was standing in his way?” His mind was racing. At last there were other possibilities surfacing, which had nothing to do with Dinah Lambourn.
“Gladys guessed at it, based on something Zenia said once, when a woman was falling down drunk in the street,” Hester answered. “She didn’t even know if it was true, and no one has ever seen another man in Copenhagen Place, visiting her, or even looking for her. He could be dead by now, if he ever existed at all.”
Her voice dropped and she looked sad, and apologetic. “She could have invented him, to make herself sound more respectable, or even more interesting. It could have been daydreaming, a bit of wishing that it had been so.”
He felt the sadness inside him also, a sudden understanding of the woman’s wistful dreams that he would prefer not to have understood. “Then why did you come to tell it to me so urgently before I went into court?” The sharp edge of disappointment was raw in his voice.
“I’m sorry, that was misleading.” She brushed it away with a slender hand. “What I really came to tell you was that I also found a woman called Agatha Nisbet, who runs something of a makeshift hospital on the south bank of the river, near Greenland Dock. It is mainly for injured dockers, lightermen, and so on. She has a pretty steady supply of opium …”
“Opium?” Now he was listening, his attention quickened.
“Yes.” She smiled bleakly. “I made a deal with her to buy the best quality myself, for the clinic. She spoke to Joel Lambourn several times. He sought her out in his inquiries into opium. He wasn’t out to stop the trade, just to get it properly labeled so people knew what they were taking. Agnes Nisbet said it was the deaths of children that upset him especially.”
Rathbone nodded. He knew that already.
“But she warned me that a lot of people make money out of opium, ever since the Opium Wars,” Hester went on. “They are quite happy, some of the worst of them, to get people addicted so they will have a permanent market.” Her face was pinched with misery and anger as she said it. “A lot of very powerful families built their fortunes on opium, and they wouldn’t be at all happy with the exposure Lambourn’s report would inevitably have brought when it was argued in Parliament. All kinds of ghosts would’ve been dug up.”
“You can’t dig up a ghost,” he said irrelevantly. “Do you think Dinah is right, at least as far as Lambourn’s report is concerned?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “It makes sense, Oliver. We don’t even know whose fortune comes from opium, and what they could lose if it’s all brought out into the open, and regulated. Some companies are going to go out of business, simply because they wouldn’t make the same level of profit if they are forced to measure and label.”
He thought about it for a moment or two. It opened up new, alternative explanations for the death of both Joel Lambourn and Zenia Gadney-but they had no proof of anything. Great fortunes had always been made in appalling ways: through buccaneering-which was only another name for piracy-slaving, before the abolition half a century ago; and then in opium. Few wealthy families were free from one stain or another. With the fear and anger running rampant in the courtroom, and far beyond it, he did not think that “reasonable doubt” was going to save Dinah Lambourn.
“Do you know anything about the Opium Wars?” Hester interrupted his thoughts.
“Not much,” he admitted. “It was all in China. Trade war of some sort, as far as I know. Our part in it has been justified by some, but it was pretty ugly. I believe we introduced opium into China and now hundreds of thousands of people are addicted to it. Not something to be proud of.”
“Perhaps we should find out more, just in case it matters,” she said quietly.
“Did you believe this woman, this Agatha?” he asked her. “Not her honesty, but her knowledge?”
“Yes … I think so. It compared in ways to my own experience in the Crimea.”
“Are there any wars that aren’t ugly?” He thought bitterly of all he knew and had heard of the Crimean War, its violence, futility, and loss. “This Civil War in America-God knows what those losses will be by the end-pretty good market for opium there, too. I hear the slaughter is appalling, and the injuries to those who survived. I don’t suppose they even know the extent of it themselves yet. And it’s not just the dead, it’s the ruin of the land, and the hatred left behind.”
“I think there’s a good deal of hatred left behind the Opium Wars, too,” Hester replied. “And money, and guilt. A lot of secrets to bury.”
“Secrets don’t stay buried,” Rathbone said quietly. He wanted to tell her about his own secret, those photographs still sitting in his home, waiting to be stored in a bank vault where only he could disinter them.
She was staring at him. “Oliver?” she said with concern. “Do you know something about Dinah that we don’t? Something bad?”
“No!” he said with a rush of relief. “It … it was … I was thinking about something else entirely.”
She looked doubtful. “It?” she asked. “What are we talking about?”
“It was … it …” He breathed in and out deeply. The weight of the knowledge he carried was almost unbearable alone. “Do you know what happened to Arthur Ballinger’s photographs after he was killed?”
Her face paled a little, and there was pain in her eyes.
“I have no idea. Why? Are you afraid someone has them?” She reached across the table and touched his hand gently. “There’s no point in worrying. They’re probably locked up somewhere where nobody will ever find them. But if they’re not, there’s still nothing you can do about it.” Her hand was warm on his. “If somebody has them they can only blackmail the guilty, and do you really have any sympathy for men who abused children like that? I know they may have been fools more than villains to begin with, but you still can’t protect them.”
“I would have no sympathy if it were about money, Hester, but it isn’t. It’s about power,” he said simply.
“Power?” There was sharper fear in her face now, and perhaps the beginning of understanding as to what he meant.
“Power to make the men in those photographs do anything, which they would, out of fear of being exposed,” he elaborated.
“Do you think there are other people in those pictures who are … judges and politicians, or …?” She saw it in his face. “You do! Did Ballinger say there were?”
“No. He did far worse than that, Hester. He left them to me.” He looked at her intently, waiting for the horror in her eyes, even the revulsion.
She sat motionless and very slowly the full impact of it settled over her, like a shadow. She studied him. Perhaps she saw in him something of the burden he felt, and the bitterness of the irony. It was both Ballinger’s legacy and his revenge. He might not know what it would do to Rathbone, but he must have relished the possibilities.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “If you had destroyed them you would have told me differently, wouldn’t you.” It was not a question; she was letting him know that she understood.
“Yes,” he confessed. “I would. I will hide them. If I die then they will be destroyed. I meant to do it at the time I saw them; then when I saw who was in them, I couldn’t. Maybe I still will. The power of it is … so very great. Ballinger began by using them only for good, you know? He told me. It was to force people to take action against injustice or abuse, when they wouldn’t do it any other way.” Was he making excuses for Ballinger? Or for himself, because he had not destroyed the pictures? He looked at Hester’s face and saw the confusion in her, and the comprehension. He waited for her to ask if he would use them, and she did not.
“Do you think Dinah is innocent?” she asked instead.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “At first I thought it was possible, then after the beginning of the trial, I seriously doubted it. Now I don’t know whether she killed Zenia Gadney or not, but I’m beginning to have very serious doubts as to whether Lambourn committed suicide. And if he was murdered, then that opens up a lot of other doubts, and questions.”
There was a sound of footsteps outside the door to the hall. A moment later Ardmore came in and very courteously reminded Rathbone that it was time for him to go.
Hester smiled and rose to her feet. There was no need for further discussion, simply a quiet good-bye.
Lambourn’s suicide was still in Rathbone’s mind as the trial resumed an hour and a half later, when he met Sorley Coniston in the hall and they exchanged brief greetings.
