Execution Dock (12 page)

He stopped, his emotion too strong for the moment. Then he drew in a deep breath.

“I didn't want to talk about my past, and I didn't care about his. For any of us, it's who you are today that matters.”

Hester smiled, looked away, then back again at him. “ Durban was a real person, William,” she said gently. “Good and bad, wise and stupid. Picking out bits to like isn't really liking at all. It isn't friendship, it's comfort for you. You're better than that, whether he was or not. Are your dreams, or Durban 's memory, worth more than the lives of other boys like Fig?” She bit her lip. “Or Scuff?”

He winced. He had been lulled into forgetting how honest she could be, even if her words were harsh.

“I know it's intrusive to examine the whole man,” she said. “Even indecent, when he's dead and cannot defend himself, or explain, or even repent. But the alternative is to let it go, and isn't that worse?”

It was a bitter choice, but if Durban had been careless, or even dishonest, that had to be faced. “Yes,” he conceded. “Pass me the papers. We'll sort them into those we understand, those we don't, and those I expect we never will. I'll get that bastard Phillips, however long or hard the trail. I made the mistake, and I'll undo it.”

“We did,” she corrected him, her face pinched a little. “I let Oliver paint me as an overemotional woman whose childlessness led her to hysterical and ill-thought-out judgments.”

He saw the pain in her face, the self-mockery, and for that he would not forgive Rathbone until he had paid the last ounce, and maybe not even then. That was something else she had lost, the real and precious friendship with Rathbone. Like Monk, she had no close, loving family left. She had lost a brother in the Crimea, her father to suicide, and her mother to a broken heart. Her one surviving brother was a stiff and distant man, not really a friend. One day, when he had time, Monk must go and visit the sister he barely remembered. He did not think they had been close, even when his memory had been whole, and that was probably his fault.

He put the papers down and leaned over, touching Hester gently, then drawing her closer to him and kissing her, then closer again. “There's tomorrow,” he whispered. “Let it be-for now.”

Monk rose early and went to buy the newspapers. He considered not taking them home so Hester would not see how bad they were, and then discarded the idea. She did not need his protection, and probably would not wish for it. It would not mean tenderness to her as much as exclusion. And after both the honesty and the passion of the previous night, she deserved better from him. He thought, with a smile, that perhaps he was beginning to understand women, or at least one woman.

There was nothing else to smile at. When he sat at the breakfast table opposite her, each with their newspapers propped open in front of them, the full ugliness of the situation was extremely clear. Durban was drawn as incompetent, a man whose death saved him from the indignity of having been removed from office for at best a personal vengeance against a particularly grubby criminal on the river, at worst a seriously questionable professional ethic.

Monk himself was painted as little better, an amateur drafted in over the heads of more experienced men. He was out of his depth and beyond his skill. He had been trying too hard to pay a debt that he imagined he owed a friend, but whom in truth he barely knew.

Hester came off more lightly, at first glance. She was portrayed as overemotional, driven by loyalty to her husband and a foolish attachment to a class of child her thwarted maternal instincts had fastened on, and caused her to reach out and cherish, quite inappropriately. But from a woman denied her natural role in society by a misguided devotion to charitable causes, and a certain belligerence that made her unattractive to decent men of her own station, what else could one expect? It should be a lesson to all young ladies of good breeding to remain in the paths that nature and society had set for them. Only then might they expect fulfillment in life. It was immeasurably condescending.

When Hester read it she used some language about the writer and his antecedents that she had learned in her Army days. After several minutes she looked nervously at Monk, and apologized, concerned in case she had shocked him.

He grinned at her, possibly a little bleakly, because the remarks about her had stung him perhaps even more than they had hurt her.

“You'll have to tell me what that means,” he responded. “I think I may have use for some of those expressions myself.”

She colored deeply, and looked away, but the tension eased out of her body, and her hands unknotted in her lap.

The worst thing in the papers actually was a single line suggesting, almost as an afterthought, that possibly the River Police had outlived their usefulness. Perhaps the time had come for them to relinquish any separate identity, and simply come under the command of whatever local force was nearest. They had so badly mishandled the case that Jericho Phillips, were he guilty, had escaped the noose forever, at least for the murder of Walter Figgis. He was now free to continue his trade unmolested. It made a mockery of the law, and that could not be permitted, no matter which well-intentioned but incompetent officer had to be dismissed.

A hot, tight resolution settled in Hester to prove them wrong, but immeasurably more important than that was to prove Monk right. But she was realistic enough to know that that was not necessarily possible. She had no doubt at all that Phillips was capable of murder, or even that he had committed it, if not of Fig, then of others. But the truth was that, in their outrage and their certainty, they had been careless, and they had forgotten the precision of the law, when used by someone like Oliver Rathbone.

And that was another, different kind of pain. It was less urgent: a wide, blind ache that intruded into all sorts of other areas of life, darkening and hurting. The only way to begin again was with her own investigation, which meant at the clinic. And of course that also meant seeing Margaret. Hester had liked Margaret from the first time they had met, when Margaret had been shy and wounded from the repeated humiliation of her mother constantly trying to marry her off to someone suitable-according to her own assessment, not Margaret's, of course. To Margaret's mortification, when they had encountered Rathbone, at some ball or other, Mrs. Ballinger had praised Margaret's virtue to him, in front of Margaret herself, with the all-too-obvious intent of engaging Rathbone's matrimonial interest.

Hester understood with sharp compassion. She would never forget her own family's similar attempts on her behalf. It had made her feel like jetsam, to be cast overboard at the first opportunity. Her acute understanding of Margaret's situation had forged a bond between them. Margaret had found purpose and freedom working in the clinic, and even a sense of her own worth, which no one else had given her, or could now take away.

Then Rathbone had realized that he really did love her. Kindness had nothing to do with it. He was not rescuing her at all. It was his privilege to earn her love in return.

Now, with the acquittal of Jericho Phillips, Hester's closeness with the Rathbones was gone too, tarnished and made uncomfortable.

The long bus ride came to an end and Hester walked the short distance along Portpool Lane, under the huge shadow of the brewery. She went through the door of the rambling tenement houses that were now connected inside to form one large clinic where the sick and injured would be treated, lodged, and nursed if necessary. They were even operated on there if emergency required it and the procedure was comparatively slight, such as the amputation of a finger or toe, the setting of bones, or the stitching of knife wounds. Once or twice there had been the removal of bullets, and once the amputation of a gangrenous foot. The extraction of splinters of various kinds, the repair of dislocations, the occasional difficult birth, and the nursing of bronchitis, fever, pneumonia, and consumption were usual in their daily work. More than one woman had died of a bungled abortion, beyond repair even after their most exhaustive and desperate efforts to save her. There was too much shared triumph and loss to let go of friendship easily.

But as Hester went in through the front door and Bessie greeted her, she felt none of her usual anticipation of warmth. She responded, and then asked Bessie about the previous two days’ happenings, when she had been occupied in court, and could not be there. Of course Bessie knew why she had been absent, as they all did; and telling them the outcome was not something she was looking forward to. Like drinking castor oil, it was better done swiftly.

“We lost,” she said, before Bessie could ask. “Phillips got away with it.”

Bessie was a large woman who wore her hair screwed back fiercely and gripped by pins so tightly Hester had wondered how she could bear it. Bessie looked even angrier than usual, but her eyes were oddly gentle. “I know that,” she said tartly. “That lawyer twisted everything to make it look like yer fault. I ‘eard already.”

That was a complication Hester had not even thought of, divided loyalties in the clinic. More bitter medicine to take. Her chest hurt with the tightness of her breath. “That was Sir Oliver's job, Bessie. We should have got our evidence tight enough so that he couldn't. We weren't sufficiently careful.”

“Yer just gonna let it go, then?” Bessie challenged her, disbelief, pity, and hurt crowding her face all at once.

Hester swallowed. “No. I'm going to go back to the beginning and start again.”

Bessie flashed a brilliant smile, then it disappeared so rapidly it could have been an illusion. “Good. Then yer'll be needin’ me an’ the rest of us ter keep comin’ ‘ere.”

“Yes, please. I would appreciate that very much.”

Bessie grunted. “Lady Rathbone is in the kitchen, givin’ orders, I ‘spect,” she added. “An’ Squeaky's in the office countin’ money.” She was watching Hester carefully, judging her reaction.

“Thank you,” Hester replied with a face as devoid of expression as she could manage, and went to get the encounter done with as soon as possible. Besides, she needed to speak to Squeaky Robinson privately, and at some length.

She swallowed hard and walked along the uneven passage with its twists and its steps up and down until she reached the kitchen. It was a large room, originally intended to serve a family, and it had been added to when the two houses had been turned into one.

She smiled with bitter humor when she remembered how Rathbone had exercised legal skill and some considerable guile in maneuvering Squeaky into yielding his ownership of the brothels, and then taking on the bookkeeping of his own premises as a shelter for the very people he had once owned. Rathbone had left Squeaky no acceptable choice. It had been wildly daring, and from Rathbone's point of view, totally against the spirit of the establishment he had spent his adult life serving. It had also brought him acute moral and emotional pleasure.

But then Hester had also allowed Squeaky little choice in his decision, or as little as she could manage.

Now she was at the kitchen door. Her quick, light step on the wooden boards had alerted Margaret to her coming. Margaret turned with a vegetable knife in her hand. At home she had servants for everything; here she could put her hand to any task that required attention. There was no one else in the room. Hester was not sure if it would have been easier or harder had there been.

“Good morning,” Margaret said quietly. She stood motionless, her shoulders square, chin a little high, eyes direct. In that one look Hester knew that she was not going to apologize or offer even the suggestion, however tacit, that the verdict of the trial had been unjust. She was prepared to defend Rathbone to the hilt. Had she any idea why he had chosen to champion Jericho Phillips? From the angle of her head, the unwavering stare, and the slight rigidity of her smile, Hester guessed that she did not.

“Good morning,” she replied politely. “How are our stores? Do we need flour, or oatmeal?”

“Not for three or four days,” Margaret said. “If the woman with the knife wound in her arm goes home tomorrow, we might last longer. Unless, of course, we get anyone else in. Bessie brought some ham bones this morning, and Claudine brought a string of onions and the bones from a saddle of mutton. We are doing well. I think we should use what money we have for lye, carbolic, vinegar, and a few more bandages. But see what you think yourself.”

There was no need for Hester to check; that would have made the most delicate of implications that she did not believe Margaret capable. Before the Phillips affair neither of them would have thought such conspicuous courtesy necessary.

They discussed the medical supplies, simple as they were: alcohol for cleaning wounds and instruments, cotton pads, thread, bandages, salve, laudanum, quinine for fevers, fortified wines to strengthen and warm. The cautious politeness was in the air like a bereavement.

Hester was relieved to escape to the room where Squeaky Robinson, the short-tempered, much-aggrieved ex-brothel-keeper was doing the accounts and guarding every farthing from frivolous and unnecessary expenditure. One would have thought he had labored for it personally rather than received it, through Margaret, from the charitable of the city.

He looked up from his table as she closed the door behind her. His sharp, slightly lopsided face under its long, moth-eaten-looking hair was full of sympathy.

“Made a mess of it,” he observed, without specifying whom he meant. “Pity that. Bastard should've ‘ad ‘is neck stretched, an’ no mistake. The fact we got a lot o’ money in't much comfort, is it! Not today, any'ow. Mebbe termorrer it'll feel good. Yer can ‘ave five pounds ter get more sheets, if yer like.” That was an extraordinarily generous offer from a man who begrudged a penny, and regarded sheets for street women as being about as necessary as pearl necklaces in the farmyard. It was his oblique way of trying to comfort her.

She smiled at him, and he looked away, embarrassed. He was slightly ashamed of himself for being generous; he was letting his standards slip.