The face of a stranger

by Anne Perry

  It was best done immediately; the longer she thought about it the harder it would be. She had little patience with minor ailments; she had seen too much desperate disease, and her own health was good enough she did not know from experience how debilitating even a minor pain can be when stretched over time.

  She knocked on Fabia's door and waited until she heard the command to enter, then she turned the handle and went in.

  It was a less feminine room than she had expected. It was plain light Wedgwood blue and sparsely furnished compared with the usual cluttered style. A single silver vase held summer roses in full bloom on the table by the window; the bed was canopied in white muslin, like the inner curtains. On the farthest wall, where the sun was diffused, hung a fine portrait of a young man in the uniform of a cavalry officer. He was slender and straight, his fair hair falling over a broad brow, pale, intelligent eyes and a mobile mouth, humorous, articulate, and she thought in that fleeting instant, a little weak.

  Fabia was sitting up in her bed, a blue satin bedjacket covering her shoulders and her hair brushed and knotted loosely so it fell in a faded coil over her breast. She looked thin and much older than Hester was prepared for. Suddenly the apology was not difficult. She could see all the loneliness of years in the pale face, the loss which would never be repaired.

  "Yes?" Fabia said with distinct chill.

  "I came to apologize, Lady Fabia," Hester replied quietly. "I was very rude to General Wadham yesterday, and as your guest it was inexcusable. I am truly sorry."

  Fabia's eyebrows rose in surprise, then she smiled very slightly.

  "I accept your apology. I am surprised you had the grace to come—I had not expected it of you. It is not often I misjudge a young woman." Her smile lifted the corners of her mouth fractionally, giving her face a sudden life, echoing the girl she must once have been. "It was most embarrassing for me that General Wadham should be so-so deflated. But it was not entirely without its satisfactions. He is a condescending old fool—and I sometimes get very weary of being patronized."

  Hester was too surprised to say anything at all. For the first time since arriving at Shelburne Hall she actually liked Fabia.

  "You may sit down," Fabia offered with a gleam of humor in her eyes.

  "Thank you." Hester sat on the dressing chair covered with blue velvet, and looked around the room at the other, lesser paintings and the few photographs, stiff and very posed for the long time that the camera required to set the image. There was a picture of Rosamond and Lovel, probably at their wedding. She looked fragile and very happy; he was facing the lens squarely, full of hope.

  On the other chest there was an early daguerreotype of a middle-aged man with handsome side-whiskers, black hair and a vain, whimsical face. From the resemblance to Joscelin, Hester assumed it to be the late Lord Shelburne.

  There was also a pencil sketch of all three brothers as boys, sentimental, features a little idealized, the way one remembers summers of the past.

  "I'm sorry you are feeling unwell," Hester said quietly. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

  "I should think it highly unlikely; I am not a casualty of war—at least not in the sense that you are accustomed to," Fabia replied.

  Hester did not argue. It rose to the tip of her tongue to say she was accustomed to all sorts of hurt, but then she knew it would be trite—she had not lost a son, and that was the only grief Fabia was concerned with.

  "My eldest brother was killed in the Crimea." Hester still found the words hard to say. She could see George in her mind's eye, the way he walked, hear his laughter, then it dissolved and a sharper memory returned of herself and Charles and George as children, and the tears ached in her throat beyond bearing. "And both my parents died shortly after," she said quickly. "Shall we speak of something else?"

  For a moment Fabia looked startled. She had forgotten, and now she was faced with a loss as huge as her own.

  "My dear—I'm so very sorry. Of course—you did say so. Forgive me. What have you done this morning? Would you care to take the trap out later? It would be no difficulty to arrange it."

  “I went to the nursery and met Harry.'' Hester smiled and blinked. "He's beautiful—" And she proceeded to tell the story.

  * * * * *

  She remained at Shelburne Hall for several more days, sometimes taking long walks alone in the wind and brilliant air. The parkland had a beauty which pleased her immensely and she felt at peace with it as she had in few other places. She was able to consider the future much more clearly, and Callandra's advice, repeated several times more in their many conversations, seemed increasingly wise the more she thought of it. The tension among

  the members of the household changed after the dinner with General Wadham. Surface anger was covered with the customary good manners, but she became aware through a multitude of small observations that the unhap-piness was a deep and abiding part of the fabric of their lives.

  Fabia had a personal courage which might have been at least half the habitual discipline of her upbringing and the pride that would not allow others to see her vulnerability. She was autocratic, to some extent selfish, although she would have been the last to think it of herself. But Hester saw the loneliness in her face in moments when she believed herself unobserved, and at times beneath the old woman so immaculately dressed, a bewilderment which laid bare the child she had once been. Undoubtedly she loved her two surviving sons, but she did not especially like them, and no one could charm her or make her laugh as Joscelin had. They were courteous, but they did not flatter her, they did not bring back with small attentions the great days of her beauty when dozens had courted her and she had been the center of so much. With Joscelin's death her own hunger for living had gone.

  Hester spent many hours with Rosamond and became fond of her in a distant, nonconfiding sort of way. Callan-dra's words about a brave, protective smile came to her sharply on several occasions, most particularly one late afternoon as they sat by the fire and made light, trivial conversation. Ursula Wadham was visiting, full of excitement and plans for the time when she would be married to Menard. She babbled on, facing Rosamond but apparently not seeing anything deeper than the perfect complexion, the carefully dressed hair and the rich afternoon gown. To her Rosamond had everything a woman could desire, a wealthy and titled husband, a strong child, beauty, good health and sufficient talent in the arts of pleasing. What else was there to desire?

  Hester listened to Rosamond agreeing to all the plans, how exciting it would be and how happy the future looked,

  and she saw behind the dark eyes no gleam of confidence and hope, only a sense of loss, a loneliness and a kind of desperate courage that keeps going because it knows no way to stop. She smiled because it brought her peace, it prevented questions and it preserved a shred of pride.

  Lovel was busy. At least he had purpose and as long as he was fulfilling it any darker emotion was held at bay. Only at the dinner table when they were all together did the occasional remark betray the underlying knowledge that something had eluded him, some precious element that seemed to be his was not really. He could not have called it fear—he would have hated the word and rejected it with horror—but staring at him across the snow-white linen and the glittering crystal, Hester thought that was what it was. She had seen it so often before, in totally different guises, when the danger was physical, violent and immediate. At first because the threat was so different she thought only of anger, then as it nagged persistently at the back of her mind, unclassified, suddenly she saw its other face, domestic, personal, emotional pain, and she knew it was a jar of familiarity.

  With Menard it was also anger, but a sharp awareness, too, of something he saw as injustice; past now in act, but the residue still affecting him. Had he tidied up too often after Joscelin, his mother's favorite, protecting her from the truth that he was a cheat? Or was it himself he protected, and the family name?

  Only with Callandra did she feel relaxed, but it did on one occasion c
ross her mind to wonder whether Callandra's comfort with herself was the result of many years' happiness or the resolution within her nature of its warring elements, not a gift but an art. It was one evening when they had taken a light supper in Callandra's sitting room instead of dinner in the main wing, and Callandra had made some remark about her husband, now long dead. Hester had always assumed the marriage to have been happy, not from anything she knew of it, or of Callandra Daviot, but from the peace within Callandra.

  Now she realized how blindly she had leaped to such a shortsighted conclusion.

  Callandra must have seen the idea waken in her eyes. She smiled with a touch of wryness, and a gentle humor in her face.

  "You have a great deal of courage, Hester, and a hunger for life which is a far richer blessing than you think now— but, my dear, you are sometimes very naive. There are many kinds of misery, and many kinds of fortitude, and you should not allow your awareness of one to build to the value of another. You have an intense desire, a passion, to make people's lives better. Be aware that you can truly help people only by aiding them to become what they are, not what you are. I have heard you say 'If I were you, I would do this—or that.' T am never 'you'—and my solutions may not be yours."

  Hester remembered the wretched policeman who had told her she was domineering, overbearing and several other unpleasant things.

  Callandra smiled. "Remember, my dear, you are dealing with the world as it is, not as you believe, maybe rightly, that it ought to be. There will be a great many things you can achieve not by attacking them but with a little patience and a modicum of flattery. Stop to consider what it is you really want, rather than pursuing your anger or your vanity to charge in. So often we leap to passionate judgments—when if we but knew the one thing more, they would be so different."

  Hester was tempted to laugh, in spite of having heard very clearly what Callandra had said, and perceiving the truth of it.

  "I know," Callandra agreed quickly. "I preach much better than I practice. But believe me, when I want something enough, I have the patience to bide my time and think how I can bring it about.''

  "I'll try," Hester promised, and she did mean it. "That miserable policeman will not be right—I shall not allow him to be right.''

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I met him when I was out walking," Hester explained. "He said I was overbearing and opinionated, or something like that."

  Callandra's eyebrows shot up and she did not even attempt to keep a straight face.

  "Did he really? What temerity! And what perception, on such a short acquaintance. And what did you think of him, may I ask?"

  "An incompetent and insufferable nincompoop!"

  "Which of course you told him?"

  Hester glared back at her. "Certainly!"

  "Quite so. I think he had more of the right of it than you did. I don't think he is incompetent. He has been given an extremely difficult task. There were a great many people who might have hated Joscelin, and it will be exceedingly difficult for a policeman, with all his disadvantages, to discover which one it was—and even harder, I imagine, to prove it."

  "You mean, you think—" Hester left it unsaid, hanging in the air.

  "I do," Callandra replied. "Now come, we must settle what you are to do with yourself. I shall write to certain friends I have, and I have little doubt, if you hold a civil tongue in your head, refrain from expressing your opinion of men in general and of Her Majesty's Army's generals in particular, we may obtain for you a position in hospital administration which will not only be satisfying to you but also to those who are unfortunate enough to be ill."

  "Thank you." Hester smiled. "I am very grateful." She looked down in her lap for a moment, then up at Callandra and her eyes sparkled. "I really do not mind walking two paces behind a man, you know—if only I can find one who can walk two paces faster than I! It is being tied at the knees by convention I hate—and having to pretend I am lame to suit someone else's vanity."

  Callandra shook her head very slowly, amusement and sadness sharp in her face. "I know. Perhaps you will have to fall a few times, and have someone else pick you up, before you will learn a more equable pace. But do not walk slowly simply for company—ever. Not even God would wish you to be unequally yoked and result in destroying both of you—in fact God least of all."

  Hester sat back and smiled, lifting up her knees and hugging them in a most unladylike fashion. "I daresay I shall fall many times—and look excessively foolish—and give rise to a good deal of hilarity among those who dislike me—but that is still better than not trying."

  "Indeed it is," Callandra agreed. "But you would do it anyway."

  8

  The most productive of Joscelin Grey's acquaintances was one of the last that Monk and Evan visited, and not from Lady Fabia's list, but from the letters in the flat. They had spent over a week in the area near Shelburne, discreetly questioning on the pretense of tracing a jewel thief who specialized in country houses. They had learned something of Joscelin Grey, of the kind of life he led, at least while home from London. And Monk had had the unnerving and extremely irritating experience one day while walking across the Shelburne parkland of coming upon the woman who had been with Mrs. Latterly in St. Marylebone Church. Perhaps he should not have been startled—after all, society was very small—but it had taken him aback completely. The whole episode in the church with its powerful emotion had returned in the windy, rain-spattered land with its huge trees, and Shelburne House in the distance.

  There was no reason why she should not have visited the family, precisely as he later discovered. She was a Miss Hester Latterly, who had nursed in the Crimea, and was a friend of Lady Callandra Daviot. As she had told him, she had known Joscelin Grey briefly at the time of his injury. It was most natural that once she was home she should give her condolences in person. And also certainly within her nature that she should be outstandingly rude to a policeman.

  And give the devil her due, he had been rude back— and gained considerable satisfaction from it. It would all have been of no possible consequence were she not obviously related to the woman in the church whose face so haunted him.

  What had they learned? Joscelin Grey was liked, even envied for his ease of manner, his quick smile and a gift for making people laugh; and perhaps even more rattier than less, because the amusement had frequently an underlying caustic quality. What had surprised Monk was that he was also, if not pitied, then sympathized with because he was a younger son. The usual careers open to younger sons such as the church and the army were either totally unsuitable to him or else denied him now because of his injury, gained in the service of his country. The heiress he had courted had married his elder brother, and he had not yet found another to replace her, at least not one whose family considered him a suitable match. He was, after all, invalided out of the army, without a mer-chandisable skill and without financial expectations.

  Evan had acquired a rapid education in the manners and morals of his financial betters, and now was feeling both bemused and disillusioned. He sat in the train staring out of the window, and Monk regarded him with a compassion not unmixed with humor. He knew the feeling, although he could not recall experiencing it himself. Was it possible he had never been so young? It was an unpleasant thought that he might always have been cynical, without that particular kind of innocence, even as a child.

  Discovering himself step by step, as one might a stranger, was stretching his nerves further than he had been aware of until now. Sometimes he woke in the night, afraid of knowledge, feeling himself full of unknown shames and disappointments. The shapelessness of his doubt was worse than certainty would have been; even certainty of arrogance, indifference, or of having overridden justice for the sake of ambition.

  But the more he pulled and struggled with it, the more stubbornly it resisted; it would come only thread by thread, without cohesion, a fragment at a time. Where had he learned his careful, precise diction? Who had taught him to mo
ve and to dress like a gentleman, to be so easy in his manners? Had he merely aped his betters over the years? Something very vague stirred in his mind, a feeling rather than a thought, that there had been someone he admired, someone who had taken time and trouble, a mentor—but no voice, nothing but an impression of working, practicing—and an ideal.

  The people from whom they learned more about Joscelin Grey were the Dawlishes. Their house was in Primrose Hill, not far from the Zoological Gardens, and Monk and Evan went to visit them the day after returning from Shel-burne. They were admitted by a butler too well trained to show surprise, even at the sight of policemen on the front doorstep. Mrs. Dawlish received them in the morning room. She was a small, mild-featured woman with faded hazel eyes and brown hair which escaped its pins.

  "Mr. Monk?" She queried his name because it obviously meant nothing to her.

  Monk bowed very slightly.

  "Yes ma'am; and Mr. Evan. If Mr. Evan might have your permission to speak to the servants and see if they can be of assistance?"

  "I think it unlikely, Mr. Monk." The idea was obviously futile in her estimation. "But as long as he does not distract them from their duties, of course he may."

  "Thank you, ma'am." Evan departed with alacrity, leaving Monk still standing.

  "About poor Joscelin Grey?" Mrs. Dawlish was puzzled and a little nervous, but apparently not unwilling to help. "What can we tell you? It was a most terrible tragedy. We had not known him very long, you know."

  "How long, Mrs. Dawlish?"

  "About five weeks before he ... died." She sat down and he was glad to follow suit. "I believe it cannot have been more."

  "But you invited him to stay with you? Do you often do that, on such short acquaintance?"

  She shook her head, another strand of hair came undone and she ignored it.

  "No, no hardly ever. But of course he was Menard Grey's brother—" Her face was suddenly hurt, as if something had betrayed her inexplicably and without warning, wounding where she had believed herself safe. "And Jos-celin was so charming, so very natural," she went on. "And of course he also knew Edward, my eldest son, who was killed at Inkermann."