her properly, holding her closely for a moment before letting her go, coughing to clear his throat, and muttering good-bye before he turned to leave.
Sitting alone at the breakfast table, Callandra also was deeply shaken by the picture of Elissa in the newspaper. Her first thought was not how it might affect the jury in the court, but her own amazement that Elissa should look so vulnerable. She had found it difficult enough when Hester had told her that she was beautiful, and then that her actions in Vienna had been passionate and brave. Callandra had created in her mind the picture of a hard and brittle loveliness, something dazzling, but a matter of perfect bones and skin, dramatic coloring, perhaps handsome eyes. She was not prepared for a face where the heart showed through, where the dreams were naked and the pain of disillusion clear for anyone to see. How could Kristian have stopped loving her?
Why do people stop loving? Could it be anything but a weakness within themselves, an incapacity to give and go on giving, somewhere a selfishness? Her mind raced back over all she could remember of Kristian, every time they had met in the hospital, and before that the long hours they had spent during the typhoid outbreak in Limehouse. Every picture, every conversation, seemed to her tirelessly generous. She could see, as if it were before her now, his face in the flickering lights of the makeshift ward, exhausted, lined with anxiety, his eyes dark and shadowed around the sockets. But he had never lost his temper or his hope. He had tried to ease the distress of the dying, not only their physical pain but their fear and grief.
Or was she recalling it as she wished it to have been? It was so easy to do. She thought she was clear-sighted, a realist, but then perhaps everyone thought he was.
And even if Kristian were all she believed in, his work with the sick, that did not mean he was capable of the kind of love that binds individuals. Sometimes it is easier to love a cause than a person. The demands are different. With a blinding clarity like the clean cut of a razor, so sharp at first you barely feel it, she saw the inner vanity of experiencing the uncritical dependence of someone profoundly ill who needs your help, whose very survival depends upon you. You have the power to ease immediate, terrible physical pain.
The needs of a wife are nothing like that. A close human bond demands a tolerance, an ability to adjust, to moderate one’s own actions and to accept criticism, even unreasonable behavior at times, to listen to all kinds of chatter and hear the real message behind the words. Above all, it needs the sharing of self, the dreams and the fears, the laughter and the pain. It means taking down the defenses, knowing that sooner or later you will be hurt. It means tempering ideals and acknowledging the vulnerable and flawed reality of human beings.
Perhaps, after all, Kristian was not capable of that, or simply not willing. She thought back to earlier in the year, to the men from America who had come to buy guns for the Civil War which was even now tearing that country apart. They had been idealists, and one at least had permitted the general passion to exclude the particular. Hester had told her of it in one of their many long hours together, of the slow realization, and the grief. It was a consuming thing, and allowed room for nothing and no one else. It sprang not from the justice of the cause but from the nature of the man. Was Kristian like that, too, a man who could love an idea but not a woman? It was possible.
And perhaps she herself had been guilty of falling in love with an ideal, not a real man, with his passions that were less bright, and his weaknesses?
Then it would not matter what Elissa was like, how brave and beautiful, how generous or how kind, or funny, or anything else. It could have been she who was trapped in the marriage, and sought her way out through the lunacy of gambling.
And all the thoughts filling her mind did not succeed in driving out the image of the other murdered woman, the artists’ model whose only sin had been seeing who had killed Elissa. No rationalization could excuse her death. The thought that Kristian might have killed her was intolerable, and she thrust it away, refusing even to allow the words into her mind.
There were things to be done. She closed the newspaper, ate the last of her toast and ignored the cold tea in her cup. Before the trial opened she had one visit to make which was going to require all her concentration and self-control. She had no status whatever in the matter. She was not a relative, employer or representative of anyone. To attend every day with no duty, no reason beyond friendship, and to be obliged to be nothing but a helpless onlooker would be excruciating. If she were there representing the hospital governors, who very naturally had a concern for Kristian as his employers, and for their own reputation because of that, then her presence was explained, even her intervention, if any opportunity presented itself.
To do this she must go and see Fermin Thorpe, and persuade him of the necessity. It was an interview she dreaded. She loathed the man, and now she had not her usual armor of assurance, or the indifference to what he thought which her social position normally provided. She needed something only he could grant her. How could she ask him for it while hiding her vulnerability so he did not sense it and take his chance to be revenged for years of imagined affront?
The longer she thought about it the more daunting it became. She had no time to waste, the trial would begin tomorrow. Better she go now, before too much imagination robbed her of what courage she had left.
She walked out of the dining room across the hall and went upstairs to prepare herself, collect her costume jacket and the right hat.
The journey out to Hampstead took her over an hour. Progress was sporadic because of the traffic and the drifting fog, and she had far too much time to think and play the scene in her mind a dozen times, none of them less than painful.
When she arrived at the hospital, she told her coachman to wait for her as she did not intend to remain, then was obliged to sit for nearly an hour while Fermin Thorpe interviewed a new young doctor with, apparently, a view to employing him. She kept her temper because she needed to. On another occasion, as a governor herself, she could simply have interrupted. Today she could not afford to antagonize him.
When Thorpe finally showed the young doctor out, smiling and sharing a joke, he turned to her with satisfaction shining in his face. He hated Kristian, because Kristian was a better doctor than he, and they both knew it. Kristian did not defer to him. If he thought differently—which he often did in moral and social matters—he said so, and Thorpe had lost the issue, for which, in his stiff, frightened mind, there was no forgiveness. Now he was on the brink of getting rid of Kristian forever, and the taste of victory was sweet on his lips. He was going to be proved right before the world in every bitter or critical thing he had ever said about Kristian, beyond even his most far- fetched dreams.
“Good morning, Lady Callandra,” he said cheerfully. He was almost friendly; he could afford to be. “A bit chilly this morning, but I hope you are well?”
She must playact as never before. “Very,” she said, forcing herself to smile. “The cold does not trouble me. I hope you are well also, Mr. Thorpe, in spite of the burden of responsibility upon you?”
“Oh, very well,” he said forcefully, opening his office door for her and standing aside for her to enter. “I believe we will rise above our temporary difficulties. Young Dr. Larkmont looks very promising. Good surgical experience, nice manner, keen.” He met her eyes boldly.
