operation were entirely successful, she knew even better than Kristian did that that was only the beginning of healing. Mary’s real illness lay in her mind, the fears and anxieties, the introspection and the numbing boredom that crippled her days.
Hester spoke with her for a little while, trying to encourage her, then went to find Callandra. She looked in the patients’ waiting rooms and was told by a young nurse that she had seen Callandra in the front hall, but when Hester got there she met only Fermin Thorpe, looking angry and important. He seemed about to speak to Hester, then with a curt gesture of irritation he turned on his heel and went the other way. Callandra came from one of the wards, her hair flying up in a gray-brown streamer, the main coil of it askew.
“That man is an interfering nincompoop!” she said furiously, her face flushed, her eyes bright. “He wants to reduce the allowance of porter every day for nurses. I don’t approve of drunkenness any more than he does, but he’d get far better work out of them if he increased their food ration! It’s drink on an empty stomach that does it.” She blinked. “Talking about stomachs, how is Mary Ellsworth?”
Hester smiled a little bleakly. “Miserable, but there’s no infection in the wound.”
“And no heart in her,” Callandra said for her. All the time she was speaking her eyes were seeking Hester’s, looking desperately for some reassurance, some inner comfort that this nightmare would be brief and any moment they would all waken and find it was explained, proved sad, but some kind of release.
Hester longed to be able to tell her so, but she could not bring herself to, even for a day or two’s ease. “No, no heart,” she agreed. “But perhaps when it doesn’t hurt quite so much she’ll be better.”
“No more laudanum?” Callandra asked, pity softening her face.
“No. It’s too easy to depend on it. And it can be caustic, which is the last thing she needs with that wound in her stomach. Believe me, she’d sooner have the pain of the moment!”
Callandra hesitated, as if she were reading double and triple meanings into the words, then she smiled at her own foolishness and poked her flying hair back into the knot on the back of her head and went purposefully towards the apothecary’s room, leaving Hester to take a quick cup of tea with one of the nurses and then catch the omnibus back to Grafton Street.
In the afternoon Hester busied herself with housework, a large part of which was quite unnecessary. Her housekeeper came in three days a week and did most of the laundry, ironing and scrubbing. Everything that mattered had already been done, but she was too restless to sit still, so she began to clean out the kitchen cupboards, setting everything from them onto the table. Surely it must have been the artists’ model who was killed, and Kristian’s wife the unfortunate witness? It was the only answer that made sense.
Except that of course it wasn’t obvious at all.
She had every cupboard empty and a bowl full of soapy water on the bench, ready to begin scrubbing, when the doorbell rang and she was obliged to go and answer it.
Charles was on the step, looking even more haggard than three days ago, with hollows around his eyes like bruises, and a cut on his jaw, but this time he was at no loss for words.
“Oh, Hester, I’m so glad you’re home.” He came inside, moving stiffly, without waiting for her to ask. “I was afraid you might be at a hospital. . or something. Are you still. . no, I suppose you’re not. I mean. . it’s. .” He stood in the center of the room, and took a couple of deep breaths.
Hester interrupted him. “When you followed Imogen the other evening, you said it was somewhere in the direction of the Royal Free Hospital, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Swinton Street. Why?”
“Do you now know of someone she might have been visiting?” Hester asked.
“No.” The word came so quickly it almost cut off the question, but if anything, the fear in his eyes increased. He started to say something else. It seemed to be a denial, then he stopped. “I suppose you heard that there was a double murder in Acton Street, just beyond the hospital?” He was watching her intently.
“Yes, a doctor’s wife and an artists’ model.”
“Oh my God!” His legs folded, and he sank down into the armchair.
For a moment she was afraid he had collapsed. “Charles!” She knelt in front of him, clasping his hands, intensely relieved to feel strength in them. She was about to say that the locality didn’t mean anything and could have no connection with Imogen when, like a drench of cold water, she realized that he was afraid that it did. He was lying by misdirection and evasion. He was refusing to look at whatever it was that hovered just beyond his words.
“Charles!” she started again, more urgently. “What do you know about where she is going? You followed her to Swinton Street, which is a block from Acton Street. .”
He jerked his head up. “That’s not where she went the night of the murders!” he said abruptly. “I know that, because I followed her myself.”
“Where did she go?” she asked.
“South of High Holborn,” he said immediately. “Down Drury Lane, just beyond the theater, nowhere near the top of the Gray’s Inn Road.” He stared at her almost defiantly.
Why was he so quick to deny that Imogen had been there?
She stood up and moved away, turning her back to him so he would not see the anxiety in her face. “I understand they were killed in an artist’s studio,” she said almost lightly. “The model worked for him and spent quite a lot of time there, and the doctor’s wife went for a sitting because he was painting a portrait of her.”
“Then the artist did it,” he said quickly. “The newspapers didn’t say that.”
“Apparently, he wasn’t there. A misunderstanding, I suppose.”
He sat silently.
“So you don’t need to worry,” she continued, as if she had dismissed the matter. “Anyone walking about in the evening is in no more danger in Swinton Street than anywhere else.”
She heard his intake of breath. He was frightened, confused, and now feeling even more alone. Would it persuade him at last to be more open?
But the silence remained.
Her patience broke and she swung around to face him. “What is it you are afraid of, Charles? Do you think Imogen knows someone who might be involved with this? Argo Allardyce, for example?”
“No! Why on earth should she know him?” But the color washed up his face, and he must have felt its heat. “I don’t know!” he burst out. “I don’t know what she’s doing, Hester! One day she’s elated, the next she’s in despair. She dresses in her best clothes and goes out without telling me where. She lies about things, about where she’s been, who she’s visited. She gets unsigned messages about meeting someone, and she knows from the handwriting who it is and where to go!”
He fished in his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, offering it to her. She took it. It was simply an agreement to meet, no place given, and unsigned. Charles pressed his hands over his face, leaving white marks on his cheeks, and he winced sharply when he touched his jaw. “She’s changed so much I can hardly recognize her sometimes, and I don’t know why!” he said wretchedly. “She won’t tell me anything. . she doesn’t trust me anymore. What can I think?” His eyes were hot and desperate, begging for help.
Hester heard all the details of what he said, but overriding it all she heard the panic in him, the knowledge that he had lost control and for the first time in his life his emotions were in a chaos he could not hide.
“I don’t know,” she said gently, going over to him again. “But I’ll do everything I can to find out, I promise you.” She looked at him more closely, seeing the darkening bruises. “What did you do to your face?”
“I. . I fell. It doesn’t matter. Hester. .”
“I know,” she said gently. “You think perhaps you would rather not find out the truth, but that isn’t so. As long as you don’t know, you will imagine, and all the worst things will be there in your mind.”
“I suppose. . but. .” He stood up awkwardly, as if his joints hurt. “I’m really not sure, Hester. Perhaps I’m worrying. . I mean. . women can be. .”
She gave him a withering look.
“Well. . not you, of course. .” He foundered again, his face pale, blotches of dull color on his cheeks.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” she contradicted. “I can be as irrational as anybody else, or at least I can appear so to a man who doesn’t understand me. If you recall, Papa thought so. But that was because he didn’t wish to understand that I wanted something to do just as much as you or James.”
“Oh, far more!” The faint ghost of a smile crossed his mouth. “I never wanted anything with the fierceness you did. I think you terrified him.”
