Death of a Stranger (5 page)

“Yes, of course it matters,” Hester responded, wondering how to answer the woman, little more than a girl, without overwhelming her with facts she could neither understand nor believe. “It matters when anyone is killed.”

“Then help us!” Livia pleaded. “You know these women. Tell me something!”

“No, I don’t know them,” Hester cut across her. “I do what I can for their injuries… that’s all.”

Livia’s eyes were wide, uncomprehending. “But…”

“They come in through that door.” Hester nodded to the street entrance. “Sometimes I have seen them before, sometimes I haven’t. They are either injured with cuts, bruises, or broken bones, or they are in a critical state of disease, most often syphilis or tuberculosis, but other things as well. I don’t ask more than their first names, merely for something to call them. I do what I can, and often that is not much. When they are well enough, they go away again.”

“But don’t you know how they were injured?” Livia pressed, her voice rising. “You must know what happened!”

Hester looked down at the tabletop. “I don’t need to ask. Either a customer lost his temper, or they kept a bit of the money for themselves and their pimps beat them,” she replied. “And now and again they took a bit of trade in someone else’s patch and got into a fight that way. The competition is pretty rough. Whatever it is, it really doesn’t make any difference to what I need to do.”

Livia obviously did not understand. It was a world, even a language, beyond her experience or imagination. “What is a… pimp?”

“The man who looks after them,” Hester replied. “And takes most of what they earn.”

“But why?” There was no comprehension in Livia’s eyes.

“Because it’s dangerous for a woman on her own,” Hester explained. “Most of them have no choice. The pimps own the buildings, in a way they almost own the streets. They keep other people from hurting the women, but if they think they’re lazy, or cheating them, then they beat the women themselves, usually not badly enough to scar their faces or make them unfit to work. Only a fool damages his own property.”

Livia shook her head as if to get rid of the idea. “Then who hurts them when they come here to you?”

“Customers, perhaps, who are drunk and don’t know their own strength, or just lose their tempers,” Hester said. “Other women sometimes. Quite often they come because of disease.”

“Lots of people get tuberculosis,” Livia pointed out. “All sorts of people. I had a cousin who died of it. She was only twenty-eight. They call it the White Death, don’t they.” That was a statement. “And the other is…” She would not speak the words. Her own embarrassment at the subject was too deep to allow such candor. At last she let herself look around the room at the whitewashed walls and the cupboards, some of them locked.

Hester saw her glance. “Carbolic, lye, potash, vinegar,” she said. “It’s good for cleaning. And tobacco. We keep that locked.”

Livia’s eyes widened. “Tobacco? You let people use tobacco? Even women?”

“For burning,” Hester explained. “It’s a good fumigant, especially if we have lice or ticks, or things like that.”

Livia’s face twisted as if she could smell the reek of it already. “I just want to know what they saw,” she begged. “What happened to my father?”

Hester studied her, the youth in the soft curves of her cheek and throat, the unlined skin, the earnest gaze. But already the shadow of grief had touched her; there was a hollowness, a papery quality around her eyes and a tightness to her mouth. The world was a different place from the one it had been three days before, and that innocence could not be found again.

Hester struggled for something to say that would stop this girl, for that is all she was in spite of her years, and send her back to her own life to believe whatever she wanted to. Unless there were a trial, she would never have to know what her father had been doing in Leather Lane. “Let the police find out, if they can,” she said aloud.

“They’re finding nothing!” Livia answered indignantly. “These women won’t talk to them! Why should they? It’s someone they know who killed him. They’re probably afraid to tell.”

“What was your father like?” Hester asked, then instantly regretted it. It was a stupid question. What does any woman say her dead father was like? Everything she wanted him to be, reality blurred by loss, loyalty, the sense of decency that says you speak no ill of the dead. “I mean, why might he have come to Leather Lane at night?” she amended.

Livia looked slightly embarrassed and defensive. “I don’t know. It must have been business of some kind.”

“What does your mother say?”

“We don’t discuss it,” Livia responded, as if it were the most usual thing to say. “Mama is an invalid. We try to keep anything troublesome or distressing from her. Jarvis… my brother… says he must have been going to meet someone, possibly to do with navvies, or something like that. My father owned a railway company. They have a new track which is almost completed. It will go all the way from the dockside here in London up to Derby. And we have a factory near Liverpool as well, for making railway wagons. Perhaps he was seeing someone about laborers, or steel, or that kind of thing?”

Hester could not meet her eyes and answer. That was not the sort of business people conducted in Leather Lane at night, but what use was there in pointing that out to Baltimore’s daughter? “These women wouldn’t know about that,” she said instead. “They scrape the best living they can by selling their bodies, and they pay a heavy price for it…” She saw the incomprehension again. “You think they should be in factory labor? Sweatshops? Do you know what that pays?”

Livia hesitated. “No…”

“Or the hours?”

“No… but…”

“It’s honest, right?” There was an edge of scorn in her voice she had not intended, and she saw the sting of it in Livia’s face. “They can’t afford to be honest at one and sixpence a day for fourteen or fifteen hours’ work,” she said more gently, but still with the underlying anger-not for Livia but for the facts. She saw Livia’s eyes widen and her throat constrict. “Especially if they’ve got children to keep, or debts to pay,” she added. “They can make a pound or two every night on the streets, even after giving their pimp his cut.”

“But…” Livia started again, looking toward the curled-up outline of Fanny in the nearest bed.

“The risks? Injuries, disease, the unpleasantness of it?” Hester asked. “Go into a sweatshop sometime, see if you think it’s any better. They’re cramped, ill-lit, dirty, overcrowded. There’s just as much disease there. A different kind, maybe, but I’m not sure it’s any better. Dead is dead, whatever the cause.”

“Can’t you help me at all?” Livia said softly, shock and something like humility in her face. “At least ask them?”

“I can ask,” Hester promised, overwhelmed with pity again. “But please, don’t hope for much. I don’t think anyone knows. And of course, if it was business of some sort, it would be well away from any of these women. The police say he was found in Abel Smith’s… house… in Leather Lane, but Abel swears it wasn’t any of his women who killed him. Perhaps they are telling the truth, and he was killed by whoever he went to see?” She hated telling what she thought was almost certainly a lie. But very possibly no one would ever know who had killed Baltimore, let alone why, so perhaps his daughter would be able to cling to her illusions.

“That would be it,” Livia said, grasping hope as if it were a lifeline. “Thank you for your logic, your good sense, Mrs. Monk.”

Hester pressed her advantage, and it was at least in part for Livia as well. “Perhaps your brother would stop asking the police so hard to drive the women off the streets?” she suggested. “It may have nothing to do with any of them, and harrying them will make them even less likely to tell you anything.”

“But if they don’t know anything…” Livia started.

“They may have seen nothing,” Hester conceded. “But they will get to hear. Word passes quickly in places like this.”

“I don’t know. Jarvis doesn’t listen to-”

Before she could finish the train of her thought the street door swung open wide and a young man shouted for help, panic harsh in his voice. His face was white, his hair streaked across his brow in the rain, and his thin clothes were sodden and sticking to his narrow chest.

Livia swung around, and Hester rose to her feet just as a far larger man came staggering in holding a woman in his arms. She was so pale her skin looked waxy in the gaslight, and her eyes were closed, her head lolling as if she were completely insensible.

“Put her there.” Hester pointed to the larger, empty table.

“ ’Aven’t yer got a bed?” The large man stifled a sob. His face was twisted with emotion; anger was so much less painful than the terror which obviously engulfed him.

Hester was accustomed to all kinds of feelings pouring out beyond control, and she made no judgment of them, no response to those that were unfair.

“I need to see what is wrong,” she explained. “I have to have a firm surface, and the light. Put her there.”

He obeyed, his eyes imploring her to help, to find some answer beyond his imagining.

Hester looked at the girl lying in front of her. The man had put her down as gently as he could, but it was still clear that her bones were broken. Her arms and legs lay awkwardly; the flesh was swelling and the bruises were darkening even as Hester watched. The veins in the girl’s neck and shoulders were blue, her skin gray-white. She was breathing but her eyelids did not flutter at all.

“Can yer ’elp ’er?” the man demanded, the youth now beside him.

“I’ll try,” Hester promised. “What happened? Do you know?”

“Someone beat the ’ell out of ’er!” he exploded. “Can’t yer see that? Yer blind or summink?”

“Yes, I can see that,” Hester said, looking at the woman, not at him. “I wanted to know how long ago, how you found her, if she’s been stabbed or cut. If you can tell me that without my moving her, so much better. I can see how her arms and legs are. What about her body? Did you see where she was punched or kicked?”

“Gawd, lady! D’yer think I’d’a let it ’appen if I’ad? I’d’a killed the b-bastard if I’d b-bin there!” he stuttered in a futile effort to find a word bad enough for the rage that ate him. “If yer can’t ’elp ’er, at least don’ ’urt ’er any more, yer ’ear me?”

Hester put her hands very gently on the woman’s arms, feeling for the grating edges of bone where the flesh was already misshapen and damaged. She found one break in the left arm, two in the right. The left knee was swollen and at least two small bones were broken in the right foot. The collarbone was broken on one side, but there was little she could do about that. Cutting the cloth of the girl’s bodice, she exposed a purple bruise at least six inches wide across the ribs and stretching down below the waist. This was what she feared-it meant internal bleeding she could do nothing to help. She had a fair knowledge of anatomy, mostly learned in the battlefield while looking at the actuality of torn-open bodies, not the neater, more leisurely education of medical school, or dissections of the dead. Still, she knew where the major arteries were and what could happen to them when damaged.

“Do something! Damn yer!” the man said desperately, shifting his immense weight from one foot to the other and back again in his fever of anxiety.

Without answering, Hester continued to learn as much as she could without moving the broken body of the woman. She wished Margaret were there to help. Bessie was kind, but she had not the inner calm, the steady hands that Margaret had. She identified too much with the women, having lived all her life among them. She saw the pain and the fear from the inside, and it robbed her of the dispassion needed for practical help in such critical injuries as these.

“Go and find Mr. Lockhart,” she ordered, and saw Bessie’s face flood with relief that she could do something useful and at the same time escape the pain. She was out of the door without even grasping for her hat.

Hester turned to Livia, ignoring the man.

“Miss Baltimore!” she said firmly. “Would you be good enough to pass me that roll of bandage on the table? And then fetch a splint from the cupboard over there.” She pointed with her other hand. “In fact, fetch three.”

Very slowly, Livia stood up. She looked pale enough to faint.

“If you would do it quickly, please,” Hester instructed, holding out her hand.

Livia obliged, still moving as if in a dream, fumbling with the bandage, rolling in the ends, then going to the cupboard. She returned after a moment with three splints and passed one across.

Hester took it from her. “Now, would you hold the girl’s shoulders, please? Lean on them. I need them to remain still.”

“What?”

“Just do it! Lean your weight on her shoulders. Be firm, but gentle.” She looked up. “Go on! I’m going to set these bones so they heal as straight as possible. I need someone to hold her still. It’s far kinder to do it while she is insensible anyway. Can you imagine how it will hurt if we leave it until she regains herself?”

Livia stood frozen to the spot.

“You don’t catch diseases that way. Just do it!” Hester snapped. “I can’t set it by myself. You came here to find out who killed your father. If you can’t even bring yourself to look at this world, how are you going to learn anything about it? You want these people to help you? You’d better give a little help yourself.”

Slowly, still looking as if she were going to pass out, Livia put her hands on the young woman’s shoulders and leaned forward, resting her own body’s weight on them.

“Thank you,” Hester acknowledged. Then she carefully took the lower arm and, feeling the sickening grating of bone, pulled the limb straight. The youth handed her the splint and the bandages, his hands gentle as he laid them by the limb, and she bound them together as firmly as she dared. Fortunately there was no broken skin, so there was no possibility of infection from dirt, but she knew very well that there might be considerable internal bleeding which she could not reach or stop.

With Livia’s shocked and reluctant help she set the other bones as well. The large man stoked the fire and fetched more water. Hester made poultices for the broken ribs and collarbone, and placed them gently on the injuries.