“Thank you for your help,” he said, handing her the steaming tin mug.
She dismissed his gratitude with a gesture so tiny he might not even have seen it. She did not waste time with preamble.
“I’m trying to save Joel Lambourn’s widow from being hanged,” she said bluntly. “I don’t believe she killed anyone, but I don’t know who did.”
He was sitting on a makeshift stool. He looked up at her with hopelessness in his eyes, and a pity so deep he did not attempt to express it in words.
“You can’t save her,” he said simply. “You’re fighting a war nobody’s going to win. We ruined the Chinese, now we’re ruining ourselves.” He gave a bitter little laugh. “A little drink of opium to still the baby’s crying, ease the stomachache, get a little sleep. A deeper draft of it to dull the agony of wounds for the soldier, the man with the crushed leg, with the kidney stones he can’t pass.”
His face twisted sharply. “A pipe full for the man whose life is a gray drudgery, the one who’d rather be dead than give up his escape into dreams.” His voice dropped. “And in a few cases, a hollow needle and a thin glass vialful into a vein, and for a while hell becomes heaven-but just awhile-then you need some more.”
He blinked. “The blood spilt and the profit made on this drug will drown you. Believe me, I know. I lost my home, my practice, and the woman I was going to marry.”
She felt fear closing in as if the shadows were darker around her, and yet a surge of strength also; she had finally found someone who wasn’t offering her denials.
“What did Joel Lambourn find out that was worth killing him to hide?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Doulting replied. “All he told me about was the number of children who died unnecessarily, because packages were not labeled. Their mothers gave them gripe water, teething medicine, dosages against colic and diarrhea that didn’t say how much or how often it should be taken. The figures are terrible, and its names are proprietary brands we all know and think we can trust.”
“What else?” she pressed, sipping from her tea. It was too strong, and certainly not fresh, but it was hot. It reminded her of her army days.
“He didn’t tell me,” Doulting assured her. “He knew someone was trying to stop him, to make him look incompetent. He was careful. Everything was documented.” His face was very pale as if misery and guilt crowded him. Every now and again he winced, as if he too had his own pain to battle. “I tried collecting information myself, and I gave him all I had. I asked questions, took notes. Some of the stories would break your heart.”
“Where are your notes?”
“My office was burned, and all my papers and records were lost. Even my instruments, my scalpels and needles, all my medicines-everything was destroyed. I had to start again in a new place, begging and borrowing what I could.”
Hester was cold, chilled from the inside. “Do you know who did it?”
“Names? No. Intent, I’m not sure. More than simply to stop the report that would regulate the sale of opium. It will cost to measure and label everything, and require that all medicines are sold only by people qualified to say what they are, but not that much. There are those who consider it to be limiting the freedom of poor people to buy the only relief from pain that we know, but it won’t. What they’re really concerned about is their own freedom to sell it to the desperate as often and as easily as possible.
“But there’s no point in your asking me who ‘they’ are, because Lambourn didn’t tell me. Said I was safer not to know it. But I’m certain he knew.”
“But it’s someone here in London?” Hester persisted.
Doulting nodded, his face haunted by other people’s pain. “Killing Lambourn, gutting poor Zenia Gadney and seeing Dinah Lambourn hang for it would not add more weight to their souls. Perhaps there is nothing left that would.”
She believed that he was telling the truth as he had heard it. The fear was written in his face, and the meager instruments and few medicines in the room testified to it. But would Lambourn have had proof of someone creating an addiction in order to feed it? And was that even a crime? A sin, of course-but a crime punishable by law? And how would Lambourn have used that proof, even if he did have it? It would not have furthered his cause of regulating sales.
Was it not a completely separate issue, to be faced at another time, if at all? Who would listen? People did not want to hear that those they trusted were capable of such brutality and greed, such utter disregard for human destruction. Would they even believe it, or would they say that if a man chose to go to hell, he had the right to do it in his own fashion? It was so much easier, and safer, to condemn the bringer of such news, destroy the words rather than the fearful, indelible acts.
“If he was collecting information on illness and death from ignorance of dosage, how would he learn of the deeper addiction caused by using the needle?” Hester asked. “He was looking at harassed mothers who’d lost children: ordinary people, who’d never been more than a few miles from their homes.”
Doulting looked tired. “I don’t know. I don’t know where he went or who else he spoke to. He probably found it by accident from old soldiers. He didn’t say.”
“Old soldiers?” she said quickly.
He smiled very bitterly. “From the Crimean War, and the Opium Wars: men with injuries that will always pain them. They take opium to ease the ache of old wounds, to sleep through the nightmares of memory. For some it is to take the edge off the fevers and cramps of returning malaria and ague, and other things they don’t even know the names of.”
She felt stupid for not having realized. Her mind had been fixed on Lambourn’s concern for infant mortality.
“You won’t get it into evidence to save Dinah Lambourn,” Doulting said quietly, no hope at all in his eyes. “We won’t admit its evils because we sold it to an entire nation. We robbed, plundered, we murdered civilians, poisoned the men, women, and children of a nation too militarily backward to resist us, and we are barbarians: all of us, those who did it, and those who let them, and we who choose not to admit it now.” He let out a quiet sigh. “If we admit it, then we have to make reparation, and we have to give back the profits. Can you see anyone doing that?”
Hester could think of no answer. “There’s still time to find out who is behind this!” she said, not as a reply but as an admission.
“But who will we help if we die trying to prove it?” he asked.
“All I want at the moment is to save Dinah from being hanged,” she told him.
“And you think knowing what Lambourn found out will help?” He smiled, but there was no belief of it in his eyes.
“Yes! It’s possible,” she insisted. “It will at least make the jury realize that there is a very great deal more to this than domestic jealousy. Tell me where I can find the soldiers Dr. Lambourn saw?” she asked. “I could look for them myself, but I haven’t any time to waste.”
“I’ll write down for you what I know,” Doulting offered. “Then I need to get back to work.”
She finished her tea and set the mug down in one of the few clear spaces. “Thank you.”
CHAPTER 18
Rathbone knew that the case was slipping out of his grasp. He could not help his conviction that Dinah was innocent, yet he wondered if he felt that way because he was drawn to her loyalty to Lambourn by his own inner need to believe in the existence of such a love: deeper than her need for her own survival, deeper even than the evidence. Even Lambourn’s betrayal of her with another woman and his own apparent suicide had not shaken Dinah’s devotion.
He lay awake, alone in his silent bedroom, and came no closer to an answer. The sky was paling in the east, and the light came through the crack in the curtains where he had not closed them properly. It was going to be one of those bright winter days that made the coming of Christmas even more charming, more festive. Soon it would be the shortest day. People were collecting wreaths of holly and ivy and garlanding doors with ribbons. There would be carol singers in the street.
