A Breach of Promise

by Anne Perry

  “What is it?” Gabriel asked, watching him.

  How honest should he be? There was a difference between the candor of respect and the tactlessness of acting without thought or compassion.

  “Suicide,” Monk replied. “They brought in a verdict of suicide, although they couldn’t decide what actually turned the balance between misery and despair or, for that matter, how or precisely when she took the poison.”

  Perdita gave a little sigh.

  “I’m sorry,” Gabriel said quietly. “She must have found it beyond bearing.” He looked for a moment as if he was going to say something more, then changed his mind.

  “Do you understand it?” Monk asked, then could have bitten his tongue. It was exactly what he had determined not to do. He was aware of Hester just behind him near the door.

  Gabriel smiled, lighting the good side of his face and twisting the scarred flesh of the other.

  “No. But if there is anything I’ve learned in all this, it is that we don’t understand what makes the breaking point, or what we find we can endure beyond anything we thought we could—for ourselves or for anyone else.” He was speaking quietly, the look in his eyes far away. “The damnedest people endure things that seem impossible, and sometimes do it without even complaining. I’ve seen men I used to think were ordinary, not very special in any way, a bit crude.” He smiled ruefully. “A bit stupid even, put up with terrifying injury without crying out. Or walk for miles with their feet ripped raw and squelching blood, and make silly jokes about it.” Hester and Perdita had been close together, motionless up to this point. Now Perdita came forward and sat by the bed near Gabriel, sliding her hand over his.

  Gabriel tightened his fingers to grasp hers, then went on. “I’ve seen men I thought were callous and insensitive stay by a dying man they scarcely knew, and sit up all night telling him stories about anything and everything so he wasn’t alone, and then when they were so tired they could hardly see straight, get up and dig a hole deep enough to bury him. I’ve heard illiterate men say prayers that would wrench your heart, and the next minute use language you wouldn’t let your father hear, let alone your mother.” He laughed, but it was a jerky sound, charged with emotion. “And I’ve seen men I thought had all the courage in the world lie down and die of a wound that wouldn’t have slowed up someone else. I don’t know why Melville killed herself. You don’t either?”

  “No. No, I don’t. It …” Monk sighed and sat down on the chair at the foot of the bed. “It leaves a feeling of being unfinished, as if there were something else I should know, but I can’t think what it is.”

  “Don’t torture yourself,” Gabriel said gently. “You may never know. There are lots of things about other people we’ll never understand. It doesn’t matter. You don’t have any particular right to know—or need, except for your own curiosity.”

  Perdita turned to Monk.

  “Thank you for coming,” Perdita said with a tiny smile. “I would far rather you told us than we heard it from Athol.” She flinched minutely as she spoke his name, more of remembered pain than dislike. She had known him too long not to understand at least part of the prejudices which drove him. “What will happen to Mr. Wolff?” she asked very quietly. “They can’t hurt him, can they?”

  Gabriel was watching Monk as well, a shadow of concern in his eyes. Odd how beautiful and clear they were above his disfigured face. Monk found himself no longer surprised or horrified by it. Of course, he had never known him before, and that must make a shattering difference. If he had loved a beautiful woman, how would he feel if she were scarred like that? Would he still be in love with her, or only care as a friend?

  Hester was not beautiful … except for her eyes, and her mouth when she was thinking, and when she smiled, and her hands. She had the loveliest hands he had ever seen, not soft and white as fashion admired, but slender, delicate and very strong, perfectly balanced.

  Perdita was waiting.

  “No …” he said abruptly. “No, it’s not a crime to allow someone to masquerade as a man while being a woman. Unless it is for the purpose of fraud, of course.”

  “But this wasn’t!” Perdita said quickly. “She was selling her designs to Mr. Lambert, and it shouldn’t matter whether she was a man or a woman for that!”

  “Mr. Lambert won’t take the matter any further,” Monk said with a smile. “Unless he can blame someone for her death—then he will.”

  Gabriel was surprised. “Can he?”

  Monk shrugged. “I doubt it. I thought for a little while it might somehow be murder, but that doesn’t make sense, either for motive or opportunity.”

  “I suppose we should be pleased … I think.” Hester came farther into the room at last. She met Monk’s eyes, searching, behind her words, to see what he felt. “I don’t know if I am. I hate to think of her … so …” She did not finish the sentence.

  Gabriel shot a glance at her over Perdita’s head, but Perdita turned also.

  “I know what you mean,” she agreed. “But we cannot help. If you wish to see Mr. Monk alone for a little while, I shall stay and keep Gabriel company.” She smiled self-consciously. “For once we were not talking about India. I have plans to alter the garden a little and I was telling him about it. I shall draw it out, once he agrees. Perhaps I shall even paint it.”

  Monk bade them good-bye, and Hester took him to the withdrawing room, where the parlormaid served them with tea and hot buttered crumpets. Monk was surprised how much he enjoyed them. He had been too angry and disturbed to think of luncheon.

  “So there’s really nothing more you can do for Keelin Melville, is there?” Hester asked, biting into her crumpet and trying very carefully not to drop butter down herself.

  “No, it seems to be finished,” he agreed. “Gabriel is correct: there are some things we’ll never know, and we don’t have any right to.” He took a second crumpet.

  “What are you going to tell Mr. Lambert?”

  He looked at her across the tea tray. What did she expect of him? There was nothing to follow, nothing else to pursue.

  She was waiting, as though his answer mattered.

  “Nothing!” he said a little sharply.

  “What other cases have you?” She looked interested, holding the crumpet up regardless of the butter dripping onto the plate.

  “Nothing of any interest,” he said ruefully. “Trivial things which won’t mean anything, people looking for fault when there is only error or inarticulateness.” The prospect was tedious but unavoidable. It was part of the daily routine between the larger cases, and it paid his way so well that he relied very little on Callandra Daviot’s kindness now. Their original agreement—that he would include her in all the cases of complexity or unusual interest as reciprocation for her assistance in times of hardship—had worked extremely well, to both their advantage.

  “Oh, good.” Hester smiled and put the rest of the crumpet into her mouth before it lost all its butter. “Then you will have time to look a little further for Martha’s nieces.”

  He should have known she was leading to that. He should have foreseen it and avoided it. How naive of him.

  The smile was still on her face, but less certain, and her eyes were very direct.

  “Please?” She did not use his name or stretch out her hand to touch him. It would have been easier to refuse if she had. She presumed intolerably upon friendship by not presuming on it at all.

  “There is hardly any chance of success,” he argued. “Do you realize what you are asking?”

  “I think I do.” Now she looked apologetic without actually saying so. “It will be very difficult indeed. No one will blame you if you can’t find them. Please just look….”

  “They’re probably dead!”

  “If she knew that, then she could mourn them and stop worrying that they are alive somewhere, suffering and alone, and she was doing nothing to help.”

  “Hester!” he said exasperatedly.

  “What?” She regarde
d him as if she had no idea what he was going to say.

  There was no point in arguing with her. She was not going to give up. He might as well agree now as in half an hour, or tomorrow, or the day after.

  “I’ll try,” he said warningly. “It won’t do any good.”

  “Thank you….” Her eyes were soft and bright, and she looked at him with a kind of trust he would never have believed could be so fiercely, uniquely precious.

  Monk started out early the next morning without any hope of success. He might trace them from Putney if he was diligent—and lucky. He might even follow the first few years of their unfortunate lives. Would it really help Martha Jackson to know how they were treated, and when and where they died, from what cause? Perhaps it would. Perhaps Hester was right in that it would at least allow her to know there was nothing she could do, so she could begin to leave the worst of the distress behind her.

  He packed a small, soft-sided bag with a change of clothes and paid a week’s rent in advance, then left Fitzroy Street to travel south and west. He no longer wore his usual smartly cut jacket and elegant trousers. In the places he knew he would be going they would mark him out as a stranger, a target for cut-purses and possibly even garroters. He loathed the feeling of being unshaven, but it helped him to blend less noticeably into the background of those who lived in the borders of the underworld. He wanted to seem a man who should not be crossed, a dangerous man who was too familiar with the territory to be lied to. He also armed himself with a small, sharp knife and as much money as he could spare for food and accommodation, and for such bribes as should prove necessary.

  The beginning would be the hardest. It was going to be very difficult indeed to find anyone who knew what had happened to two ugly, slow-witted little girls fifteen years ago. He turned the problem over and over in his mind as he rode in the omnibus along the riverbank and then across the Putney Bridge. The only person who would know would be the landlord who had passed them on, sold them, or whatever arrangement it had been. It would be a waste of his time to bargain with anyone else. Please heaven he was still alive!

  It took him all morning and into the early afternoon to track him. He had bought almost a dozen pints of beer or cider for the information.

  Mr. Reilly turned out to be a huge man with white hair like a mop head, unkempt and falling over his ears. It also fell over his brow and eyes, but that did not matter because apparently he was completely blind. He welcomed Monk cheerfully. He was sitting in a tattered chair beside the hearth, a mug of ale at his hand where he could reach it without having to fumble. A small black-and-white dog of some terrier breed lay beside his feet and watched Monk carefully.

  “What yer be wantin’ ter know, then?” Reilly asked cautiously. He was lonely these days, and companionship was precious.

  Monk traded on it. “A few tales about the Coopers Arms, when it was yours,” he replied, settling into the rickety chair opposite, afraid to let his full weight fall on the back of it in case it collapsed. “What was it like?”

  Reilly did not need asking a second time. He launched into one tale after another, and it was the best part of three hours before Monk could steer him towards the two deformed kitchen maids he had sold to a man from Rotherhithe who kept a big public house down by the river and could use some rough help where it wouldn’t be seen and no one would mind the twisted lips and the crooked eyes.

  “Ugly little beggars, they were,” he said, staring sightlessly at Monk. “An’ slow with it. Could tell ’em ‘alf a dozen times ter do summink, and they still wouldn’t. Jus’ ignore yer.”

  “Deaf,” Monk said before he thought to stop himself. He was not supposed to know them, or care.

  “What?” Reilly frowned at him, taking another long draft of his ale.

  “Perhaps they were deaf?” Monk suggested, trying to keep the anger he felt out of his voice, not very successfully.

  “Yeah, p’raps.” Reilly did not care. He set the mug down with a clunk. “Anyway, I couldn’t keep ’em. Upset me customers, and not much bloody use.”

  “So you sold them to a man from Rotherhithe. That was clever of you.” Monk tried to force some appreciation into his tone. Reilly could not see the contempt on his face. “Wonder what he thought when he got them home?”

  “Never ’eard,” Reilly said, chuckling. “ ’E din’t come back, that’s all I know.”

  “You never went after him to find out?” Monk barely made it a question.

  “Me? Ter Rother’ithe? Not on yer life! Common place. Full o’ all sorts. Dangerous too. Nah! I likes Putney. Nice an’ respectable.” Reilly reached again for his ale mug, which Monk had refilled several times. “What else’d yer like ter ’ear abaht?”

  Monk listened another ten minutes, then excused himself after one more attempt to learn the name of the public house in Rotherhithe.

  “Elephant an’ summink … but you won’t like it,” Reilly warned.

  It was late afternoon and the mournful sound of ships’ foghorns drifted up the Thames on the incoming tide as Monk got off the omnibus in Rotherhithe Street, right on the river’s edge. He could not afford to ride in hansom cabs on a job like this. Martha Jackson’s pocket would not stretch to meet his legitimate expenses, never mind his comfort.

  It was a gray, late-spring day with the water slurping against the stones a few yards away and the smells of salt and fish and tar sharp in the air. He was many miles nearer the estuary here than in Putney. The Pool of London lay in front of him, Wapping on the farther side. To his left he could just make out the vast bulk of the Tower of London in the mist, gray and white. Beyond it lay Whitechapel, and ahead of him Mile End.

  The pool itself stretched out silver in the light between the ships coming and going laden with cargoes from all over the earth. Every kind of thing that could be loaded on board a vessel came in and out of this port. It was the center of the seagoing world. A clipper from the China Seas, probably in the tea trade, rocked gently on the swell, its masts drawing circles against the sky. A few gulls rode the wind, crying harshly. Barges worked their way upstream, tied together in long queues like the carriages of a train, their decks laden with bales and boxes tied down and covered with canvas.

  Downriver on the farther side lay the Surrey Docks, Lime-house and then the Isle of Dogs. He stirred with memories of that, and of the fever hospital where Hester had worked with Callandra during the typhoid outbreak. He would never forget the smell of that, the mixture of effluent, sweat, vinegar and lime. He had been sick with fear for her, that she would catch it herself and be too exhausted to fight it.

  Even standing there with the cool wind in his face off the water, he broke out in a sweat at the memory.

  He turned away, back to the matter in hand. He must find a public house called the Elephant and something.

  He stopped a laborer pushing a barrow along the cobbles.

  “Elephant an’ summink?” The man looked puzzled. “Never ’eard of it. ’Round ’ere, is it?”

  “Rotherhithe,” Monk answered, a sinking feeling gripping him that the man did not know. Rotherhithe was not so large. A man such as this would surely know all the public houses along the water’s edge, by repute if not personally.

  They were passed by another group of longshoremen.

  “You sure?” The man squinted at Monk skeptically, looking him up and down. “W’ere yer from? Not ‘round ’ere, are yer!”

  “No. Other side of the river.”

  “Oh.” He nodded as if that explained everything. “Well, all I knows abaht ’ere is the Red Bull in Paradise Street an’ the Crown an’ Anchor in Elephant Lane—that’s just up from the Elephant Stair … which you can see up there beyond Princes’ Stair. Them two are real close.”

  “Elephant Stair?” Monk repeated with a surge of hope. “Thank you very much. I’m obliged to you. I’ll try the Crown and Anchor.” And he walked briskly along the river’s edge to the Elephant Stair, where the shallow stone steps led down into the creepin
g tide, salt-sharp and slapping against the walls, crunching and pulling on the shingle. He turned right and went up Elephant Lane.

  He went into the crowded, noisy, steamy barroom and ordered and ate a good meal of pie with excellent pastry. He declined to imagine what the filling might be, judging that he preferred not to know. He followed it with a treacle suet pudding and a glass of stout, then began his enquiries.

  He was glad he had eaten first; he needed the strength of a full stomach and a rested body to hear what was told him. It seemed the landlord had paid more attention to the low price than to the goods he was purchasing. When he had got the girls back to Rotherhithe he had put them to work in the sculleries washing glasses and dishes and scrubbing the floors. They had worked from before dawn until the public house closed at night. They had eaten what they could scavenge, and slept on the kitchen floor in a pile of sacking by the hearth, curled up together like cats or dogs.

  They were willing enough to work, but they were slow, hampered by partial deafness and by being undersized and frequently ill. After a few months he had come to the conclusion that they were a bad bargain and cost him more than they were worth. He had been offered the chance to sell them to a gin mill in St. Giles, and seized the opportunity. It was a few shillings’ return on his investment.

  Where was the gin mill?

  The publican had no idea.

  Would a little money help him to recall?

  It might. How much money?

  A guinea?

  Not enough.

  The anger exploded inside Monk. He wanted to hurt the man, to wipe the greedy smile from his face and make him feel for a few minutes the misery and fear those children must have known.

  “There are two possible ways of encouraging people to tell you what you need to know,” he said very quietly. “By offering a reward …” He let the suggestion hang in the air.

  The man looked at Monk’s face, at his eyes. He was slow to see the rage there. He felt no more than a short shiver of warning. He was still working out how much money he could squeeze.

  “Or by threat of something very nasty happening to them,” Monk finished. His voice was still polite, still soft, but there was an edge of viciousness in it a sensitive ear would have caught.