She found Monk at some inconvenience, and was obliged to wait at his lodgings until after dark, when he returned home. He was startled to see her.
'Hester! What has happened? You look fearful.' 'Thank you,' she said acidly, but she was too full of her
news to carry even an irritation for more than an instant. 'I have just been to the War Office-at least I was this afternoon. I have been waiting here for you interminably-'
'The War Office.' He took off his wet hat and overcoat, the rain felling from them in a little puddle on the floor. 'From your expression I assume you learned something of interest?''
Only hesitating to draw breath when it was strictly necessary, she told him everything she had learned from Septimus, then all that had been said from the instant of entering Major Tallis's office.
'If that was where Octavia had been on the afternoon of her death,'' she said urgently,”if she learned what I did today, then she must have gone back to Queen Anne Street believing that her father had deliberately contrived her husband's promotion and transfer from what was a fine middle-order regiment to Lord Cardigan's Light Brigade, where he would be honor- and duty-bound to lead a charge in which casualties would be murderous.' She refused to visualize it, but it crowded close at the back of her mind. 'Cardigan's reputation is well known. Many would be bound to die in the first onslaught itself, but even of those who survived it, many would be so seriously wounded the field surgeons could do little to help them. They'd be transferred piled one upon another in open carts to the hospital in Scutari, and there they'd face a long convalescence where gangrene, typhus, cholera and other fevers killed even more than the sword or the cannon had.'
He did not interrupt her.
'Once he was promoted,' she went on, 'his chances of glory, which he did not want, were very slight; his chances of death, quick or slow, were appallingly high.
“If Octavia did learn this, no wonder she went home ashen-faced and did not speak at dinner. Previously she thought it fate and the chances of war which bereaved her of the husband she loved so deeply and left her a dependent widow in her father's house, without escape.' She shivered. 'Trapped even more surely than before.'
Monk agreed tacitly, allowing her to go on uninterrupted.
'Now she discovered it was not a blind misfortune which had taken everything from her.' She leaned forward. 'But a deliberate betrayal, and she was imprisoned with her betrayer, day after day, for as for as she could see into a gray future.
'Then what did she do? Perhaps when everyone else was asleep, she went to her father's study and searched his desk for letters, the communication which would prove beyond doubt the terrible truth.' She stopped.
'Yes,' he said very slowly. 'Yes-then what? Basil purchased Harry's commission, and then when he proved a fine officer, prevailed upon his friends and purchased him a higher commission in a gallant and reckless tegiment. In whose eyes would that be more than a very understandable piece of favor seeking?'
'No one's,' she answered bitterly. 'He would protest innocence. How could he know Harry Haslett would lead in the charge and fall?'
'Exactly,' he said quickly. 'These are the fortunes of war. If you marry a soldier, it is the chance you take-all women do. He would say he grieved for her, but she was wickedly ungrateful to charge him with culpability in it all. Perhaps she had taken a little too much wine with dinner-a fault which she was apt to indulge rather often lately. I can imagine Basil's face as he said it, and his expression of distaste.'
She looked at Monk urgently. 'That would be useless. Oc-tavia knew her father and was the only one who had ever had the courage to defy him-and reap his revenge.
'But what defiance was left her? She had no allies. Cyprian was content to remain a prisoner in Queen Anne Street. To an extent he had a hostage to fortune in Romola, who obeyed her own instinct for survival, which would never include disobeying Basil. Fenella was uninterested in anyone but herself, Araminta seemed to be on her father's side in apparently everything. Myles Kellard was an additional problem, hardly a solution. And he too would never override Basil's wishes; certainly he would not do it for someone else!'
'Lady Moidore?' he prompted.
'She seemed driven, or else had retreated, to the periphery of things. She fought for Octavia's marriage in the first place, but after that it seems her resources were spent. Septimus might have fought for her, but he had no weapons.'
'And Harry was dead.' He took up the thread. 'Leaving a void in her life nothing else could begin to heal. She must have felt an overwhelming despair, grief, betrayal and a sense
of being trapped that were almost beyond endurance, and she was without a weapon to fight back.''
'Almost?' she demanded. 'Almost beyond endurance? Tired, stunned, confused and alone-what is 'almost' about it? And she did have a weapon, whether she intended it as such or not. Perhaps the thought had never entered her mind, but scandal would hurt Basil more than anything else-the fearful scandal of a suicide.' Her voice became harsh with the tragedy and the irony of it. 'His daughter, living in his home, under his care, so wretched, so comfortless, so un-Christian as to take her own life, not peacefully with laudanum, not even over the rejection of a lover, and it was too late to be the shock of Harry's death, but deliberately and bloodily in her own bedroom. Or perhaps even in his study with the betraying letter in her hand.
'She would be buried in unhallowed ground, with other sinners beyond forgiveness. Can you imagine what people would say? The shame of it, the looks, the whispers, the sudden silences. The invitations that would no longer come, the people one calls upon who would be unaccountably not at home, in spite of the fact that their carriages were in the mews and all the lights blazing. And where there had been admiration and envy, now there would be contempt-and worst of all, derision.'
His face was very grave, the dark tragedy of it utterly apparent.
'If it had not been Annie who had found her, but someone else,'' he said,”one of the family, it would have been an easy thing to remove the knife, put her on the bed, tear her nightgown to make it seem as if there had been some struggle, however brief, then break the creeper outside the window and take a few ornaments and jewels. Then it would seem murder, appalling, grieving, but not shameful. There would be acute sympathy, no ostracism, no blame. It could happen to anyone.
'Then I seemed about to ruin it all by proving that no one had broken into the house, so a murderer must be found among the residents.'
'So that is the crime-not the stabbing of Octavia, but the slow, judicial murder of Percival. How hideous, how immeasurably worse,' she said slowly. 'But how can we possibly
prove it? They will go undiscovered and unpunished. They will get away with it! Whoever it is-'
'What a nightmare. But who? I still don't know. The scandal would harm them all. It could have been Cyprian and Rom-ola, or even Cyprian alone. He is a big man, quite strong enough to carry Octavia from the study, if that was where it happened, up to her room and lay her on the bed. He would not even run much risk of disturbing anyone, since his room was next to hers.'
It was a startlingly distressing thought. Cyprian's face with its imagination and capacity for humor and pain came sharply to her mind. It would be like him to want to conceal his sister's act, to save her name and see that she might be grieved for, and buried in holy ground.
But Percival had been hanged for it.
'Was Cyprian so weak he would have permitted that, knowing Percival could not be guilty?' she said aloud. She wished profoundly she could dismiss that as impossible, but Cyprian yielding to Romola's emotional pressure was too clear in her mind, as was the momentary desperation she had seen in his face when she had watched him unobserved. And he of all of them seemed to grieve most deeply for Octavia, with the most wounding pity.
'Septimus?' Monk asked.
It was the kind of reckless, compassionate act Septimus might perform.
'No,' she denied vehemently. 'No-he would never permit Percival to hang.'
'Myles would.' Monk was looking at her with intense emotion now, his face bleak and strained. 'He would have done it to save the family name. His own status is tied inextricably with the Moidores'- in fact it is totally dependent on it. Araminta might have helped him-and might not.'
A sharp memory returned to Hester of Araminta in the library, and of the charged emotion between her and Myles. Surely she knew he had not killed Octavia-and yet she was prepared to let Monk think he had, and watch Myles sweat with fear. That was a very peculiar kind of hatred-and power. Was it fueled by the horror of her own wedding night and its violence, or by his rape of the maid Martha-or by the fact
