by Anne Perry
“I don’t know how!” Sylvestra’s voice rose in desperation. “I cannot help them. All they asked me were useless questions about what Leighton was wearing and when he went out. None of that is going to achieve anything.”
“What would help?” Hester poured her cold tea into the slop basin and reached for the pot, politely offering it to Sylvestra as well. At Sylvestra’s nod, she refilled both cups.
“I wish I knew,” Sylvestra said almost under her breath. “I’ve racked my brain to think what Leighton would have been doing in a place like that, and all I can imagine is that he went after Rhys. He was … he was very angry when he left home, far angrier than I told that young man from the police. It seems so disloyal to discuss family quarrels with strangers.”
Hester knew she meant not so much strangers as people from a different social order, as she must consider Evan to be. She would not know his father was a minister of the church, and he had chosen police work from a sense of dedication to justice, not because it was his natural place in society.
“Of course,” she agreed. “It is painful to admit, even to oneself, of a quarrel which cannot now be repaired. One has to set it amid the rest of the relationship and see it as merely a part, only by mischance the last part. It was probably far less important than it seems. Had Mr. Duff lived they would surely have made up their differences.” She did not leave it exactly a question.
Sylvestra sipped her fresh tea. “They were quite unlike each other. Rhys is the youngest. Leighton said I indulged him. Perhaps I did. I … I felt I understood him so well.” Her face puckered with hurt. “Now it looks as if I didn’t understand him at all. And my failure may have cost my husband his life.…” Her fingers gripped the cup so tightly Hester was afraid she would break it and spill the hot liquid over herself, even cut her hands on the shards.
“Don’t torture yourself with that, when you don’t know if it is true,” she urged. “Perhaps you can think of something which may help the police learn why they went to St. Giles. It may stem from something that happened some time before that evening. It is a fearful place. They must have had a very compelling reason. Could it have been on someone else’s account? A friend in trouble?”
Sylvestra looked up at her quickly, her eyes bright. “That would make some sense of it, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. Who are Rhys’s friends? Who might he care about sufficiently to go to such a place to help? Perhaps someone who had borrowed money. It can happen … a gambling debt a young man dared not tell his family about, or a girl of dubious reputation.”
Sylvestra smiled; the smile was full of fear, but there was self-mastery in it also. “That sounds like Rhys himself, I’m afraid. He tended to find respectable young ladies rather boring. That was the principal reason he quarreled with his father. He felt it unfair that Constance and Amalia were able to travel to India to have all manner of exotic experiences, and he was required to remain at home and study, and marry well and then go into the family business.”
“What was Mr. Duff’s business?” Hester felt considerable sympathy with Rhys. All his will and passion, all his dreams, seemed to lie in the Middle East, and he was required to remain in London while his elder sisters had the adventures not only of the mind, but of the body as well.
“He was in law,” Sylvestra replied. “Conveyancing, property. He was the senior partner. He had offices in Birmingham and Manchester as well as the City.”
Highly respectable, Hester thought, but hardly the stuff of dreams. At least the family would presumably still have some means. Finances would not be an additional cause for anxiety. She imagined Rhys had been expected to go to university and then follow in his father’s footsteps in the company, probably a junior partnership to begin with, leading to rapid promotion. His whole future was built ahead of him, and rigidly defined. Naturally, it required that he make at the very least a suitable marriage, at best a fortunate one. She could feel the net drawing tight, as if it had been around her also. It was a life tens of thousands would have been only too grateful for.
She tried to imagine Leighton Duff and his hopes for his son, his anger and frustration that Rhys was ungrateful, blind to his good fortune.
“He must have been a very talented man,” she said, again to fill the silence.
“He was,” Sylvestra agreed with a distant smile. “He was immensely respected. The number of people who regarded his opinion was extraordinary. He could perceive both opportunities and dangers that others, some very skilled and learned men, did not.”
To Hester it only made his journey into St. Giles the harder to understand. She had no sense of his personality, apart from an ambition for his son and perhaps a lack of wisdom in his approach to pressing it. But then she had not known Rhys before the attack. Perhaps he had been very willful, wasting his time when he should have been studying. Maybe he had chosen poorly in his friends, especially his female ones. He could well have been a son overindulged by his mother, refusing to grow up and accept adult responsibility. Leighton Duff might have had every reason to be exasperated with him. It would not be the first time a mother had overprotected a boy and thereby achieved the very last thing she intended: left him unfit for any kind of lasting happiness, but instead a permanent dependent, and an inadequate husband in his turn.
Sylvestra was lost in her own thoughts, remembering a kinder past.
“Leighton could be very dashing,” she said thoughtfully. “He used to ride over hurdles when he was younger. He was terribly good at it. He didn’t keep horses himself, but many friends wanted him to ride for them. He won very often, because he had the courage … and, of course, the skill. I used to love to watch him, even though I was terrified he would fall. At that speed it can be extremely dangerous.”
Hester tried to picture it. It was profoundly at odds with the rather staid man she had envisioned in her mind, the dry lawyer drawing up deeds for property. How foolish it was to judge a person by a few facts, when there were so many other things to know. Perhaps the law offices were only a small part of him, a practical side which provided for the family life, and perhaps also the money for the adventure and imagination of his truer self. It could be from their father that Constance and Amalia had inherited their courage and their dreams.
“I suppose he had to give it up as he got older,” Hester said thoughtfully.
Sylvestra smiled. “Yes, I’m afraid so. He realized it when a friend of ours had a very bad fall. Leighton was so upset for him. He was crippled. Oh, he learned to walk again, after about six months, but it was only with pain, and he was no longer able to practice his profession. He was a surgeon, and he could not hold his hands steadily enough. It was very tragic. He was only forty-three.”
Hester did not reply. She thought of a man whose life had been dedicated to one art, losing it in a moment’s fall from a horse, not even doing anything necessary, simply a race. What regret would follow, what self-blame for the hardship to his family.
“Leighton helped him a great deal,” Sylvestra went on. “He managed to sell some property for him and invest the money so he was provided for, at least with some income for his family.”
Hester smiled quickly, in acknowledgment that she had heard and appreciated it.
Sylvestra’s face darkened again. “Do you think Rhys may have gone into that dreadful area searching for a friend in trouble?” she asked.
“It seems possible.”
“I shall have to ask Arthur Kynaston. Perhaps he will come to see Rhys when he is a little better. He might like that.”
“We can ask him in a day or two. Is he fond of Rhys?”
“Oh yes. Arthur is the son of one of Leighton’s closest friends, the headmaster of Rowntrees—that is an excellent boys’ school near here.” Her face softened for a moment and her voice lifted with enthusiasm. “Joel Kynaston was a brilliant scholar, and he chose to dedicate his life to teaching boys the love of learning, especially the classics. That is where Rhys learned his Latin and Greek,
and his love of history and ancient cultures. It is one of the greatest gifts a young person can receive. Or any age of person, I suppose.”
“Of course,” Hester agreed.
“Arthur is Rhys’s age,” Sylvestra went on. “His elder brother, Marmaduke—they call him Duke—is also a friend. He is a little … wilder, perhaps? Clever people sometimes are, and Duke is very talented. I know Leighton thought him headstrong. He is now at Oxford studying classics, like his father. Of course, he is still home for Christmas. They both must be terribly grieved by this.”
Hester finished her toast and drank the last of her tea. At least she knew a little more about Rhys. It did not explain what had happened to him, but it offered a few possibilities.
Nothing she had learned prepared her for what happened that afternoon when Sylvestra came into the bedroom for the third time that day. Rhys had had a very light luncheon and then fallen asleep. He was in some physical pain. Lying in more or less one position was making him very stiff and his bruises were healing only slowly. It was impossible to know what injuries were causing pain, swelling or even bleeding within him. He was very uncomfortable, and after Hester had given him a sedative herbal drink with something to ease him at least a little, he fell into a light sleep.
He woke when Sylvestra came in.
She went over and sat in the chair next to him.
“How are you, my dear?” she said softly. “Are you rested?”
He stared at her. Hester was standing at the end of the bed and saw the pain and the darkness in his eyes.
Sylvestra put out her hand and stroked him gently on the bare arm above his splints and plasters.
“Every day will be a little better, Rhys,” she said just above a whisper, her voice dry with emotion. “It will pass, and you will heal.”
He looked at her steadily, then slowly his lips curled back from his teeth in a cold glare of utter contempt.
Sylvestra looked as if she had been struck. Her hand remained on his arm, but as if frozen. She was too stunned to move.
“Rhys …?”
A savage hatred filled his face, as if, had he the strength, he would have lashed out at her physically, wounding, gouging, delighting in pain.
“Rhys …” She opened her mouth to continue, but she had no words. She withdrew her hand as if it had been injured, holding it protectively.
His face softened; the violence crumpled out of it, leaving him limp and bruised.
She reached out to him again, instant to forgive.
He looked at her, measuring her feelings, waiting; then he lifted his other hand and hit her, jarring the splints. It must have been agony to his broken bones and he went gray with the shock of it, but he did not move his eyes from hers.
Her eyes filled with tears and she stood up, now truly physically hurt, although it was nothing compared with the pain of confusion and rejection and helplessness within. She walked slowly to the door and out of the room.
Rhys’s lips curled in a slow, vicious, satisfied smile, and he swung his face back to look at Hester.
Hester was cold inside, as if she had swallowed ice.
“That was horrible,” she said clearly. “You have belittled yourself.”
He stared at her, confusion filling his face, and surprise. Whatever he had expected of her it was not that.
She was too repelled and too aware of Sylvestra’s grief to guard her words. She felt a kind of horror she had never known before, a mixture of pity and fear and a sense of something so dark she could not even stumble towards it in imagination.
“That was a cruel and pointless thing to do,” she went on. “I’m disgusted with you!”
Anger blazed in his eyes, and the smile came back to his mouth, still twisted, as if in self-mockery.
She turned away.
She heard him bang his hand on the sheet. It must have hurt; it would jar the broken bones even further. It was his only way of attracting attention, unless he knocked the bell off, and when he did that others might hear, especially Sylvestra if she had not yet gone downstairs.
She turned back.
He was trying desperately to speak. His head jerked, his lips moved and his throat convulsed as he fought to make a sound. Nothing came, only a gasping for breath as he choked and gagged and then choked again.
She went to him and put her arm around him, lifting him a little so he could breathe more easily.
“Stop it!” she ordered. “Stop it! That won’t help you to speak. Just breathe slowly. In … out. In … out. That’s better. Again. Slowly.” She sat holding him up until his breathing was regular, under control, then she let him lie back on the pillows. She regarded him dispassionately, until she saw the tears on his cheeks and the despair in his eyes. He seemed oblivious of his hands, lying on the cover with the splints broken and crooked, carrying the bones awry. It must have been agonizing, and yet the pain of emotion inside him was so much greater he seemed to not even feel the pain in his hands.
What in God’s name had happened to him in St. Giles? What memory tore inside him with such unbearable horror?
“I’ll rebandage your hands,” she said more gently. “You can’t leave them like that. The bones may even have been moved.”
He blinked, but made no move of disagreement.
“It’s going to hurt,” she warned.
He smiled and made a little snort, letting out his breath sharply.
It took her nearly three quarters of an hour to take the bandages off both hands, examine the broken fingers and the bruised and swollen flesh, lacerated across the knuckles, realign the bones, all the time aware of the hideous pain it must be causing him, and then resplint and rebandage his hands. It was really a surgeon’s job, and perhaps Corriden Wade would be angry with her for doing it herself, instead of calling him, but he was due to come tomorrow, and she was perfectly capable. She had certainly set enough bones before. She could not leave Rhys like that while she sent a messenger out to Wade’s house to look for him. At this time he might very well be out at dinner, or even the theater.
Afterwards Rhys was exhausted. His face was gray with pain and his clothes were soaked with sweat.
“I’ll change the bed,” she said matter-of-factly. “You can’t sleep in that. Then I’ll get you a draft to ease the pain of it and help you to rest. Maybe you’ll think twice before hitting anyone again?”
He bit his lip and stared at her. He looked rueful, but it was far less than an apology. It was too complicated to express without words, perhaps even with them.
She helped him to the far side of the bed, half supporting his weight; he was dizzy and weak with pain. She eased him down. She took off the rumpled sheets, marked with spots of blood, and put on clean ones. Then she helped him change into a fresh nightshirt and held him steady while he half rolled back to the center of the bed and she straightened the covers over him.
“I’ll be back in a few moments with the draft for pain,” she told him. “Don’t move until I return.”
He nodded obediently.
It took her nearly a quarter of an hour to mix up the strongest dose she dared give him from Dr. Wade’s medicine. It should be enough to help him sleep at least half of the night. Anything strong enough to deaden the pain of his hands might kill him. It was the best she could do. She offered it to him and held it while he drank.
He made a face.
“I know it’s bitter,” she agreed. “I brought a little peppermint to take the taste away.”
He looked at her gravely, then very slowly he smiled. It was thanks; there was nothing else in it, no cruelty, no satisfaction. He was powerless to explain.
She pushed the hair back off his brow.
“Good night,” she said quietly. “If you need me, you have only to knock the bell.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Yes, of course I’ll come,” she promised.
This time the smile was a little wider, then he turned away suddenly, and his eyes filled with tears.
/>
She went out quietly, bitterly aware that she was leaving him alone with his horror and his silence. The draft would give him at least a little rest.
The doctor called the following morning. It was a dark day, the sky heavy-laden with snow and an icy wind whistling in the eaves. He came in with skin whipped ruddy by the cold and rubbing his hands to get the circulation back after sitting still in his carriage.
Sylvestra was relieved to see him and came out of the morning room immediately when she heard his voice in the hall. Hester was on the stairs and could not help observing his quick effort to smile at her, and her relief. She went to him eagerly and he took her hands in his, nodding while he spoke to her. The conversation was brief, then he came straight up to Hester. He took her arm and led her away from the banister edge and towards the more private center of the landing.
“It is not good news,” he said very quietly, as if aware of Sylvestra still below them. “You gave him the powders I left?”
“Yes, in the strongest dose you prescribed. It provided him some ease.”
“Yes.” He nodded. He looked cold, anxious and very tired, as if he too had slept little. Perhaps he had been up all night with other patients. Below them in the hall Sylvestra’s footsteps faded towards the withdrawing room.
“I wish I knew what to do to help him, but I confess I am working blindly.” Wade looked at Hester with a regretful smile. “This is very different from the orlop deck on which I trained.” He gave a dry little laugh. “There everything was so quick. Men were carried in and laid on the canvas. Each waited his turn, first brought in, first seen. It was a matter of searching for musket balls, splinters of wood—teak splinters are poisonous, did you know that, Miss Latterly?”