“Fig were my friend,” he said very quietly. “I din’t ’elp ’im. Nor the other neither.”
“I know.” She felt the lump, hard and painful, in her throat. Fig was one of the boys Jericho Phillips had murdered. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Yer can’t ’elp it,” he said reasonably. “Yer did yer best. No one can stop it.” He moved an inch or two closer to her. “Tell me some more about Rose and the others.”
She had seen survivor’s guilt before. In her nursing in the Crimea she had heard soldiers cry out from the same nightmares and had seen them waken with the same shocked and helpless eyes, staring at the comfort around them, and feeling the horror inside.
She tried to think of something else to say to Scuff, happy things, anything to take away his memory of his own lost friends, adding a little more until she looked at him and saw his eyes closing. She lowered her voice, and then lowered it even more. He was so close to her now that he was touching her. She could feel the warmth of him through the sheet that separated them. A few minutes later he was asleep. Without being aware of it he had put his head against her shoulder. She stopped talking and lay still. It was a little cramped, but she did not move until morning, when she pretended to have been asleep also.
After a breakfast of hot porridge, toast, and marmalade, Monk sent Scuff out on an errand and turned to Hester.
“Nightmares again?” he asked.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “I knew I’d probably waken you, but I couldn’t leave him alone. I banged the door so-”
“You don’t need to explain.” He cut across her. The ghost of a smile softened the angular planes of his face for a moment, and then it was gone again. He looked grim, full of a pain he did not know how to deal with.
She knew he was remembering the terrible night on the river when Jericho Phillips had kidnapped Scuff to prevent Monk from completing the case against him, for which he would have assuredly hanged. Phillips had so very nearly succeeded. Had it not been for Sutton’s little dog, Snoot, they would never have found the boy.
“He’s still afraid,” she said quietly. “He knows Phillips is dead-he saw the drowned body in the cage-but there are other people doing the same thing, other boats on the river that use boys for pornography and prostitution-boys just like him, his friends. People we can’t help. I don’t know what to say to him, because he’s far too clever to believe comforting lies. And I don’t want to lie to him anyway. Then he’d never trust me in anything. I wish he didn’t care about them so much, and yet I’d hate it if he could feel safe only by never looking back. He thinks we can’t help.” She blinked hard. “William, parents ought to be able to help. That’s part of what they are for. He sees us not even trying, just accepting defeat. He doesn’t even understand why he feels so guilty, and thinks he’s betraying them by being all right. He won’t believe that we don’t secretly think the same of him, whatever we say.”
“I know.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And that isn’t the only problem.”
She waited, her heart pounding. They had avoided saying it; all their time and emotion was concentrated on Scuff. But she had known it would have to come. Now she looked at the lines of strain in Monk’s face, the shadows around his eyes, the lean, high cheekbones. There was a vulnerability there that only she understood.
She thought of Oliver Rathbone, who had been both Monk’s friend and hers for so long, and beside whom they had fought desperate battles for justice, often at the risk of their reputations, even their lives. They had sat up for endless nights searching for answers, had faced victory and disaster together, horrors of grief, pity, and disillusion. Rathbone had once loved Hester, but she had chosen Monk. Then he had married Margaret Ballinger and found a happiness far better suited to his nature. Margaret could give him children, but more obvious than that, she was socially his equal. She was of a calmer, more judicious nature than Hester; she knew how to behave as Lady Rathbone, wife of the most gifted barrister in London, should.
Was it really conceivable that Margaret’s father had been the power and the money behind Jericho Phillips’s abominations? That is what Lord Justice Sullivan had claimed, right before his terrible suicide at Execution Dock. Hester longed for Monk to tell her that it was not true.
“You heard what Rathbone said about Arthur Ballinger and Phillips?” Monk said.
“Yes. Has he said anything more?”
“No. I suppose there’s nothing legal, or he would have. He’d have no choice.”
“You mean there’s no proof, just Sullivan’s word-and he’s dead anyway?”
“Yes.”
“But you believe it?” That also was not really a question.
“Of course I do,” he said very softly. “Rathbone believes it, and do you think he would if there were any way in heaven or hell that he could avoid it?”
Monk lifted up his hand and touched Hester’s cheek so softly, she felt the warmth of him more than the brush of his skin against hers.
“I have to know if Ballinger was involved, for Scuff, so at least he knows I’m trying,” he continued. “And Rathbone has to know too, however much he would prefer not to.”
“Are you going to speak to him?”
“I’ve been avoiding it, and so has he. He’s been in court on another case for the last two weeks, but it’s finished now and I can’t put it off any longer.”
“Are you sure he needs to know?” she pressed. “The pain of it would be intolerable, and he would have no choice but to do something about it.”
“That’s not like you,” he said ruefully.
“To want to avoid someone else’s pain?” She was momentarily indignant.
“To be evasive,” he corrected her. “You are too good a nurse to want to put a bandage on something that you know needs surgery. If it’s gangrene, you must take off the arm, or the patient will die. You taught me that.”
“Am I being a coward?” She winced as she said the word. She knew that to a soldier, “coward” was the worst word in any language, worse even than “cheat” or “thief.”
Monk leaned forward and kissed her, lingering only a moment. “You don’t need courage if you aren’t afraid,” he answered. “It takes a little while to be certain you have no alternative. Scuff needs to know that we care enough for the truth itself, not just to rescue him and then turn away. I think Rathbone would want that too, whatever the cost.”
“Whatever?” she questioned.
He hesitated. “Maybe not at any cost, but that doesn’t change the reality of it.”
Hester went to the clinic that she had set up to treat and care for prostitutes and other street women who were sick or injured. It survived on charitable donations, and Margaret Rathbone was by far the most dedicated and the most able among those who sought and obtained such money. Margaret also spent a certain amount of time actually working there, cooking, cleaning, and practicing the little light nursing that she had learned from Hester. Of course she had done rather less of such work since her marriage, and no longer did nights. Still, Hester did not look forward to seeing her today and hoped it would be one of those times when Margaret was otherwise engaged.
She walked from Paradise Place down the hill to the ferry. The autumn wind was blustery, salt-smelling. From Wapping she took an omnibus westward toward Holborn. It was a long journey, but it was necessary that they live near Monk’s work. His was a reasonably new position, back in the police again after years of being a private agent of inquiry, when he’d lurched from one case to another with no certainty of payment. For less than a year he had been head of the River Police in this area, which was a profoundly responsible position. There was no one in England with better skills in detection, or more courage and dedication-and, some might say, ruthlessness. But his art in managing men and placating his superiors in the political hierarchy was altogether another matter.
If the circumstances caused Hester a little more traveling, it was a small enough contribution to his success. Added to which, she really did like the house in Paradise Place, with its view over the infinitely changing water, not to mention the freedom from financial anxiety that a regular income gave them.
She walked briskly along Portpool Lane under the shadow of the Reid Brewery, and in at the door of the house that had once been part of a huge brothel. It was Oliver Rathbone who had helped her obtain the building, quite legally, but with considerable coercion of its previous owner, Squeaky Robinson. Squeaky had remained here, a partially reformed character. To begin with he had stayed because he had had nowhere else to go, but now he took a certain pride in the place, oozing self-righteousness at his newfound respectability.
Squeaky was in the entrance as she came in, his face gaunt, his stringy gray-white hair down to his collar as
