by Anne Perry
She must see him. Win or lose, she must know.
The opportunity came the day Lovat-Smith concluded his case. She had been discussing a pauper who had just been admitted and had persuaded the governors that the man was deserving and in great need. Kristian Beck was the ideal person to treat him. The case was too complex for the student doctors, the other surgeons were fully occupied, and of course Sir Herbert was absent for an unforeseeable time—perhaps forever.
She knew Kristian was in his rooms from Mrs. Flaherty. She went to his door and knocked, her heart beating so violently she imagined her whole body shook. Her mouth was dry. She knew she would stumble when she spoke.
She heard his voice invite her to enter, and suddenly she wanted to run, but her legs would not move.
He called again.
This time she pushed the door and went in.
His face lit with pleasure as soon as he saw her and he rose from his seat behind the table.
“Callandra! Come in—come in! I have hardly seen you for days.” His eyes narrowed a little as he looked at her more closely. There was nothing critical in him, just a gentleness that sent her senses lurching with the power of her own feelings. “You look tired, my dear. Are you not well?”
It was on her lips to tell him the truth, as she always had, most particularly to him, but it was the perfect excuse to evade.
“Not perhaps as I would like to be. But it is of no importance.” Her words came in a rush, her tongue fumbling. “I certainly don’t need a doctor. It will pass.”
“Are you sure?” He looked anxious. “If you’d prefer not to see me, then ask Allington. He is a good man, and here today.”
“If it persists, I will,” she lied. “But I have come about a man admitted today who most certainly does need your help.” And she described the patient in detail, hearing her own voice going on and on as if it were someone else’s.
After several moments he held up his hand.
“I understand—I will see him. There is no need to persuade me.” Again he looked at her closely. “Is something troubling you, my dear? You are not at all yourself. Have we not trusted one another sufficiently that you can allow me to help?”
It was an open invitation, and she knew that by refusing she would not only close the door and make it harder to open again next time, but she would hurt him. His emotion was there in his eyes, and it should have made her heart sing.
Now she felt choked with unshed tears. All the loneliness of an uncounted span, long before her husband had died, times when he was brisk, full of his own concerns—not unkind, simply unable to bridge a gulf of difference between them—all the hunger for intimacy of the heart was wide and vulnerable within her.
“It’s only the wretched business of the nurse,” she said, looking down at the floor. “And the trial. I don’t know what to think, and I am allowing it to trouble me more than I should … I am sorry. Please forgive me for burdening everyone else with it when we all have sufficient to bear for ourselves.”
“Is that all?” he said curiously, his voice lifted a little in question.
“I was fond of her,” she replied, looking up at him because that at least was totally true. “And she reminded me of a certain young woman I care about even more. I am just tired. I will be much better tomorrow.” And she forced herself to smile, even though she felt it must look ghastly.
He smiled back, a sad, gentle look, and she was not sure whether he had believed anything she had said. One thing was certain, she could not possibly ask him about Marianne Gillespie. She could not bear to hear the answer.
She rose to her feet, backing toward the door.
“Thank you very much for accepting Mr. Burke. I was sure you would.” And she reached for the door handle, gave him another brief, sickly smile, and escaped.
Sir Herbert turned the moment Rathbone came in the cell door. Seen from the floor of the courtroom at all but a few moments, he had looked well in command of himself, but closer to, in the hard daylight of the single, high window, he was haggard. The flesh of his face was puffy except around the eyes, where the shadows were dark, as if he had slept only fitfully and without ease. He was used to decisions of life or death, he was intimately acquainted with all the physical frailty of man and the extremity of pain and death. But he was also used to being in command; the one who took the actions, or refrained; the one who made the judgments on which someone else’s fate was balanced. This time he was helpless. It was Rathbone who had control, not he, and it frightened him. It was in his eyes, in the way he moved his head, something even in the smell of the room.
Rathbone was used to reassuring people without actually promising anything. It was part of his profession. With Sir Herbert it was more difficult than usual. The accepted phrases and manners were ones with which he was only too familiar himself. And the cause for fear was real.
“It is not going well—is it?” Sir Herbert said without prevarication, his eyes intent on Rathbone’s face. There was both hope and fear in him.
“It is early yet.” Rathbone moderated, but he would not lie. “But it is true that we have so far made no serious inroads into his case.”
“He cannot prove I killed her.” There was the very faintest note of panic in Sir Herbert’s voice. They both heard it. Sir Herbert blushed. “I didn’t. This business of having a romantic liaison with her is preposterous. If you’d known the woman you would never have entertained the idea. She simply wasn’t—wasn’t remotely of that turn of mind. I don’t know how to make it plainer.”
“Can you think of another explanation of her letters?” Rathbone asked with no real hope.
“No! I can’t. That is what is so frightening! It is like an absurd nightmare.” His voice was rising with fear, growing sharper. Looking at his face, his eyes, Rathbone believed him entirely. He had spent years refining his judgment, staking his professional reputation upon it. Sir Herbert Stanhope was telling the truth. He had no idea what Prudence Barrymore had meant, and it was his very confusion and ignorance which frightened him most, the complete loss of reality, events he could neither understand nor control sweeping him along and threatening to carry him all the way to destruction.
“Could it be some sort of malicious joke?” Rathbone asked desperately. “People write strange things in their diaries. Could she be using your name to protect someone else?”
Sir Herbert looked startled, then a flicker of hope brightened his face. “I suppose it is conceivable, yes. But I have no idea whom. I wish to God I had! But why would she do such a thing? She was only writing to her sister. She cannot have expected the letters ever to be public.”
“Her sister’s husband, perhaps?” Rathbone suggested, knowing it was foolish even as the words were out.
“An affair with her sister’s husband?” Sir Herbert was both shocked and skeptical.
“No,” Rathbone replied patiently. “It is possible her sister’s husband might read the letters. It is not unknown for a man to read his wife’s letters.”
“Oh!” Sir Herbert’s face cleared. “Yes of course. That would be perfectly natural. I have done that from time to time myself. Yes—that is an explanation. Now you must find who the man is that she means. What about that man Monk? Can’t he find him?” Then the moment’s ease slipped away from him. “But there is so little time. Can you ask for an adjournment, a continuance, or whatever it is called?”
Rathbone did not answer.
“It gives me much more ammunition with which to question Mrs. Barker,” he replied instead, then remembered with a chill that it was Faith Barker who had offered the letters to Monk in the conviction they would hang Sir Herbert. Whatever Prudence had meant, her sister was unaware of any secret the letters contained. He struggled to keep his disillusion from his face, and knew he failed.
“There is an explanation,” Sir Herbert said desperately, his fists clenched, his powerful jaw gritted tight. “God damn it—I never had the slightest personal interest in the woman! Nor did
I ever say anything which could …” Suddenly sheer, blind horror filled him. “Oh God!” He stared at Rathbone, terror in his eyes.
Rathbone waited, teetering on the edge of hope.
Sir Herbert swallowed. He tried to speak, but his lips were dry. He tried again.
“I praised her work! I praised it a great deal. Do you think she could have misinterpreted that as admiration for her person? I praised her often!” There was a fine sweat of fear on his lip and brow. “She was the finest nurse I ever had. She was intelligent, quick to learn, precise to obey, and yet not without initiative. She was always immaculately clean. She never complained of long hours, and she fought like a tiger to save a life.” His eyes were fixed on Rathbone’s. “But I swear before God, I never meant anything personal by my praise for her—simply what I said. No more, never more!” He put his head in his hands. “God preserve me from working with young women—young women of good family who expect and desire suitors.”
Rathbone had a very powerful fear that he was going to get his wish—and be preserved from working with anyone at all—although he doubted God had anything to do with it.
“I will do everything I can,” he said with a voice far firmer and more confident than he felt. “Keep your spirits high. There is very much more than a reasonable doubt, and your own manner is one of our strongest assets. Geoffrey Taunton is by no means clear, nor Miss Cuthbertson. And there are other possibilities also—Kristian Beck, for one.”
“Yes.” Sir Herbert rose slowly, forcing himself to regain his composure. Years of ruthless self-discipline finally conquered his inner panic. “But reasonable doubt. Dear Heaven—that would ruin my career!”
“It does not have to be forever,” Rathbone said with complete honesty. “If you are acquitted, the case will remain open. It may be a very short time, a few weeks, before they find the true killer.”
But they both knew that even reasonable doubt had still to be fought for to save Sir Herbert from the gallows—and they had only a few days left.
Rathbone held out his hand. It was a gesture of faith. Sir Herbert shook it, holding on longer than was customary, as if it were a lifeline. He forced a smile which had more courage in it than confidence.
Rathbone left with a greater determination to fight than he could recall in years.
After his testimony Monk left the court, his stomach churning and his whole body clenched with anger. He did not even know against whom to direct it, and that compounded the pain inside him. Had Prudence really been so blind? He did not wish to think of her as fallible to such a monstrous degree. It was so far from the woman for whom he had felt such grief at the crowded funeral in the church at Hanwell. She had been brave, and noble, and he had felt a cleanness inside from having known of her. He had understood her dreams, and her fierce struggle, and the price she had paid for them. Something in him felt at one with her.
And yet he was so flawed himself in his judgment or he would never have loved Hermione. And the very word love seemed inappropriate when he thought of the emotion he had felt, the turmoil, the need, the loneliness. It was not for any real woman, it was for what he had imagined her to be, a dream figure who would fill all his own emptinesses, a woman of tenderness and purity, a woman who both loved and needed him. He had never looked at the reality—a woman afraid of the heights and the depths of feeling, a small, craven woman who hugged her safety to her and was content to stand on the edge of all the heat of the battle.
How could Monk, of all people, condemn Prudence Barrymore for misjudgment?
And yet it still hurt. He strode across Newgate Street regardless of horses shying and drivers shouting at him and a light gig veering out of his way. He was nearly run down by a black landau; the footman riding at the side let fly at Monk a string of language that caused even the coachman to sit a little more upright in surprise.
Without making any deliberate decision, Monk found himself going in the general direction of the hospital, and after twenty minutes’ swift walking, he hailed a hansom and completed the rest of the journey. He did not even know if Hester was on duty or in the nurses’ dormitory catching some well-needed sleep, and he was honest enough to admit he did not care. She was the only person to whom he could confide the confusion and power of his feelings.
As it chanced, she had just fallen asleep after a long day’s duty beginning before seven, but he knew where the nurses’ dormitory was and he strode in with an air of such authority that no one stopped or questioned him until he was at the entrance doorway. Then a large nurse with ginger hair and arms like a navvy stood square in the middle, staring at him grimly.
“I need to see Miss Latterly in a matter of urgency,” he said, glaring back at her. “Someone’s life may depend on the matter.” That was a lie, and he uttered it without a flicker.
“Oh yeah? Whose? Yours?”
He wondered what her regard for Sir Herbert Stanhope had been.
“None of your affair,” he said tartly. “I’ve just come from the Old Bailey, and I have business here. Now out of my way, and fetch Miss Latterly for me.”
“I don’t care if yer’ve come from ’Ell on a broomstick, yer not comin’ in ’ere.” She folded her massive arms. “I’ll go an’ tell ’er as yer ’ere if yer tell me who yer are. She can come and see yer if she feels like it.”
“Monk.”
“Never!” she said in disbelief, looking him up and down.
“That’s my name, not my calling, you fool!” he snapped. “Now tell Hester I’m here.”
She snorted loudly, but she obeyed, and about three minutes later Hester herself came out of the dormitory looking tired, very hastily dressed, and her hair over her shoulder in a long brown braid. He had never seen it down before, and it startled him. She looked quite different, younger and more vulnerable. He had a twinge of guilt for having woken her on what was essentially a selfish errand. In all probability it would make no difference at all to the fate of Sir Herbert Stanhope whether he spoke to her this evening or not.
“What happened?” she said immediately, still too full of exhaustion and sleep to have thought of all the possibilities fear could suggest.
“Nothing in particular,” he said, taking her arm to lead her away from the dormitory door. “I don’t even know if it is going well or badly. I shouldn’t have come, but there was no one else I really wished to speak to. Lovat-Smith has finished his case, and I wouldn’t care to be in Stanhope’s shoes. But then Geoffrey Taunton comes out of it badly too. He has a vile temper, and a record of violence. He was in the hospital at the time—but it’s Stanhope in the dock, and nothing so far is strong enough to change their places.”
They were in front of one of the few windows in the corridor and the late afternoon sun shone in a haze of dusty light over them and in a pool on the floor around their feet.
“Has Oliver any evidence to bring, do you know?” She was too tired to pretend formality where Rathbone was concerned.
“No I don’t. I’m afraid I was short with him. His defense so far is to make Prudence look a fool.” There was pain and anger still tight inside him.
“If she thought Sir Herbert Stanhope would marry her, she was a fool,” Hester said, but with such sadness in her voice he could not be angry with her for it.
“He also suggested that she exaggerated her own medical abilities,” he went on. “And her stories of having performed surgery in the field were fairy tales.”
She turned and stared at him, confusion turning to anger.
“That is not so! She had as good a knowledge of amputation as most of the surgeons, and she had the courage and the speed. I’ll testify. I’ll swear to that, and they won’t shake me, because I know it for myself.”
“You can’t,” he answered, the flat feeling of defeat betrayed in his tone, even his stance.
“I damned well can!” she retorted furiously. “And let go of my arm! I can stand up perfectly well by myself! I’m tired, not ill.”
He kept hold o
f her, out of perversity.
“You can’t testify, because Lovat-Smith’s case is concluded,” he said through clenched teeth. “And Rathbone certainly won’t call you. That she was accurate and realistic is not what he wants to hear. It will hang Sir Herbert.”
“Maybe he should be hanged,” she said sharply, then immediately regretted it. “I don’t mean that. I mean maybe he did kill her. First I thought he did, then I didn’t, now I don’t know what I think anymore.”
“Rathbone still seems convinced he didn’t, and I must admit, looking at the man’s face in the dock, I find it hard to believe he did. There doesn’t seem any reason—not if you think about it intelligently. And he will be an excellent witness. Every time Prudence’s infatuation with him is mentioned, a look of total incredulity crosses his face.”
She gazed at him, meeting his eyes with searching candor.
“You believe him, don’t you?” she concluded.
“Yes—it galls me to concede it, but I do.”
“We will still have to come up with some better evidence as to who did it, or he is going to hang,” she argued, but now there was pity in her, and determination.
He knew it of old, and the memory of it, once so passionately on his behalf, sent a thrill of warmth through him.
“I know,” he said grimly. “And we will have to do it quickly. I’ve exhausted all I can think of with Geoffrey Taunton. I’d better follow what I can with Dr. Beck. Haven’t you learned anything more about him?”
“No.” She turned away, her face sad and vulnerable. The light caught her cheekbones and accentuated the tiredness around her eyes. He did not know what hurt her; she had not shared it with him. It pained him sharply and unexpectedly that she had excluded him. He was angry that he wanted to spare her the burden of searching as well as her nursing duties, and angriest of all that it upset him so much. It should not have. It was absurd—and weak.
“Well, what are you doing here?” he demanded harshly. “In all this time surely you have done more than fetch and carry the slops and wind bandages? For God’s sake, think!”