balance. She refused to accept that it was indeed suicide, even thought the police investigated it, naturally, and that was their finding. We… we were hoping she was…'
'I'm sorry.' Monk found he meant it with savage honesty. He imagined Mary as she must have been when she was alive, the pale, river-wet face animated with emotion, anger, amazement, grief. 'That's a very hard thing for anyone to bear.' Like a physical blow, he remembered that Hester's father had also taken his own life, and the pain of it was close and real in a way that no power of words alone could have given.
Argyll looked at him with surprise, as if he had heard the emotion through the polite phrases. 'Yes. Yes, it is.' It was clear he had not expected Monk to allow his feelings to show. 'I… I don't know how poor Jenny will deal with this. It's…' He failed to find the words for what he was struggling to say, perhaps even to himself.
'Would it be easier for Mrs. Argyll if we were here, so that she could ask us any questions she wishes to?' Monk asked. 'Or would you prefer to tell her privately?'
Argyll hesitated. He seemed torn by a genuine indecision.
Monk waited. The clock on the mantel struck the quarter hour; otherwise there was silence.
'Perhaps I should not deny her the chance to speak with you,' Argyll said at last. 'If you will excuse me, I shall inform her alone, and then see what she wishes.' He took Monk's acquiescence for granted and rose to his feet. He walked out of the room a little unsteadily, only saving himself from bumping into the doorjamb at the last moment, and leaving the door itself gaping open.
'Poor man,' Orme said softly. 'Wish we could tell 'im it were an accident.' He looked at Monk with a question in his eyes.
'So do I,' Monk agreed. It began to look as if Mary Havilland had at least temporarily lost her mental balance, but he did not want to say so, even to Orme.
The butler came in and stood like a black shadow just inside the door.
'Mrs. Argyll asked me to see if there is anything I could bring for you gentlemen. Perhaps a glass of'-he considered-'ale?' He was not going to offer them a glass of good sherry they would not appreciate, and certainly not the best brandy.
Monk realized how achingly hungry he was. Orme must be also. Perhaps that was at least in part why he was still cold.
'Thank you,' he accepted. 'We've come straight from the river. A sandwich and a glass of ale would be very gracious of you.'
The butler looked faintly uncomfortable, as if realizing he should have thought of it himself 'Immediately, sir,' he acknowledged. 'Would cold roast beef and a spot of mustard be right?'
'It would be perfect,' Monk answered.
Orme thanked him warmly as soon as the door was closed. ' 'Ope it comes afore Mr. Argyll gets back,' he added. 'Wouldn't be decent to eat it in front of 'im, specially if Mrs. Argyll comes too. Don't reckon as she will, though. Most ladies take bad news 'ard.'
The sandwiches arrived and were consumed ravenously, just before Argyll returned. But Orme was mistaken in his second guess: Jenny Argyll chose to see them. She came in ahead of her husband, a handsome woman with eyes and mouth startlingly like those of her dead sister, but darker hair and not the same high cheekbones. Now she too was bleached of color and her eyelids were puffy from weeping, but she was remarkably well composed, given the circumstances. She was wearing a dark red woollen dress with a wide skirt and her hair was elaborately coiffed in a style that must have taken her lady's maid at least half an hour to accomplish. She regarded Monk with civility but no interest at all.
Argyll closed the door behind them and waited until his wife was seated.
Monk expressed his condolences again.
'Thank you,' Mrs. Argyll said briefly. 'My husband says that Mary fell off Westminster Bridge. Toby was with her. Perhaps he tried to stop her and failed. Poor Toby. I think he still loved her, in spite of everything.' The tears filled her eyes again but she ignored them and her face remained under control. It was impossible to tell what the effort cost her. She did not look at her husband, nor did she reach to touch him.
Monk should have accepted the answer implicit in her words, and yet in spite of all sense he refused to. When Hester's father had shot himself because of the unanswerable debt he had been cheated into, she had returned from the Crimea, where she had been serving as a military nurse, and redoubled her efforts to strengthen her family and to fight all the wrongs she encountered. It had been her resolve that had strengthened Monk to struggle against the burden that had seemed impossible to him. She was acid-tongued-at least he had thought so- opinionated and unwise in her expression of it, hasty to judge and quick-tempered, but even he, who had found her so irritating, had never doubted her courage or her iron will.
Of course he had seen the passion, the laughter, and the vulnerability in her since then. Was he imagining in Mary Havilland something she had never possessed? Whatever the cost to Mrs. Argyll, he wanted to know.
'I understand that your father met his death recently,' he said gravely. 'And that Miss Havilland found it very difficult to come to terms with.'
She looked at him wearily. 'She never did,' she answered. 'She couldn't accept that he took his own life. She wouldn't accept it, in spite of all the evidence. I'm afraid she became… obsessed.' She blinked. 'Mary was very… strong-willed, to put it at its kindest. She was close to Papa, and she couldn't believe that something could be so wrong and he would not confide in her. I'm afraid perhaps they were not as… as close as she imagined.'
'Could she have been distressed over the breaking of her betrothal to Mr. Argyll?' Monk asked, trying to grasp on to some reason why a healthy young woman should do something so desperate as plunge over the bridge. And had she meant to take Argyll with her, or was he trying, even at the risk of his own life, to save her? Did he still love her so much? Or was it out of guilt because he had abandoned her, possibly for someone else? They really did need the surgeon to ascertain if she had been with child. That might explain a great deal. It was a hideous thought, but if he would not marry her, perhaps she had felt suicide the only answer, and had determined to take him with her. He was, in a sense, the cause of her sin. But that would be true only if she were with child and certain of it.
'No,' Mrs. Argyll said flatly. 'She was the one who broke it. If anything, it was Toby who was distressed. She… she became very strange, Mr. Monk. She seemed to take against us all. She became fixed upon the idea of a dreadful disaster that was going to happen in the new sewer tunnels that my husband's company is constructing.' She looked very tired, as if revisiting an old and much-battled pain. 'My father had a morbid fear of enclosed spaces, and he was rather reactionary. He was afraid of the new machines that made the work far faster. I imagine you are aware of the urgency of building a new system for the city?'
'Yes, Mrs. Argyll, I think we all are,' he answered. He did not like the picture that was emerging, and yet he could not deny it. It was only his own emotion that drove him to fight it, a completely irrational link in his mind between Mary Havilland and Hester. It was not even anything so definite as a thought, just words used to describe her by a landlady who barely knew her, and the protective grief over the suicide of a father.
'My father allowed it to become an obsession with him,' she went on. 'He spent his time gathering information, campaigning to have the company alter its methods. My husband did everything to help him see reason and appreciate that deaths in construction are unavoidable from time to time. Men can be careless. Landslips happen; the London clay is dangerous by its nature. The Argyll Company has fewer incidents than most others. That is a fact he could have checked with ease, and he did. He could point to no mishaps at all on this job, in fact, but it did not calm his fears.'
'Reason does not calm irrational fears,' Argyll said quietly, his voice hoarse with his own emotion, unable to reach towards hers. Perhaps he feared that if he did, they might both lose what control they had. 'Don't harrow yourself up anymore,' he went on. 'There was nothing you could have done then, or now. His terrors finally overtook him. Who knows what another man sees in the dark hours of the night?'
'He took his life at night?' Monk asked.
It was Argyll who answered, his voice cold. 'Yes, but I would be obliged if you did not press the matter further. It was thoroughly investigated at the time. No one else was in the least at fault. How could anyone have realized that his madness had progressed so far? Now it appears that poor Mary was also far more unstable than we knew, and it had preyed upon her to the point where she herself could not exercise her human or Christian judgment anymore.'
Jenny turned to look at him, frowning. 'Christian?' she challenged him. 'If anyone is so sunk in despair that they feel death is the only answer for them, can't we have a little… pity?' There was anger in her eyes.
