A Breach of Promise (22 page)

“Thank you, Athol,” she said helplessly. It was impossible to judge from her expression whether she was relieved or terrified.

The maid beyond her was still looking at Hester.

Monk swiveled back to her.

The man in the bed was sitting up, turned towards them. His skin was flushed, his face appallingly disfigured. Monk felt a rush of pity for him that was almost physical.

“I know you will, Mr. Sheldon.” Hester’s voice was soft but very clear, very insistent. “And it will be a very safe place….”

“Good—good….” he began.

“But it will not help if you try to force Gabriel into it before he is ready,” she continued. “A prison is simply a place you don’t want to be and from which you cannot escape.”

“Really! Miss Latterly—” Athol protested.

“Stop speaking about me as if I am not here, Athol.”

Gabriel had spoken for the first time. His face was damaged beyond healing, but his voice was still beautiful, clear and of unusual character and timbre.

“I’ve lost an arm, not my wits. I don’t want wrapping away from reality as if I were a case of nervous collapse or hysteria. Pretending Cawnpore never happened isn’t going to take the nightmares out of my sleep, and I don’t want to forget my friends as if they never lived or died. It would be a betrayal. They don’t deserve that. God knows, they don’t!” Suddenly the anger and the overwhelming pain drenched his voice and was raw in the room, silencing even Athol.

Only Hester had seen war as he had. Monk knew even he was excluded, for all the poverty and death and daily intolerable misery he had seen in the city slums not more than a mile from where they stood. But he felt grateful for it, not angry, not put aside.

He looked at Hester, not smiling at her with his lips, but willing her to understand that he knew what she was doing, and that she was right, and that he admired her intensely for it. Gabriel Sheldon must need desperately to speak openly to someone. One can wrap the truth in palatable euphemisms for
only so long, then it chokes in the throat and the lies suffocate. One ends in hating those who force the deceit by their expectancy, their fear, their cowardice, their sheer lack of understanding of the reality of pain and loss.

“Perhaps we should go downstairs?” Monk said aloud. “I am sure the matters about which I consulted Miss Latterly can wait a while longer.”

“Oh …” Athol had apparently forgotten who he was. “Good … good. Yes, perhaps we should. Talk about something else, what? Would you like a glass of whiskey, Mr.? …”

“Monk. Thank you.” He turned and followed Athol across the landing and towards the stairs. He wanted to stay and talk to Hester, but he knew it was impossible now.

However, she surprised him. He had barely closed the withdrawing room door, and Perdita asked the butler to bring the decanter, when Hester came in as well.

“Is he all right?” Perdita said immediately, her voice rapid, the decanter forgotten.

“Yes,” Hester assured her with a softness around her mouth which was almost a smile. “Don’t worry for him. These memories are bound to intrude at times. They would with all of us.”

Athol frowned and took half a step forward, but Perdita seemed unaware of him; her attention was entirely upon Hester.

“It isn’t in me,” she whispered. “I’ve never seen anything really terrible. I feel a thousand miles away from him, as if there were an ocean between us and I don’t know how to cross it. I don’t even understand. I don’t have nightmares.”

“Don’t you?” Hester looked doubtful. “Didn’t you feel shattered, terrified, broken inside—”

“Miss Latterly!” Athol said sharply.

“No!” Monk put his hand on Athol’s arm, his fingers gripping hard enough to silence him.

“… when you saw Gabriel for the first time after he came home?” Hester finished.

“Well …” The memory was so clear in Perdita’s face, her mouth pulled as if the pain were physical inside her. She
struggled for words and did not know which to choose. “Well … I …” Her eyes filled with tears. “Yes … I felt … just like that.”

“Haven’t you forgotten sometimes, and woken up as if it were all just the same as before, then remembered?” Hester asked. “And had to live it all over again?”

“Yes!” Suddenly Perdita knew; she grasped the reality of it as if it could save her from drowning. “Yes, I have.”

“Then you know what nightmares are like,” Hester assured her. “It is that same shock of seeing and feeling all over again, just as sharp as the first time, only it happens again and again.”

“Poor Gabriel. Do you think if I read”—she looked at Hester with desperate earnestness, stumbling towards knowledge—“if I read the history of India, as you said, that I shall be able to listen to him and be of some use?”

“I really don’t think—” Athol began.

Perdita swung around on him. “Oh, be quiet!” she said sharply. “I don’t want to hear about all their tortures and deaths. I’d much rather imagine the world is all as safe as we are here and nothing really unspeakable ever happens. But it isn’t true, and in my heart I know that. If I try to stay a child forever, I shall lose Gabriel.”

“Nonsense, my dear—”

“Don’t tell me it’s nonsense!” She stood still with her hands straight by her sides, her fists clenched. “He has to be able to speak properly to survive. If it isn’t to me, it will be to Hester. It certainly won’t be to you! You don’t know anything more about India than I do! Not about the reality of it, the heat and dust and disease, the flies and the cruelty, the death. You don’t know what happened to him. Neither do I … but I’m going to find out!”

“You are overtired,” Athol said, nodding with assurance. “It is hardly surprising. You have had a most distressing time. Any woman would—”

“Stop it!” she said loudly, her voice cracking she was so close to tears. “Stop talking at me as if I were feeble! I am! I know I am! Hester has been out to the Crimea and nursed
dying men, faced bullets and swords, seen atrocities we haven’t even read about in our nice ironed newspapers the butler brings us on a tray. And what have I done? Sat at home painting silly pictures and stitching samplers and mending the linen. Well, I refuse to stay useless! I’m—I’m terrified!”

Athol was appalled. He had no idea what to say or do. He stared at her, then at Hester with a mixture of anger and appeal. He loathed her for precipitating this crisis, and yet he needed her to cope with it, which he resented profoundly.

Monk was waiting for Hester to show her impatience with Perdita. She was quite right; she was useless and had been hiding from reality like a child.

“Being terrified doesn’t matter,” Hester said confidently, walking forward to stand beside Perdita. “So are most of us. It isn’t what you feel, it’s what you do that counts. Gabriel won’t mind you being frightened, then he’ll know you understand at least something of it. Nobody understands it all.”

“You do.”

Hester laughed. “Nonsense! I simply know what it feels like to see pain you can’t help, to be terrified yourself, overwhelmed and hideously uncomfortable in body, and so tired you haven’t even the strength to weep. If you haven’t felt that yet, one day you will.” She took her by the arm. “Now have a stiff sherry or something and go up to him.”

“But it’s you he wants to talk to,” Perdita protested. “You understand. He doesn’t want to have to explain to someone who knows nothing.” There was reluctance in every line of her.

“Frightened?” Hester said with a smile.

“Yes!” Perdita pulled back physically.

“So now is the time to have courage,” Hester pointed out. “Imagine how much worse soldiers must feel at the order to charge. What is the worst that can happen to you? Your husband will think less of you? You will still have all your arms and legs. You will not bleed or—”

“That’s enough!” Athol said sharply. “You exceed yourself, Miss Latterly!”

Perdita gulped and then swung around very deliberately and glared at him.

“She is quite right! I am going up to see Gabriel. Please don’t wait for me. I don’t know when I shall be down.” And without stopping to see his response, or Hester’s, she marched out of the room and they heard her feet cross the hall floor, sharp and determined.

“Have some whiskey,” Monk suggested to Athol, although it sounded like an offer. He felt enormously proud of Hester, as if he had had some part in her actions, which was absurd. But they were friends, closer in ways than many a man and wife. They had shared extraordinary triumphs and disasters; they knew each other, both the best and the worst. He trusted her above anyone else. There was a way in which friendship was the deepest and the best of bonds.

Athol took the whiskey and drank it, then poured himself another. He did not think to offer Monk one. It was not rudeness, he was simply too lost in his own perplexity.

Hester turned to Monk. She had not the slightest idea what had been going through his mind or his heart.

“Do you still care to discuss the case which concerns you?” she asked as if they had only just left the subject a few moments ago.

He did not. There was really nothing to say. But on the other hand, he did not want to leave yet.

“If you can spare the time, I should,” he answered.

“Certainly.” She turned to Athol. “I shall be upstairs if I am needed, Mr. Sheldon, but I think I will not be, at least until bedtime.”

“What? Oh. Yes, I think you have done quite enough for one day.” He was displeased, and he intended her to know it.

Monk watched her closely and saw no sign of embarrassment or doubt in her face.

She led the way out of the room and up the stairs to the small sitting room she shared with the gaunt lady’s maid, Martha Jackson. They sat in the deep, chintz-covered armchairs and he told her about his fruitless search for information which
might help Rathbone, mentioning that apparently Melville had studied abroad, because no one in England knew of him until about five years ago. He also told her the story of Barton Lambert and the unnamed lord who had been involved with the flawed building plans.

None of it mattered insofar as he expected her to offer any helpful remark; it was simply good to clear his own thoughts by putting them into words, and he was comfortable sitting with her.

It was almost an hour later when Martha Jackson came in. At first Monk was annoyed. It was an intrusion. But she was an agreeable woman. There was an honesty to her which pleased him, and he sensed the quiet courage to bear sorrow without complaint that seemed marked in the lines of her face. There was no bitterness in her mouth, no self-pity.

It was Hester who raised the subject of Martha’s brother’s children and their deformities—and the fact that no one now knew their whereabouts.

“How long ago?” Monk asked, turning to Martha.

“Twenty-one years,” she replied, the hope she had allowed for a moment dying out of her eyes. She had been living in the past, telling him about it, talking as if it were only recently, when it was still possible to do something. Now it was foolish even to think of it.

He was startled. Samuel would have been an elder brother. It was a hard thing. He felt for her as he watched her tired face with the grief washing back into it and the realization of pain lost in the past, irretrievable now, children who could not be found, helped or given the love which had been missed too long ago.

He looked quickly at Hester. She was watching him steadily, her eyes so direct he had the feeling she was seeing his mind and his heart as clearly as anyone else might have seen his outward features. Surprisingly, it was not an intrusion and he did not resent it in the slightest.

What he resented was the fact that he would let her down.
He could not do what she wanted, and he knew it as exactly as if he had heard the words.

Martha looked down at her hands, knotted in her lap. Then she made herself smile at Monk. “It wouldn’t matter even if I could find them,” she said quietly. “What could I do to help? I couldn’t take them then, and I couldn’t now. I just wish I knew. I … I wish they knew that they had somebody … that there was someone who belonged to them, who cared.”

“I’ll look into it,” Monk said quietly, knowing he was a fool. “It may not be impossible.”

Hope gleamed in Martha’s eyes. “Will you?” Then it faded again. “But I have very little money saved….”

“I don’t think I can succeed,” he said honestly. “And I wouldn’t charge for failure,” he lied. He avoided Hester’s eyes although he could feel her gazing at him, feel the warmth as if it were sunlight, hot on his cheek. “Please don’t hope. It is very unlikely. I’ll simply try.”

“Thank you, Mr. Monk,” Martha said as levelly as she could. “It is very good of you … indeed.”

He stood up. It was not good at all, it was idiotic. Next time he saw Hester, he would tell her just how ridiculous it was in the plainest terms.

“Save your thanks till I bring you something useful,” he said rather less generously. He felt guilty now. He had done it for Hester, and he would never be able to help this woman. “Good day, Miss Jackson. It is past time I was leaving. I must report to Sir Oliver. Good night, Hester.”

She stood up and moved closer to him, smiling. “I shall accompany you to the door. Thank you, William.”

He shot her a glance which should have frozen her and seemed to have no effect whatever.

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