“I don’t have anything that will help,” he said before she had time to ask. “I’d have told you if I had.”
She recounted to him what they had learned about Dinah and about Zenia Gadney.
“Good God!” he said with amazement, his face crumpled in an expression of profound pity. “I would do anything for her that I could, but what is there? If she didn’t kill the woman, then who did?” His expression filled with disgust. “I have no great love for politicians, or respect, either, but I find it very difficult to believe any one of them would cold-bloodedly murder Lambourn just to delay the Pharmacy Act. It will come sooner or later-probably sooner, whatever they do. Is there really so much money to be made in a year or two that it’s worth a man’s life? Not to mention a man’s soul?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she answered. “There has to be more to it, far more.”
He looked at her curiously. “What? Something that Lambourn knew and would have put in his report?”
“Don’t you think so?” She was uncertain now, fumbling for answers. She did not want Dinah to be guilty, or Joel Lambourn to be an incompetent suicide. Was that what was driving her, rather than reason? She saw the thought far too clearly in Winfarthing’s face, and felt the slight heat burn up her own cheeks.
“Lambourn’s suicide doesn’t make sense,” she said defensively. “The physical evidence is wrong.”
He ignored the argument. Perhaps it was irrelevant now anyway. “What are you thinking of?” he asked instead. “Something he discovered about the sale of opium? Smuggling? No one in Britain cares about the East India Company smuggling off the coast of China.” He snapped his fingers in the air in a gesture of dismissal. “China could be on Mars, for all it means to most of us-except their tea, silk, and porcelain, of course. But what happens there is nothing to the man in the street. Theft? In any moral sense it’s all theft: corruption, violence, and the poisoning of half a nation simply because we have the means and the desire to do it, and it’s absurdly profitable.”
“I don’t know!” Hester said again, a little more desperately. “There has to be something we do care about. We can butcher foreigners and find a way to justify it to ourselves but we can’t steal from our own, and we certainly can’t betray them.”
“And have we, Hester?” he said quietly. “What makes you think Lambourn discovered something like that? We all know that we introduced opium into China to pay for the luxuries we buy from them; we smuggle it into their country and it is killing them, an inch at a time. They go through caverns of the soul, measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. Read Coleridge-or De Quincey!”
“ ‘A sunless sea,’ ” she repeated. “That sounds like imprisonment, like drowning. How bad is real dependency on opium?”
He looked at her with sudden concentration, his eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask? Why now?”
“We don’t smoke it like the Chinese, we eat it, take it in medicines mixed with lots of other things,” she answered slowly. “It’s the only cure we have for the worst pain.”
“I know that, girl. What are you saying?”
“I met a woman in the docklands who runs a clinic for badly injured navvies and sailors. She showed me a syringe with a hollow needle that can put it straight into the blood, if you want to. That kills pain far more swiftly, and thoroughly. Less opium but more effect.”
Winfarthing nodded slowly. “And more dependency,” he growled. “Of course. Be careful, Hester. Be very careful. Opium addiction’s a wicked thing. You’re right, it’s a sea in which a million men can drown at once, and still each one do it alone. Give it just for pain, then just to get to the next day, finally to stave off the madness. Good men use it on others to ease unbearable suffering, evil ones to create a passion from which few escape.”
“Who has these needles?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“No. I don’t even know if there are many or few. I don’t know if it has anything to do with Dr. Lambourn’s death or not. No one seems to know what was in his report.”
Winfarthing sat up, his huge body stiff, his eyes wide. “Is that what you think this is about? Not the Pharmacy Act, or the Opium Wars, but someone creating a sickness only they can treat?”
“I don’t know,” she said again.
“My dear, people will call you a liar, a traitor to your country for even suggesting such things,” he said gently. “They will defend the perpetrators because it is not easy for us to admit that we have been deceived. No one gives up his delusion of self-worth willingly. Some prefer even to die.”
“Or to kill?” she said quickly. “Silence the voice that challenges their beliefs? It’s a very old thought, to punish a blasphemer, isn’t it? It could be an easy justification to make.”
“If somebody had been stoned I might accept that.” He shook his head. “To slit a man’s wrists and make him look like a suicide is not an act of righteous anger, Hester. It is cold-blooded; the sort of thing a man does to protect his own interests, not anyone else’s.”
She sat silently, picturing Joel Lambourn alone in the darkness on One Tree Hill.
“To do what was done to Zenia Gadney is the act of a man without even humanity,” Winfarthing went on. “And to do it in order to condemn someone else is beyond even a lunatic to justify.”
“I believe it was done out of self-interest to protect a fortune made, and still being made, in the opium business.” She refused to give up.
“Protect it from what?” he asked
“I already told you I don’t know!” She felt confused and defensive, as if a horrible truth were slipping out of her hands but leaving even uglier lies in its place. “But do you think Lambourn was a failure and a suicide?” she demanded. “Are you trying to prevent me stirring up something embarrassing-at the cost of Dinah Lambourn’s life?”
A sharp unhappiness filled his face, and she knew she had hurt him.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “That wasn’t fair, and I wish I hadn’t said it. I feel helpless. I know there’s something terribly wrong, and I have too little time to make sense of it.”
He made a small gesture with his hand, dismissing her accusation. “You haven’t changed, have you? Haven’t learned.” He dropped his voice a little and there was a great gentleness in his face. “I’m glad. Some people should never grow old-not inside. But be careful, girl. If there really is something to this, then it is very bad indeed, and very dangerous.” He leaned across to the desk and picked up a pen and a piece of paper. He scribbled a name and address and passed it to her.
“This is a man who helped Lambourn. He asked a lot of questions about opium, its use and its dangers. He works among the poor, scraping a living the best he can. He may not be easy to find. He’s erratic, happy one day, wretched the next, but he’s a good man. Be careful who you ask for him.”
She took the paper and glanced at it. Alvar Doulting. It was a name she did not know. “Thank you,” she said, putting it into her small reticule. “I’ll see if I can find him.”
It took her well into the next day before she at last found Alvar Doulting, working in a room next to a warehouse down by St. Saviour’s Dock. He had half a dozen patients, suffering mostly deep bruises and crushed or broken bones. With only the briefest of introductions, merely a mention of the Crimea, she began to help him.
He was a young man, earnest and pale, perhaps from exhaustion and the sudden, harsh change in the weather. His lean face was both powerful and sensitive, at the moment marred by a growth of stubble and deep lines of weariness. He wore ragged clothes, several layers of them to try to keep warm, even a woolen scarf instead of a tie or cravat around his neck.
He watched her for only a moment or two before seeing that she was experienced with wounds, and that the obvious poverty and physical dirtiness of the patients were of no importance to her. She noticed only the pain, and the dangers, first of bleeding and then of gangrene, always of shock, and-at this time of year-the cold.
They worked with rags, makeshift bandages made from torn strips of fabric, splints fashioned from anything that was strong enough, cheap brandy given both as a drink to dull pain and as a way to clean wounds before stitching them with needles and gut. He had little opium, and he used it only on the worst cases.
It was more than two hours later when they were alone and there was finally time to speak.
They sat in his tiny office cluttered with books and piles of papers, which at a glance looked like notes on patients he was possibly too tired or too busy to trust to memory. She remembered doing the same. There was a small wood-burning stove in one corner and on it a kettle. He offered her tea and she took it gratefully.
