The Shifting Tide (33 page)

He had never realized what that meant until now. He remembered some of their early conversations with a stab of self-disgust. He had condescended to her, as if she were a woman finding a second-best kind of career to fill in the space where her emotional fulfillment ought to have been. And she was stronger and better than any other human being he knew.

If she died in Portpool Lane she would leave an emptiness in his life that nothing else would ever fill.

The hansom stopped and he realized with a jolt that he was at Margaret’s home. He got out, standing in the rain to pay the driver, then ran across the footpath and up the stairs to pull the bell at the door.

The footman answered, but regretted to tell him that Miss Ballinger was out and he could not say when she would return.

Rathbone was bereft. What if she had ignored instruction and gone to the clinic after all? Then she would be in as much danger as Hester. She would suffer horribly. He would never see her again, never marry her. Whatever happened to the rest of London, or England, his own personal future was suddenly cold and dark. How could anyone else compare with her? That was a stupid thought. There were no comparisons. However virtuous, gentle, funny, or clever anyone else might be, it was Margaret he loved.

The footman was waiting patiently.

Rathbone thanked him and left, back out into the teeming rain and the darkness. The hansom had already gone. It hardly mattered. He would walk home. If it took an hour and he was soaked to the skin, he would not notice it.

Rathbone could not sleep, and in the morning he had his manservant draw him a hot bath, but he could not enjoy it. By half past eight he was breakfasted and had sent a note to his office to say he would be late. Then he looked for a hansom to take him back to Margaret’s house. He could not even contemplate what he was going to do if she was still not there. He could not think of going to the clinic to find her, nor could he think of not going. He would give her money, and then he had to go and find this wretched thief of Monk’s and see what could be done to serve justice. At least if anyone had the skill for that, it was he.

The traffic was heavy again. It was the time of day when people were going into the city, tradesmen were beginning their rounds, everybody seemed to be jamming the roads.

At the first traffic congestion everything came to a standstill. Two coachmen were arguing over whose fault it was that a horse had tried to bolt and broken his harness. Rathbone waited a short while, then finally paid his own driver and got out to walk. It was no more than three quarters of a mile farther, and the effort it would take was better than waiting cooped up and sitting.

This time he was more fortunate. The footman informed him that Miss Ballinger was taking breakfast, and he would enquire if she would receive him. Rathbone paced back and forth in the morning room until the man returned and invited him through.

Rathbone tried to compose himself, so as not to embarrass Margaret in front of her parents, should they be there. He followed the footman across the hall and into the long, very formal dining room, where he was drenched with relief to find her alone. She was dressed smartly in a dark suit a little like a riding habit. It was fashionable and extremely becoming, but she looked alarmingly pale.

“Good morning, Sir Oliver,” she said with some reserve. Obviously she had not forgotten his coolness of the other evening. “Would you care for a cup of tea? Or perhaps more? Toast?” she invited him.

“No, thank you.” He sat down, praying she would give the footman leave to go. “I have a legal matter I wish to discuss with you, of a most confidential nature.” He could not wait upon good luck.

“Really?” She raised her eyebrows slightly. She thanked the footman and asked him to leave. She looked guarded, withdrawn, as if she was afraid he was going to hurt her. He found himself ashamed at the thought.

“I know,” he said simply. “Monk came to see me yesterday afternoon. He told me of the situation at Portpool Lane.”

Her eyes widened, dark and incredulous. “He . . . told you?” She reached out instinctively and grasped his wrist. “You must say nothing! I was sworn to secrecy, absolute! No exceptions at all! It—”

“I understand,” he cut across her. “Monk told me because he needs me to defend a thief. He believes him to be innocent of murdering a watchman. It is not much—one small act of justice, and to a confessed thief at that—but it’s all I can do.” He felt ashamed saying it. “That, and help with funds. But he warned me not even to ask friends in case my urgency should cause speculation.”

Her face was filled with a relief that set his heart surging, the blood pounding in his veins. There was a wild, almost hysterical gratitude in him that Margaret was not in the clinic, and could not go. Anyway, she was needed to raise funds, to purchase what they needed, and take it to them.

“I know,” she said gently. “I am having to be so much more discreet than I want to be.” She met his eyes, her own brimming with tears. “I think of Hester in there, alone, and how she must feel, and I want to go to help her. I want to tell these people the truth and force them to give all they can, every last penny, but I know it would only drive them into hysterics—at least some of them.” She was shivering, her voice husky. “Fear does terrible things to people. Anyway I promised Sutton, which really means Hester, that I would tell no one. I couldn’t even tell you!”

“I understand!” he said quickly, closing his hand over hers where it lay on his wrist. “Be careful. And . . . and when you take food to them, leave it. Don’t be . . . don’t be tempted to . . .”

He saw an instant of pity in her eyes, not for Hester, or for the sick, but for him, because she recognized his horror of disease. It chilled him like ice at the heart. Suddenly he saw that he could lose her not to death but to contempt, that awakening of disgust that is the end of love between a woman and a man, and becomes the pity that a strong woman has for the weak, for children, and for the defenseless, but never for a lover.

He looked away.

“I will do what I have to,” she said quietly. “I do not intend to go inside the clinic; I am more use to them out here. But if Hester sends for me, perhaps because she is dying, then I will go. I might lose my life too, but if I didn’t, I could lose everything that would make life precious. I am sure you know that.” There was no certainty in her voice or her face. She was full of question. She needed his answer.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized, and he meant it with all the force of his nature. “I know you must. It was a moment’s complete selfishness because I love you.”

She smiled, and lowered her eyes as the tears slid down her cheeks. “You must go and defend this thief, if that is what Monk requires. Now I am going to raise some more money. We need vegetables, and tea, and beef, if possible.”

He took ten pounds out of his pocket and put it on the table. He was giving money away like water.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Now please go while I can still keep some measure of composure. We both have things to do.”

He obeyed, his emotions storming inside him, his own composure in shreds. He was glad to say good-bye and go as rapidly as he could outside into the anonymous street, where the sharp wind would sting his face and the rain would hide his tears.

ELEVEN

Day and night blurred into one exhausting round for Hester. There were over a dozen women in the clinic altogether, counting herself, Bessie, Claudine, Mercy, and Flo. Three had been injured by accident or violence, five were suffering fevers and congestion which might be pneumonia—or early stages of plague; it was too soon to be certain. There had already been two deaths, one apparently from heart failure, the other from internal bleeding.

Of course, to his outrage, Squeaky Robinson could not leave either. Sutton had chosen to return and work with the little terrier, Snoot, to catch the rats. Food, water, and coal were left in the yard, and the men with the dogs placed them outside the back door. When Hester went to retrieve them, she caught sight of one of the men standing near the wall, half concealed in the shadows, his dog at his feet. It gave her a feeling of safety, and reminded her at the same time that she was as much a prisoner as any of the others.

Mercy helped her carry in the pails of water, which were extremely heavy. They left two in the kitchen, and the other eight along the wall of the laundry.

“We’re going to have to use the water several times,” Hester said unhappily. “It’s not the best, but we daren’t run out. With fever like this, it’s more important to drink than to be clean, and I don’t think we can have both.”

Mercy leaned against the washtub into which the mangle drained. She looked pale and very tired, but she was smiling. “Makes you realize what a blessing it is to have water at home, doesn’t it? Ask someone for it, and there it is!”

Hester looked at her with affection. In the few days she had been there Hester had grown to like her. She still knew very little about her, other than that she was Clement Louvain’s sister. She had a gentleness with the sick, an endless patience, and in spite of the utterly different world she must be accustomed to, she never seemed to patronize people—unlike Claudine, whose temper was never far below the surface. Although Hester found she could not dislike Claudine either.

Now they worked together piling the soiled sheets into the corner, and then Mercy tipped more coal from the scuttle into the boiler to heat it up. It was an awkward job, and she was covered in smuts by the time she had finished. She leaned back, putting the scuttle down, and looked at herself in dismay.

“Why on earth do we wear white aprons?” she said disgustedly. “Whoever thought of that obviously didn’t have to do the laundry!”

Hester smiled. “Don’t worry about it. It’s good clean dirt.”

Mercy looked confused for a moment, then realized what she meant, and relaxed, smiling back. It was half past nine in the evening, and most of the jobs were done for the day, insofar as day and night were any different from each other.

“Were you really in the Crimea?” Mercy asked a little shyly.

Hester was surprised. “Yes. Most of the time it seems like another world, but right now it’s not so hard to remember.” She bit her lip a little ruefully. There had been far more deaths there; they were surrounded by it every day, and it had been brutal and terrible, largely senseless, inflicted by men upon their fellows. But there was a vast difference between war and murder, even if there had seemed times when it would be difficult to explain it. Whole hours went by when she completely forgot that Ruth Clark had been murdered, let alone that she should be trying to find out who was responsible.

Did it matter anymore—really? She realized with a jolt that she was not even certain that she wanted to know. It had to be someone here, and she cared for each of them. Was the bond of fear and survival greater than whatever had driven one of them to kill? She did not want to know the answer.

“You’ve not asked to have any message sent to your family,” she said to Mercy. She did not want to intrude. Mercy had never spoken of her home. She had not even said if she knew it was her brother who had brought Ruth Clark here, although Hester had assumed that she must have known. She seemed to be in her early twenties, pleasing to look at, and certainly she had an agreeable nature. Why was she not enjoying the social life her position offered her? Was there a love affair that had gone so badly for her that she was still too hurt to think of someone new? Was that why she was here, to escape a greater pain? Hester realized that that was what she had assumed, but there was no evidence for it.

Mercy shook her head. “My brother knows I am here,” she replied. “I left him a letter. I cannot tell him why I am remaining, but he won’t worry.”

“I’m sorry,” Hester apologized. “You must be missing many things you would have attended could you leave.”

“No point in thinking about them.” Mercy shrugged. “And I don’t suppose any of them matter anyway. One puts on one’s best clothes and one’s best manners, and ends up being so polite that all one ever talks of is the weather or what book one has just read—as long as it is not controversial, of course! Heaven protect us from having to think! Everybody is hoping to meet someone of such interest you can hardly wait to see him again, but unless you are terribly easily pleased, does it really happen? I am in greater danger of making myself believe it has, when my better self knows it hasn’t.” She smiled, rubbing absentmindedly at the smear of coal dust on her apron. “I say to myself ’Next time—next time,’ and then it’s exactly the same. At least this is real.”

“Doesn’t your mother insist on your meeting as many young gentlemen as possible? Mine did,” Hester remembered with embarrassment and sadness. Her mother had died of grief, and perhaps shame, after her father’s suicide when he had been ruined in a financial scandal. Their deaths had been her reason for returning early from the Crimea.

Mercy must have caught the momentary grief in her face. “My parents are dead,” she said quietly. “From the way you speak, your mother is also?”

“Yes, and my father,” Hester acknowledged, straightening up to go over to the table. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I just wanted you to send a message if you wished. Sutton would see that it was delivered.”

“There isn’t anyone,” Mercy replied, getting the bread out of the bin and passing it to her. “My elder sister, Charity, married a doctor. That was seven years ago. They stayed in England for a year, then he decided to go abroad, and of course Charity went with him.”

“That must have been hard for you.”

Mercy shrugged very slightly. “It was at first,” she said, turning her face away so Hester could see only the angle of her cheek and the way the muscles pulled in her neck. “But she was ten years older than I, so we were not as close as we might have been.”

“And your brother is older, too,” Hester observed, remembering Clement Louvain as he had been when he brought Ruth Clark in.

“I was an afterthought,” Mercy said, lifting her chin a little, her wide mouth curved in a smile. “My mother was nearly forty when I was born. But I think she was especially fond of me, for that.” She turned back to face Hester. “I’ll make us a cup of tea. I expect Claudine would like one too, and perhaps Mr. Robinson.” She did not mention the others because they were taking an hour or two’s rest before the night duty.