by Anne Perry
“No,” she said quickly. “No one is ill. I came because I was concerned for you. I barely had the opportunity to speak with you earlier.”
“That is most thoughtful of you, but I assure you I am merely tired.” The ghost of a smile touched his lips, but there was no echo in his eyes. “It is an effort to accept people’s sympathies graciously and think of something to say in return which is not so bland as to be a kind of rebuff. I think we are all reminded of our own losses. A hundred other griefs come far too close to us at such times.”
“May I dismiss my hansom?” It was an oblique way of inviting herself in.
He hesitated.
She blushed to do it, but with her back to the light he could not have seen. “Thank you,” she accepted before he spoke, and turned around to go back and pay the driver.
He was left with no alternative but to invite her in. He led the way to a small morning room where he reached up and turned the gas a little higher. She saw that the room was pleasantly furnished. There were three armchairs, all odd, but of similar rusty shades, lending an illusion of warmth which in fact was not there. The old Turkish rug was full of reds and blues. The fire did not appear to have been used recently. There was a worn embroidered screen in front of it and no poker, coal tongs or shovel in the hearth.
Kristian looked ill at ease, but he invited her to sit down.
She accepted, beginning to realize just how crass she had been in forcing her way in. It was inexcusably intrusive. She had allowed her concern to rob her of all sensitivity. She did not know him nearly well enough to be placing herself there.
What could she possibly say to redeem the situation?
Honesty—it would either make her actions excusable or condemn her beyond recall. She plunged in. “William is working with Superintendent Runcorn to try to find out who is responsible for this. They loathe each other, but they both want to know the truth enough to bury their feelings for the time being.”
Kristian’s face was almost expressionless as he sat opposite her. Was it from exhaustion at the end of one of the worst days of his life, and was he too in debt to old friendships to throw her out, as most men would have done in the circumstances? Or was he really concealing a very different self he did not wish her to see, more particularly did not wish her to report back to the clever, perceptive, ruthless Monk, who never let go of a case, no matter who was destroyed by the truth?
An icy fear gripped her for Callandra, and she was ashamed of it. She knew Kristian better than that.
“Kristian, was Elissa very religious?”
“What?” He looked totally startled, then the dull color spread up his cheeks, but he offered no explanation.
“The funeral was very High Church.” She knew she was hurting him, although not how.
“That was my father-in-law’s wish,” he said. He was not looking directly at her but somewhere a trifle to her left.
She was aware of feeling cold. The room was too chilly for comfort. Surely he had been sitting somewhere else when she had rung the doorbell. Was he keeping her there in the hope that the cold would persuade her to leave? If so, he had forgotten most of what he had learned about her. Did he really not remember the long, exhausting nights of labor and despair they and Callandra had spent together in Limehouse?
“And you conceded to it?” she asked with a lift of surprise.
“He is deeply grieved!” he replied a trifle sharply. “If it comforts him it does no harm, Hester.” It was a reproof, and she felt its sting.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “It is very generous of you. It did not seem your way, and it is an enormous expense.”
Now it was his turn to blush painfully. It startled her to see it. She had no idea what she had said to provoke it. He was obviously acutely embarrassed. He looked down at his hands as he answered. “None of it is my way, but if it helps him to go through the ritual, how could I deny him that? They were unusually close. She admired him intensely.” He raised his eyes to meet hers at last. “He had great physical courage also, you know? When he was still little more than a boy he was a mountaineer. There was an accident, and at great risk to his own life, he rescued the three other members of his party. Climbing was very fashionable then, and the incident became well-known. One of the men he rescued wrote a book about it.” He half smiled. “I think in a way Elissa was trying to live up to him.”
In spite of herself, Hester found her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He shrugged and shook his head a little.
“Was that why you allowed him to host the funeral meal also?” she asked.
He looked away again. “In part. They are a Liverpool family, not London. He has only been here a year or so, but he has many friends here, people I don’t know, and he wished them to be invited. As you saw, a great number came.”
Without thinking, she gazed around the room. Even in the meager light of the one lamp, she could see it was shabby. The fabric on the arms of the chairs was worn where hands and elbows rested. There was a track of faded color across the carpet from the door to each of the chairs. This was a room as one might furnish for the servants to sit in during the brief times free from their duties.
She looked again at Kristian, and saw with a rush of horror that his eyes were hot with shame. Why had he brought her to this room? Surely any other room would be better? Was it nothing to do with desiring her to leave? Was it conceivable . . . She stared at him, and a flood of understanding opened up between them. “The rest of the house?” she said in almost a whisper.
He looked down at the floor. “This is the best,” he answered. “Apart from the hall and Elissa’s bedroom. The rest is empty.”
She was stunned, ashamed for herself and for him because she had exposed something immeasurably private. At the same time it was incomprehensible. Kristian worked harder than any other man she knew. Even Monk did not work consistently as long. A great deal of it was done without payment, she knew that from Callandra, who was very familiar with the hospital’s finances, but his ordinary hours were rewarded like any other doctor’s.
It flickered through her mind that he could even have given certain things away, but that would have been a noble thing to do. He would have looked her in the face and said it with pride, not down at the floor in silent misery.
“What happened?” She said the words hoarsely, conscious of a terrible intrusion. Had Elissa not been murdered, she would never have deepened such a pain by seeking explanation, but like probing for a bullet in torn flesh, it might be the only way towards healing.
“Elissa gambled,” he said simply. “It was only a little to begin with, but lately it became so she couldn’t help it.”
“Ggambled?” She felt as if she had been struck. Her mind staggered, trying to retain balance. “Gambled?” she repeated pointlessly.
“It became a compulsion.” His voice was flat, without expression. “At first it was just a little excitement, then, when she won, it took hold of her. Then it went on, even when she began to lose. You think the next time you will make it up again. Reason doesn’t have any part in it. In the end, all you think about is the next chance to test your luck, to feel the excitement in the mind, the blood beating as you wait for the card, or the dice, or whatever it is.”
She looked around the room, her throat tightening in misery for the emptiness of it. “But it can cost you everything,” she said, her voice choking in spite of herself. Anger boiled inside her at the futility of it. She turned to face him. “And you can’t ever win unless somebody else loses.”
This time his eyes did not waver. He was not evading the truth anymore, and there was a mark of defiance in him. “I know. If there were no real danger, no loss, it wouldn’t make the heart go faster and the stomach knot inside. If you are a real gambler, you must risk more than you can afford to lose. I don’t think it was even the winning that mattered anymore; it was the defying of fate and walking away.”
Bu
t she had not. She had lost. It had taken from her the warmth and beauty of her home, then even the necessities of it, and it had cost her husband grief, exhaustion and the comfort of a home he had labored to provide, and a shame that was almost insupportable. All social life had been swept away. He could not accept an invitation from anyone, because he could not return it. He was cut off, isolated, and surely terrified of ever-increasing debt he would not be able to meet. This would become public disgrace, perhaps eventually even the utter despair of debtor’s prison, as other bills of life could not be met and creditors closed in, angry and vengeful.
It was like a disease of the mind—a madness! Elissa was a woman he had once loved, perhaps still did, but there was a part of her he could not reach, and it was destroying both of them.
She did not want to think of it, still less to face it. But it was blazingly, luminously clear even to her, with all her friendship for Kristian and her love for Callandra, that he had a supreme motive for killing Elissa. It was so powerful, so totally understandable, that she did not deny to herself the possibility that in a moment of engulfing panic, as ruin faced him, he could have done it. She felt grieved and guilty and frightened, but above all she felt wrenchingly sorry.
“Did Pendreigh know?” she asked.
“No. She always managed to keep it from him. She only called on him when she was winning, and she managed to find excuses never to invite him here. I think that was easy enough. She used my work as excuse.” He shivered and pushed his hand over his brow, hard back, as if the pressure of it eased some pain inside. “She wouldn’t have to explain,” he went on, his voice husky. “She didn’t know much about it; I never really shared it with her. I brought her here from the passion and excitement of Vienna, and expected her to be happy in a domestic life amid people she did not know, and with no cause to fight, no admiration, no danger, no loyalties . . .”
“There are plenty of battles to fight here,” she said softly. “Not at the barricades, not with plain enemies, and not always with any glory, but they are real.”
He pressed his hands over his eyes. “Not for her. I did nothing to help her find them. I was too drawn into my own work. I expected her to change. You should never expect that . . . people don’t.”
She struggled for something to say, a way of denying it to offer some comfort. But there was an element of truth in it, and that was all he could see. All the ways in which Elissa could have found causes worth all her efforts, he would see only as excuses for his own failure to make her happy.
“Perhaps we all have something of that hunger in us,” she said at last. “But when we love someone we do learn to change its direction. I went to the Crimea to nurse, but I also went for the adventure. It’s wonderful to be so very alive, even if some of it is horror and rage, and grief. Not to have lived is the worst death of all.” She smiled briefly. “I was going to say that we have the right to make those dreams only for ourselves, not for others, but there’s hardly anything we do that doesn’t take others along with us, in some way. If I’d stayed at home my family’s lives would have been different, and their deaths.” It hurt to say that. She had never allowed herself even to think it before. Perhaps life would be different for Charles if she had been there to share the burden instead of leaving him alone with the loss of a brother, then a father. Only now, sitting quietly in this room with Kristian Beck, did she try to imagine how Charles had coped with all that grief, trying to think of anything to say or do to ease his mother’s sorrow.
Did he blame himself that he had failed and she had died, too? Did Imogen ever even think of that? Hester was furious with her, and then with herself. She had not been there either. Love, loyalty, the bonds of family should mean more than simply writing good letters now and again.
She lifted her hand and touched Kristian’s arm. “I’m so sorry. I can’t say that I know how you feel. Of course I don’t, no one does who has not been where you are. But I know what pain is, and the knowledge afterwards that you might have added to it, and I am truly sorry.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly. He bit his full lower lip, bringing blood to it. “I’m not sure I can say I am glad you came, but I am certainly glad you care.” His eyes were soft, a profound honesty in them, and a depth of emotion she preferred not to name.
It was pointless offering to do anything for him. All anyone could do was find the truth and pray it did not hurt him any more profoundly. No one could lift the darkness yet, or share it.
She stood up and excused herself, and he collected his hat and coat and walked through the fog with her along Haverstock Hill towards the City until he found a hansom for her, but they did not speak again.
All the way home through the fog-choked streets her mind whirled around the new knowledge she had stumbled on so insensitively. She blamed herself for the pain she had caused, and yet it was woven into every part of the life of the dead woman. Elissa Beck was nothing like the person any of them had imagined. Monk had said she was beautiful, not just attractive but hauntingly, unforgettably beautiful. Kristian himself had said she was brave. Now it seemed she was also driven by a compulsion which devoured not only her own happiness but Kristian’s as well. He was taken to the brink of ruin, and had she lived, surely it would soon have been beyond it into an abyss.
How would Callandra feel when she knew—and there would be no way of protecting her from it—that Kristian had had an urgent, compelling motive to kill his wife?
When she arrived home Monk was in the sitting room, pacing the floor.
“Where have you been?” he demanded. “It’s after ten o’clock! Hester . . .” He stopped abruptly, staring at her face. “What’s happened? What is it? You look awful!”
“Thank you!” she said, deciding in that instant that she could not tell him what she had learned. It was too difficult, too vulnerable. “It has not been a pleasant day.”
“Of course it hasn’t been pleasant,” he responded. “But you looked a lot better at the funeral. What’s happened since then? You’re as white as paper!”
“I’m tired.” She started to walk past him.
He put out his hand and grasped her arm, not hard, but firmly enough to stop her and swing her slightly around. “Hester! Where have you been?” His voice was not rough, but there was no yielding in it, no acceptance of denial.
“I went to see Kristian,” she replied, intending to tell him only that much.
His eyes narrowed. “Why? You’ve already seen him.”
She hesitated. How little could she tell him and be believed? “I was concerned for him.”
“So you went to his house, after the funeral of his wife?” he said with open disbelief. “Didn’t it occur to you that he might wish to be alone?”
She was stung by his belief in her insensitivity, partly because she had been intrusive exactly as he accused. “Yes, of course it did! I didn’t go imagining I could comfort him. I went because I needed to know . . .” Then she stopped. She did not want to tell him yet what she had seen. He would know that Kristian could be guilty, then sooner or later he would have to tell Runcorn.
“What?” he said sharply. “What did you need to know?”
She was angry at being caught, having either to tell him the truth or to think of a convincing lie that would not stand between them forever. Or she could simply refuse to answer. “I would prefer to speak about it at another time,” she said a little primly.
“You would what?” he said incredulously, his grasp tightening on her arm.
“Let go of me, William. You are bruising me,” she said coldly.
He loosened his grip without removing his hand. “Hester, you are deliberately being evasive. What have you discovered that is so ugly that you are prepared to compromise yourself for it?”
“I’m . . .” she began, then the truth of what he was saying bit more deeply. She was compromising herself, and also the trust between them. He would find out soon anyway. She was not really protecting Kristian by hiding wh
at she knew from Monk. If Kristian had killed his wife, nothing would protect him, or Callandra; and if he had not, then only the whole truth would do any good.
She looked at Monk’s face and met his eyes squarely. “I went to find out why the funeral meal was held in Pendreigh’s house, not Elissa’s own home,” she answered.
“And why was it?” he said softly, a shadow in his face.
“Because Elissa gambled,” she replied. “Compulsively. Kristian has hardly anything left, no furniture, no carpets, no resident servants, nothing but her bedroom and one shabby sitting room, without a fire.”
He stared at her, absorbing what she had said. “Gambled?” he repeated.
“Yes. It became so she couldn’t help it, no matter how much she lost. In fact, if she weren’t risking more than she could afford, it didn’t have any excitement for her.”
He looked very pale, his face tight. He did not say anything of how he understood all that that meant, but he did not need to. It stood like a third entity, a darkness in the room with them.
CHAPTER FIVE
Monk was profoundly disturbed by what Hester had told him. He set out early, walking head down, through the still-shrouded streets. If it were true, then Kristian had a far deeper and more urgent motive for killing Elissa than any of them had realized before.
If she were driving him beyond poverty into ruin, the loss of his home, his reputation, his honor, even a time when debts could not be met, with the prospect of debtors’ prison, then Monk could very easily imagine panic and desperation prompting anyone in Kristian’s position to think of murder.
The Queen’s Prison was still kept exclusively for debtors, but all too often they were thrown in with everyone else: thieves, forgers, embezzlers, arsonists, cutthroats. They might remain there until their debts were discharged, dependent upon outside help even for food, and upon the grace of God for any kind of protection from cold, lice, disease, and the violence of their fellows, never mind the inner torments of despair.
