A Sunless Sea (35 page)

“Hester …” What could he say? A tide of embarrassment burned hot up his face.

She smiled, tears in her eyes. “I wasn’t thinking of him,” she said gently. “He was unwise, he trusted an evil man, and I wasn’t there to help. I was too busy following my own somewhat self-concerned conscience in the Crimea. National shame is different.” She looked down at her lap. “Tomorrow I’ll go and see Winfarthing again, and perhaps one or two other people who might know more about the Opium Wars, and the way we fought them.”

“I don’t think you should …,” Monk began. Then he saw the level resolve in her eyes, and his words faded away. She would do it, whatever he said, for her own well-being, just as she had gone to the Crimea without her parents’ approval, and into the streets to create the clinic without his. It would have been very much more comfortable if she were to care more for her own well-being, or for his, certainly for her safety. But then the unhappiness would come in other ways, steadily mounting as she denied who she was and what she believed.

“At least be very careful!” he ended. “Think of Scuff!”

She hesitated, and colored a little. She drew in her breath as if to retaliate, then bit her lip. “I will,” she promised.

H
ESTER BEGAN BY RETURNING
to see Winfarthing. She was obliged to wait nearly an hour before he finished treating patients, then he gave her his entire attention. As usual, his office was littered with books and papers. A very small cat was curled up on the most thoroughly scattered heap, as if it had intentionally made them into a bed for itself. It did not stir when Hester sat down on the chair nearest to it.

Winfarthing did not appear to have noticed. He looked tired and unhappy. His thick hair was standing up on end where he had run his fingers through it.

“I don’t have anything that will help,” he said before she had time to ask. “I’d have told you if I had.”

She recounted to him what they had learned about Dinah and about Zenia Gadney.

“Good God!” he said with amazement, his face crumpled in an expression of profound pity. “I would do anything for her that I could, but what is there? If she didn’t kill the woman, then who did?” His expression
filled with disgust. “I have no great love for politicians, or respect, either, but I find it very difficult to believe any one of them would cold-bloodedly murder Lambourn just to delay the Pharmacy Act. It will come sooner or later—probably sooner, whatever they do. Is there really so much money to be made in a year or two that it’s worth a man’s life? Not to mention a man’s soul?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she answered. “There has to be more to it, far more.”

He looked at her curiously. “What? Something that Lambourn knew and would have put in his report?”

“Don’t you think so?” She was uncertain now, fumbling for answers. She did not want Dinah to be guilty, or Joel Lambourn to be an incompetent suicide. Was that what was driving her, rather than reason? She saw the thought far too clearly in Winfarthing’s face, and felt the slight heat burn up her own cheeks.

“Lambourn’s suicide doesn’t make sense,” she said defensively. “The physical evidence is wrong.”

He ignored the argument. Perhaps it was irrelevant now anyway. “What are you thinking of?” he asked instead. “Something he discovered about the sale of opium? Smuggling? No one in Britain cares about the East India Company smuggling off the coast of China.” He snapped his fingers in the air in a gesture of dismissal. “China could be on Mars, for all it means to most of us—except their tea, silk, and porcelain, of course. But what happens there is nothing to the man in the street. Theft? In any moral sense it’s all theft: corruption, violence, and the poisoning of half a nation simply because we have the means and the desire to do it, and it’s absurdly profitable.”

“I don’t know!” Hester said again, a little more desperately. “There has to be something we do care about. We can butcher foreigners and find a way to justify it to ourselves but we can’t steal from our own, and we certainly can’t betray them.”

“And have we, Hester?” he said quietly. “What makes you think Lambourn discovered something like that? We all know that we introduced opium into China to pay for the luxuries we buy from them; we smuggle it into their country and it is killing them, an inch at a time.
They go through caverns of the soul, measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. Read Coleridge—or De Quincey!”

“ ‘A sunless sea,’ ” she repeated. “That sounds like imprisonment, like drowning. How bad is real dependency on opium?”

He looked at her with sudden concentration, his eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask? Why now?”

“We don’t smoke it like the Chinese, we eat it, take it in medicines mixed with lots of other things,” she answered slowly. “It’s the only cure we have for the worst pain.”

“I know that, girl. What are you saying?”

“I met a woman in the docklands who runs a clinic for badly injured navvies and sailors. She showed me a syringe with a hollow needle that can put it straight into the blood, if you want to. That kills pain far more swiftly, and thoroughly. Less opium but more effect.”

Winfarthing nodded slowly. “And more dependency,” he growled. “Of course. Be careful, Hester. Be very careful. Opium addiction’s a wicked thing. You’re right, it’s a sea in which a million men can drown at once, and still each one do it alone. Give it just for pain, then just to get to the next day, finally to stave off the madness. Good men use it on others to ease unbearable suffering, evil ones to create a passion from which few escape.”

“Who has these needles?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“No. I don’t even know if there are many or few. I don’t know if it has anything to do with Dr. Lambourn’s death or not. No one seems to know what was in his report.”

Winfarthing sat up, his huge body stiff, his eyes wide. “Is that what you think this is about? Not the Pharmacy Act, or the Opium Wars, but someone creating a sickness only they can treat?”

“I don’t know,” she said again.

“My dear, people will call you a liar, a traitor to your country for even suggesting such things,” he said gently. “They will defend the perpetrators because it is not easy for us to admit that we have been deceived. No one gives up his delusion of self-worth willingly. Some prefer even to die.”

“Or to kill?” she said quickly. “Silence the voice that challenges their beliefs? It’s a very old thought, to punish a blasphemer, isn’t it? It could be an easy justification to make.”

“If somebody had been stoned I might accept that.” He shook his head. “To slit a man’s wrists and make him look like a suicide is not an act of righteous anger, Hester. It is cold-blooded; the sort of thing a man does to protect his own interests, not anyone else’s.”

She sat silently, picturing Joel Lambourn alone in the darkness on One Tree Hill.

“To do what was done to Zenia Gadney is the act of a man without even humanity,” Winfarthing went on. “And to do it in order to condemn someone else is beyond even a lunatic to justify.”

“I believe it was done out of self-interest to protect a fortune made, and still being made, in the opium business.” She refused to give up.

“Protect it from what?” he asked

“I already told you I don’t know!” She felt confused and defensive, as if a horrible truth were slipping out of her hands but leaving even uglier lies in its place. “But do you think Lambourn was a failure and a suicide?” she demanded. “Are you trying to prevent me stirring up something embarrassing—at the cost of Dinah Lambourn’s life?”

A sharp unhappiness filled his face, and she knew she had hurt him.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “That wasn’t fair, and I wish I hadn’t said it. I feel helpless. I know there’s something terribly wrong, and I have too little time to make sense of it.”

He made a small gesture with his hand, dismissing her accusation. “You haven’t changed, have you? Haven’t learned.” He dropped his voice a little and there was a great gentleness in his face. “I’m glad. Some people should never grow old—not inside. But be careful, girl. If there really is something to this, then it is very bad indeed, and very dangerous.” He leaned across to the desk and picked up a pen and a piece of paper. He scribbled a name and address and passed it to her.

“This is a man who helped Lambourn. He asked a lot of questions about opium, its use and its dangers. He works among the poor, scraping a living the best he can. He may not be easy to find. He’s erratic,
happy one day, wretched the next, but he’s a good man. Be careful who you ask for him.”

She took the paper and glanced at it. Alvar Doulting. It was a name she did not know. “Thank you,” she said, putting it into her small reticule. “I’ll see if I can find him.”

I
T TOOK HER WELL
into the next day before she at last found Alvar Doulting, working in a room next to a warehouse down by St. Saviour’s Dock. He had half a dozen patients, suffering mostly deep bruises and crushed or broken bones. With only the briefest of introductions, merely a mention of the Crimea, she began to help him.

He was a young man, earnest and pale, perhaps from exhaustion and the sudden, harsh change in the weather. His lean face was both powerful and sensitive, at the moment marred by a growth of stubble and deep lines of weariness. He wore ragged clothes, several layers of them to try to keep warm, even a woolen scarf instead of a tie or cravat around his neck.

He watched her for only a moment or two before seeing that she was experienced with wounds, and that the obvious poverty and physical dirtiness of the patients were of no importance to her. She noticed only the pain, and the dangers, first of bleeding and then of gangrene, always of shock, and—at this time of year—the cold.

They worked with rags, makeshift bandages made from torn strips of fabric, splints fashioned from anything that was strong enough, cheap brandy given both as a drink to dull pain and as a way to clean wounds before stitching them with needles and gut. He had little opium, and he used it only on the worst cases.

It was more than two hours later when they were alone and there was finally time to speak.

They sat in his tiny office cluttered with books and piles of papers, which at a glance looked like notes on patients he was possibly too tired or too busy to trust to memory. She remembered doing the same. There was a small wood-burning stove in one corner and on it a kettle. He offered her tea and she took it gratefully.

“Thank you for your help,” he said, handing her the steaming tin mug.

She dismissed his gratitude with a gesture so tiny he might not even have seen it. She did not waste time with preamble.

“I’m trying to save Joel Lambourn’s widow from being hanged,” she said bluntly. “I don’t believe she killed anyone, but I don’t know who did.”

He was sitting on a makeshift stool. He looked up at her with hopelessness in his eyes, and a pity so deep he did not attempt to express it in words.

“You can’t save her,” he said simply. “You’re fighting a war nobody’s going to win. We ruined the Chinese, now we’re ruining ourselves.” He gave a bitter little laugh. “A little drink of opium to still the baby’s crying, ease the stomachache, get a little sleep. A deeper draft of it to dull the agony of wounds for the soldier, the man with the crushed leg, with the kidney stones he can’t pass.”

His face twisted sharply. “A pipe full for the man whose life is a gray drudgery, the one who’d rather be dead than give up his escape into dreams.” His voice dropped. “And in a few cases, a hollow needle and a thin glass vialful into a vein, and for a while hell becomes heaven—but just awhile—then you need some more.”

He blinked. “The blood spilt and the profit made on this drug will drown you. Believe me, I know. I lost my home, my practice, and the woman I was going to marry.”

She felt fear closing in as if the shadows were darker around her, and yet a surge of strength also; she had finally found someone who wasn’t offering her denials.

“What did Joel Lambourn find out that was worth killing him to hide?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Doulting replied. “All he told me about was the number of children who died unnecessarily, because packages were not labeled. Their mothers gave them gripe water, teething medicine, dosages against colic and diarrhea that didn’t say how much or how often it should be taken. The figures are terrible, and its names are proprietary brands we all know and think we can trust.”

“What else?” she pressed, sipping from her tea. It was too strong, and certainly not fresh, but it was hot. It reminded her of her army days.

“He didn’t tell me,” Doulting assured her. “He knew someone was trying to stop him, to make him look incompetent. He was careful. Everything was documented.” His face was very pale as if misery and guilt crowded him. Every now and again he winced, as if he too had his own pain to battle. “I tried collecting information myself, and I gave him all I had. I asked questions, took notes. Some of the stories would break your heart.”

“Where are your notes?”

“My office was burned, and all my papers and records were lost. Even my instruments, my scalpels and needles, all my medicines—everything was destroyed. I had to start again in a new place, begging and borrowing what I could.”

Hester was cold, chilled from the inside. “Do you know who did it?”

“Names? No. Intent, I’m not sure. More than simply to stop the report that would regulate the sale of opium. It will cost to measure and label everything, and require that all medicines are sold only by people qualified to say what they are, but not that much. There are those who consider it to be limiting the freedom of poor people to buy the only relief from pain that we know, but it won’t. What they’re really concerned about is their own freedom to sell it to the desperate as often and as easily as possible.

“But there’s no point in your asking me who ‘they’ are, because Lambourn didn’t tell me. Said I was safer not to know it. But I’m certain he knew.”

“But it’s someone here in London?” Hester persisted.

Doulting nodded, his face haunted by other people’s pain. “Killing Lambourn, gutting poor Zenia Gadney and seeing Dinah Lambourn hang for it would not add more weight to their souls. Perhaps there is nothing left that would.”