Acceptable Loss - Anne Perry [116]
Hester was overtaken by an anger that astounded her. She stood for a moment, trembling a little.
“I imagine we both have thoughts about others that are less than flattering,” she said almost between her teeth. “Or even downright unkind. I want to know why you took Hattie at least as far as the door, and watched her go outside, when you knew that I had her in the clinic to keep her safe so she could testify at the trial. Why did you?”
“You sound like a policeman,” Margaret said with a slight curl of her lip. “You are giving yourself airs to which you have no right. I gave my time to help at the clinic because I believe in the work you do there. I am not your servant to answer your questions.”
“Either I ask you or William does,” Hester said grimly.
“Then, William may try,” Margaret snapped back. “I do not have to account to you for where Hattie went, even did I know.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Hester began, furious with herself because her voice was shaking.
“That is what I just said,” Margaret told her.
“Because I already know!” Hester snapped. “She went back to Chiswick, where she was strangled and her body thrown into the river!”
Now it was Margaret’s turn to blanch, and to find herself gasping for breath.
“Now perhaps you can see my concern,” Hester added tartly. “Also why William may very well ask you where she went, and why you took her to the door.”
Margaret regained her control with difficulty. “Obviously Rupert killed her! So she would not be called to the stand and say that she’d lied before, and she’d no more taken his cravat than I had. He kept it, as everyone supposes, and later strangled Mickey Parfitt with it, because he could not go on paying him blackmail. If you were a little less blinded by your own crusades, you would have seen that in the first place. I’m sorry Hattie had to die for you to face reality.”
Hester could feel her fingernails dig into the palms of her hands. “The reality throughout is that Hattie was the one person who could have cleared Rupert,” she answered. “And you took her to the door and let her out into the street, out of the place where she was safe, and someone killed her. It might have been Rupert Cardew. It might just as easily have been your father. He was the one her testimony would have hurt. And you were the one who sent her out.”
Margaret stared at her, her face white to the lips, her eyes glittering. “Are you likening my father—my father—to Rupert Cardew? Rupert is dissolute, weak, and perverted … a … a vile man, who, for some unknown reason, in your own morality, your memory, or your need, you don’t seem able to see for what he is.”
“Of course I can see he’s weak!” Hester’s voice was rising in spite of her efforts to keep it level. “I don’t know how dissolute he is, and neither do you. But your loyalty to your father blinds you from seeing that he too could be just as greedy, as cruel, and in his own way as dissolute. He may not watch little boys being raped and abused, but is he any better if he imprisons them and causes it to happen, so he can blackmail the wretched men who do it? Is corrupting others any better, any nobler than being corrupt yourself? I think it’s worse!”
“My loyalty makes me know it could not be true,” Margaret said between her teeth. “But you wouldn’t understand that. You were in the Crimea being noble, saving strangers when your own father needed you. He died alone in despair while you were off glory-hunting. And if that weren’t enough, who supported your mother in her grief? Not you! You didn’t even come home for his funeral.”
Hester was speechless. She could not catch her breath. Her whole body hurt as if she had been beaten.
“You don’t know what loyalty is,” Margaret went on, seeing her advantage and forcing it home. “I used to be sorry for you that you