by Anne Perry
“ ’Course yer knows, yer stupid sod!” the woman said sharply. “Fink, an’ it will come back ter yer. Wot day was it? Was it afore or arter Aunt give yer them socks?”
“It were the same day,” he said sullenly. “Or the day afore.” He belched. “It were the day afore, which makes it two weeks ago, ’zac’ly! An’ all I kin tell yer.” He turned to go back inside.
The woman shot out her hand, and Monk gave her a shilling. That was the day Angus Stonefield had disappeared. It was worth a shilling.
“Thank you,” he said graciously.
She grasped the money, hid it in her voluminous skirts, and followed her husband inside, slamming the door.
Monk turned to Drusilla. There was a look of triumph in her face, her eyes were bright, her skin glowing. Delighted as he was with having traced Angus to the Isle of Dogs on the day of his disappearance, even to a specific tavern, his foremost emotion was pleasure in her company, a lift of excitement as he looked at her and he thought how lovely she was.
“Shall we adjourn to the Artichoke and take some luncheon?” he said with a wide smile. “I think we deserve it.”
“Indeed we do,” she agreed heartily, taking his arm. “The very best they have to offer.”
They ate at the Artichoke and Monk attempted to question the landlord, a burly man with a red face and a magnificent nose, squashed sideways from some ancient injury. But he was busy and highly disinclined to answer any questions that were not to do with the bill of fare. Monk learned nothing, except that it would be an excellent place in which two men might meet unnoticed.
Afterwards they tried a few more shops and passersby; there were few idlers in the thick fog and darkening afternoon. By three o’clock Monk offered to take her home. It was bitterly cold with a rawness that chilled to the bone, and she must be weary.
“Thank you, but you don’t need to come with me,” she said with a smile. “I know you want to go on until darkness.”
“Of course I shall take you,” he persisted. “You should not be alone anywhere near here!”
“Nonsense!” she said briskly. “We are equals in this. Courtesy I accept, but I refuse to be treated as an incompetent. Call me a hansom, and I shall be home within the hour. If you make me feel a burden to you, you will rob me of all the pleasure I feel now.” She smiled at him dazzlingly, laughter in her voice. “And the very considerable feeling of accomplishment. Please, William?” She had not used his name before. He found it peculiarly pleasing to hear it on her lips.
And the argument was telling. He conceded, and took her to the nearest main thoroughfare, where he stopped a hansom and helped her in, paid the driver, and watched it retreat into the looming fog. It was quickly swallowed, even its lights engulfed within minutes. Then he turned back and spent one more hour asking, probing, seeking. But he learned nothing more, only fear and rumor of Caleb Stone, all of it ugly. He seemed an elusive man, appearing and disappearing at will, always angry, always on the edge of violence.
Everything that he knew convinced him the more that Angus Stonefield was indeed dead and that Caleb had murdered him when the hatred and jealousy of years had finally exploded.
But how to prove it to a jury? How to create more than a moral certainty, a crushing sense of injustice, of wrong done, and all answer for it defied? There was no corpse. Maybe there never would be. Everything he knew of Caleb depicted him as a man of cruelty and absolute selfishness, but also of considerable cunning, with many friends along the waterfront who would hide him—who did, whenever he was threatened.
But surely Monk had the intelligence and the imagination to outwit him? He was walking slowly, almost feeling his way as the fog turned to darkness.
He could barely hear the muffled footsteps of others returning home in the late afternoon. Carriage lamps hung like moons suspended in the shrouds of mist. The sound of horses’ hooves had no sharpness on the freezing cobbles.
There was so much of himself he did not know, but at least since the accident he had never been permanently defeated in a case that really mattered—a few thefts, never a murder. Before the accident he knew only from what he had read of his own case notes in the police files.
But every case he read showed a man of relentless tenacity, broad imagination and a passion for truth. There had been other adversaries as harsh and violent as Caleb Stone, and none of them had beaten him.
He had walked a mile and a half along the West India Dock Road before he finally found a hansom and directed it to take him home to Fitzroy Street. He was expecting Genevieve Stonefield. He had promised her some report of his progress, and he must be there when she arrived. He settled back in the seat and closed his eyes for the long, slow journey. It would be well over an hour at this time of night, and in this weather, even as far as Bloomsbury.
By the time he had changed his clothes and had a hot cup of tea, and Genevieve had arrived, he was set in his determination not only to find the truth but to prove it.
“Come in, Mrs. Stonefield.” He closed the door behind her and helped her with her wet cloak and bonnet. She looked extremely tired. There were fine lines in her face which had not been there a few days earlier.
“Thank you,” she accepted, sitting down reluctantly, perched on the edge of the chair as if to relax would somehow leave her vulnerable.
“How is Lady Ravensbrook?” he asked.
“Ill,” she answered, her eyes dark with distress. “Very ill. We do not know if she will live. Miss Latterly is doing everything for her that can be done, but it may not be enough. Mr. Monk, have you learned anything about my husband? My situation is growing desperate.”
“I am very sorry about Lady Ravensbrook,” Monk said quietly, and he meant it. He had liked her in the brief moment they had met. Her face had had courage and intelligence. It hurt to think of her dying so pointlessly. He looked at Genevieve. How much more must she feel a helpless sense of loss. She was sitting rigidly on the edge of her chair, face earnest, waiting for him to answer her questions.
“I am afraid it begins to look increasingly as if you are right,” he said gravely. “I wish I could hold out a more helpful answer, but I have traced him into Limehouse on the day of his disappearance, and there seems no reason to doubt he went to see Caleb, as he had so often before.”
She bit her lip and her hands tightened in her lap, but she did not interrupt him.
“I am still looking, but I have not yet found anyone who has seen him since then,” he went on.
“But Mr. Monk, what I need is proof!” She took a deep breath. “I know in my heart what has happened. I have known since he did not return home at the time he said he would. I have feared it for long enough, but I could not dissuade him. But the authorities will not accept that!” Her voice was rising in desperation as she could not make him understand. “Without proof I am simply an abandoned woman, and God knows, London is full of them.” She shook her head as if in despair. “I cannot make any decisions. I cannot dispose of property, because as long as he is legally supposed to be alive, it is his, not mine or my children’s. We cannot even appoint a new person to manage the business. And willing as Mr. Arbuthnot is, he has neither the confidence nor the experience to do it adequately himself. Mr. Monk, I must have proof!”
He stared at her earnest, anguished face and saw the fear in it. That was all he could see, it was so sharp and urgent. Did it mask grief she could not bear to allow herself, least of all now when there was so much to be done, and she was not alone where she could weep in private? Or was something less attractive behind it—a driving concern for money, property, a very thriving business which would be hers alone as a widow?
Perhaps if Monk were doing his duty to Angus as well as to her, he would look a little closer at Genevieve as well. It was an ugly thought, and he would far rather it had not entered his head, but now that it was there he could not ignore it.
“Previously you spoke of selling the business while it is still profitable and of excellent rep
utation,” he pointed out. It was irrelevant—she could do neither—but he was interested in her change of mind. “Have you a manager in mind?”
“I don’t know!” She leaned forward and her full skirts touched and spilled over the fender. She seemed not to notice. “Perhaps it would be better than selling. Then all our present employees could remain. There is that to consider.” She was ardent to convince him. “And it would be a continued source of security for us … something for my sons to inherit. That is better than a sum of money which can disappear alarmingly quickly. A piece of misguided advice, a young man willful, unwilling to be counseled by those who are older and he considers staid and unimaginative. I have heard of it happening.”
He bent over and moved her skirt, in case a coal should fall or spark and set it alight.
She barely noticed.
“Aren’t you looking rather far ahead?” he said a little coolly.
“I have to, Mr. Monk. There is no one to take care of me but myself. I have five children. They must be provided for.”
“There is Lord Ravensbrook,” he reminded her. “He has both means and influence, and seems more than willing to be of every assistance. I think your anxiety is greater than it need be, Mrs. Stonefield.” He hated it, but his suspicions were wakened. Perhaps the relationship between herself and her husband was not as ideal as she had said. Possibly it was she whose affections had wandered elsewhere, not he? She was an extremely attractive woman. There was in her an element of passion and daring far deeper than mere physical charm. He found himself drawn to her, watching her with fascination, even while his mind was weighing and judging facts.
“And I have already tried to explain, Mr. Monk, that I do not wish to forfeit my freedom and become dependent upon the goodwill of Lord Ravensbrook,” she went on, her voice thick with emotion she could not hide. “I won’t have that, Mr. Monk, as long as I have any way at all of preventing it. I am growing more afraid day by day, but I am not yet beyond my wits’ end. And whether you believe it or not, I am doing what my husband would have wished. I knew him well, for all that you may think perhaps I did not.”
“I don’t doubt you did, Mrs. Stonefield.” It was quite out of character for him to lie. He barely knew why he did it, except some need to comfort her. He could hardly touch her and he had no instinct to. It did not come to him naturally to express himself by touch. Whether it ever had, he could not know.
“Yes you do,” she said with a pinched smile, a bitter humor of knowledge. “You have explored every other possibility than the one that Caleb killed him, because you think it more likely.” She leaned back in her chair again, and finally became aware of her skirt near the fender and almost automatically tweaked it away. “And I suppose I cannot blame you. Every day I daresay some man deserts his wife and children, either for money or another woman. But I knew Angus. He was a man to whom dishonor was not only abhorrent, it was frightening. He avoided it as another might have the touch of leprosy or the plague.” Her voice at last lost its steadiness and cracked with the effort of control. “He was a truly good man, Mr. Monk, a man who knew evil for the ugliness and the ruin it is. It had no disguise of charm for him.”
His intelligence told him it was a bereaved woman speaking with the hindsight of love, and his instinct told him it was the truth. This is how he had always looked in her eyes, and although she admired it wholeheartedly, it also exasperated or oppressed her at times.
“Now so many days have passed,” she said very quietly, “I fear it may be beyond anyone’s ability to prove what has happened to him.”
He felt guilty, which was unreasonable. Even if he had followed Angus on the very day he disappeared, he might still not have been able to prove murder against Caleb. There were enough ways of disposing of a body in Limehouse. The river was deep there, with its ebb tide to carry flotsam out and its cargo boats coming and going. At the moment there were also the common graves for the victims of typhoid, to name only a few.
He put half a dozen more coals on the fire.
“You do not always need a body to presume death,” he said carefully, watching her face. “Although it may be a good deal harder to prove murder—and Caleb’s guilt.”
“I don’t care about Caleb’s guilt.” Her eyes did not deviate from his face. “God will take care of him.”
“But not of you?” he asked. “I would have thought you a great deal more deserving … and more urgent.”
“I cannot wait for charity, Mr. Monk,” she answered with some asperity.
He smiled. “I apologize. Of course not. But I should like to deal with Caleb before waiting for God. I am doing all I can, and I am much closer than I was last time we spoke. I have found a witness who saw Angus in Limehouse, on the day of his disappearance, in a tavern where he might easily have met Caleb. I’ll find others. It takes time, but people will talk. It is just a matter of finding the right ones and persuading them to speak. I’ll get Caleb himself, in the end.”
“Will you …” She was on the edge of hope, but not allowing herself to grasp it. “I really don’t care if you cannot prove it was Caleb.” The shadow of a smile touched her mouth. “I don’t even know what Angus would want. Isn’t that absurd? For all that they were so utterly different, and Caleb hated him, he still loved Caleb. It seemed as if he would not forget the child he had been and the good times they had spent together before they quarreled. It hurt him every time he went to Limehouse after Caleb, yet he would not give up.”
She looked away. “Sometimes it would be weeks, especially after a particularly wretched visit, but then he would relent and go back again. On those times he’d be gone even longer, as if it were necessary to make up the difference. I suppose childhood bonds are very deep.”
“Did he tell you much of his visits to Caleb?” Monk asked. “Did he give you any indication of where they met, or where they might have been? If you can think of any description at all, it might help.”
“No,” she said with a slight frown, as though it puzzled her on recollection. “He never spoke of it at all. I think perhaps it was his silence which made me wonder if it was as much guilt as love which took him.”
“Guilt?”
There was a gentle pride in her face when she replied, a very slight, unconscious lift of her chin. “Angus had made a success of everything, his profession, his family and his place in society. Caleb had nothing. He was feared and hated where Angus was loved and respected. He lived from hand to mouth, never knowing where the next meal would come from. He had no home, no family, nothing in his whole life of which to be proud.”
It was a grim picture. Suddenly, with a jolt as if he had opened a door into a different, icy world, Monk perceived the loneliness of Caleb Stone, the failure that ate at his soul every time he saw his brother, the happy, smooth, successful mirror image of what he might have been. And Angus’s pity and his guilt would only make it worse.
And yet for Angus too, perhaps the memory of love and trust, the times when all things were equal for them and the divisions and griefs of the future still unknown, held a kind of sweetness that bound them together.
Why should it boil over into violence now? What had happened to change it? He looked at Genevieve. The strain was clearly marked in her face now. There were tiny lines in the skin around her mouth and eyes, visible even in the gaslight. Angus had been gone fifteen days. She was also using at least half her time nursing Enid Ravensbrook. No wonder she was tired and riven with fear.
“Have you someone in mind you can appoint to manage the business in Mr. Stonefield’s absence?” he asked. It was hardly relevant to him, and yet he found himself waiting for the answer, willing that she had not. It seemed so coldly practical for a woman not yet surely a widow.
“I thought Mr. Niven,” she answered frankly. “In spite of the error of judgment which brought him to his present state, he is of absolute honesty, and of unusual skill and knowledge in the business. I think he would not be so rash or so lenient in another’s
cause. Mr. Arbuthnot has always thought well of him, and might not be averse to continuing with us if it was in Mr. Niven’s service. Mr. Niven is also very agreeable, and I should not mind thinking of him in Angus’s place, since there needs must be someone. He has no family of his own, and would not be seeking to put me, or my sons, from their place.”
It should have made no difference whatever, and yet he found himself chilled by the readiness of her reply.
“I had not realized you knew him personally,” he said.
“Of course. He and Angus had a most cordial relationship. He has dined with us on many occasions. He is one of the few people we entertain in our home.” The shadow crossed her features again. “But naturally I cannot approach him yet. It would be quite improper until I have some proof of Angus’s fate that will satisfy the law.” She sat very straight and sighed, as if controlling herself with an effort.
He wondered exactly what emotion it was that lay so powerfully just beneath the surface of her composure. There was a strength in her at odds with her gentle, very womanly appearance, the aura of obedient wife and devoted mother, some depth to her far out of the ordinary. It troubled him, because he had liked what he had first believed of her; even her quiet strength was appealing. He did not want to think of it as ruthlessness.
“I will do all I can, Mrs. Stonefield,” he promised, his tone of voice unwittingly putting some distance between them. “As you suggest, I shall concentrate my efforts upon satisfying the authorities that your husband is dead, and leave the manner of his death for others to worry about. In the meantime, since it may not be an easy task, or a quick one, I advise you to consider Lord Ravensbrook’s offer of a home for yourself and your family, even if it is upon temporary terms.”
She sensed his thoughts and stood up gracefully, gathering her cape around her with a quick movement, but her face registered distaste and a hardening stubbornness of resistance.
“It will be a last resort, Mr. Monk, and I am not yet come to that pass. I think I shall call upon Mr. Niven, and test his feelings in the matter, before I return to Lady Ravensbrook. Good day to you.”