I will put in his place.” She leaned forward, pushing her unfinished plate out of the way. “I cannot help Angus anymore. I tried everything I knew to persuade him not to go to Caleb, but he wouldn’t listen to me. Now I have to think of my children and what will happen to them. The world won’t wait while I grieve.” Her eyes were steady, and, gazing back at her, Hester realized some of the strength in her, the power of the resolve which had made her what she was and which now drove her on to rein in her own pain, guard and control it, for the sake of her children.
Perhaps some of her admiration was plain in her expression, because the defensiveness eased out of Genevieve and she smiled ruefully, a little at herself.
Genevieve seemed such a formal name for such a woman, almost an earthy woman, one with such a vivid reality. In the lamplight Hester could see the shadow her lashes cast on her cheek and the very faint down on the skin. Had Angus called her Genny?
Genny … Ginny?
Was that where it all came from, the explanation for her acutely observed understanding of the people of Limehouse and their like, and the terror of poverty? Was it a dreadful familiarity which set her determination, that at almost any cost she would not allow her children ever to be cold, hungry, frightened and ashamed as she had been? The squalor and despair of the Limehouse slums was huge in her memory, and no present comfort would ever expunge it. Perhaps she was the girl Mary had spoken of, who had escaped Limehouse to marriage?
“Yes,” Hester said quietly. “Yes, I see. I am sure Monk will do everything he can to prove Angus’s death. And he is extremely clever. If he cannot do it one way, he will find another. Don’t despair.”
Genevieve looked at her, hope in her eyes, and curiosity. “Do you know him well?”
Hester hesitated. What was the answer to that? She was not sure she even knew it herself, much less that she was prepared to share it. What did she know of him? The areas she did not know were vast, cavernous; perhaps they were even areas he did not know himself?
“Only professionally,” she replied with a tight smile, leaning back in her chair, away from Genevieve and the quick perception in her face. Her mind was filled suddenly with the memory of those few moments in the closed room in Edinburgh, of the feel of his arms around her and that one passionate, sublime kiss. “I have seen him work in other cases,” she hurried on, knowing her face was hot. Could Genevieve see how she was lying? She thought so. “Do cling onto hope.” She was talking too much, trying to turn the subject. “At least it seems he has learned the truth. He will find a way to prove it, sufficient for the authorities to—” She stopped.
Genevieve was smiling. She said nothing, but her silence was eloquent and full of pleasure.
Hester felt trapped, not by Genevieve but by herself.
“You came from Limehouse, didn’t you?” she said quietly, as a matter of confidence, not accusation. Half of her knew it was an attack to defend herself.
Genevieve flushed, but her eyes did not evade Hester’s, nor was there anger in them.
“Yes. It seems like another life now, it was so different, and so many years ago.” She moved a little and the lamplight changed on the planes of her face, throwing the strength into relief. “But I won’t let anything drive me back. My children will not grow up there! And I won’t have Lord Ravensbrook feed them and clothe them, and dictate what manner of people they shall be. I won’t let him hug them, to fill Angus’s place.”
“Would he do that?” Hester said slowly, picturing Ravensbrook’s dark, patrician face in her mind with its arrogance and charm.
“I don’t know,” Genevieve confessed. “But I’m afraid of it. I feel terribly alone without Angus. You see, he understood me. He knew where I came from, and he didn’t mind my occasional mistakes.…”
A whole vision of fear and humiliation opened up in front of Hester. With a breathtaking vividness she perceived what it would be like for Genevieve at Ravensbrook House night and day, watched at every meal, observed and quite soon criticized. Not only would Ravensbrook himself notice all the tiny errors in even the most carefully produced etiquette or grammar, but perhaps even worse, so would the staff, the careful butler, the supercilious housekeeper, the giggling maids. Only possibly Enid would not care.
“Of course,” she said with intense feeling. “You must keep your own home. Mr.—”
She was interrupted by a brisk knock at the door and the housekeeper walking in, her face grim, the keys at her belt jangling.
“There is a person to see you, Miss Latterly,” she announced. “You had better use the butler’s pantry. Mr. Dolman says as he doesn’t mind. Begging your pardon, Mrs. Stonefield.”
“What kind of a person?” Hester asked.
The housekeeper’s face did not change in the slightest, not a flicker of her expression moved.
“A male person, Miss Latterly. More than that you will have to find out for yourself. Please be advised we do not allow the female staff to have followers, and that also applies to you while you are resident here, whatever your purpose.”
But Genevieve felt no such restrictions.
“Miss Latterly is not a servant, Mrs. Gibbons,” she said smartly. “She is a professional person who has given her time freely out of regard for Lady Ravensbrook, who might well have died if it had not been for her treatment!”
“If you can call nursing a profession,” Mrs. Gibbons retorted with a sniff. “And it is the good Lord who heals the sick, not any of us, Mrs. Stonefield. As a Christian woman, I’m sure you know that.”
Thoughts flashed across Hester’s mind about the virtues of Christian women, beginning with charity, but this was not the time to enter into an argument she could not win.
“Thank you for bringing me the message, Mrs. Gibbons,” she said, baring her teeth in a gesture that bore little resemblance to a smile. “How kind of you.” And with a nod to Genevieve, she rose to her feet and left the room.
The butler’s pantry was two doors along the passage, and she went in without knocking.
She was startled to see Monk standing there looking almost haggard. His face was pale and there were lines of strain unlike anything she had seen in him since the Grey case.
“What is it?” she asked, closing the door behind her, her stomach sinking with dread. “It can’t be Stonefield, can it? It … it’s not Callandra.” Pain almost dizzied her. “Has something happened to Callandra?”
“No!” His voice was strident. He controlled it with an effort. “No,” he repeated more calmly. His face was full of emotion and he was obviously finding it extremely difficult to frame the words to tell her.
She forced back her impatience. She had seen both shock and fear before and she knew the signs. To have affected Monk this way it must be something very dreadful indeed.
“Sit down and tell me,” she said gently. “What has happened?”
Temper flared in his eyes, then died away, replaced by the fear again. The very fact that he did not retaliate chilled her even more. She sat down on the drab, overstuffed chair and folded her hands in her lap, under her apron, where he could not see that they were clenched together.
