Cain His Brother - Anne Perry [118]
“I went back over all your cases,” Evan said with pain in his eyes. “There was no Buckingham that I can remember, either charged or accused. But of course I’ll try again. I’ll look specifically for the name.”
“Perhaps I’d better go to Norfolk.” Monk stared beyond Evan without seeing the thronged room or hearing the laughter. “That’s where they lived.”
“Why would you have gone to Norfolk?” Evan was puzzled. “You only dealt with London cases. If it happened there, the local police would have handled it, not you.” He shrugged very slightly, and shivered as if someone had opened an outside door, although the coffee shop was almost too hot, with its crowded atmosphere and steaming drinks, and the fire leaping in the hearth. “I suppose it could have started in London, and there have been witnesses—and suspects, for that matter—in Norfolk. I’ll try.” He frowned, knowing he was speaking only for comfort. “Don’t worry, if it’s there, I’ll find it.”
And if it is not, Monk thought, then any injury to her was personal, and how in God’s name do I learn that? How will I ever know my own view of it, why I did whatever it was, what I thought or felt, what there is in mitigation for me?
He finished his coffee and stood up. He had not the heart even to meet Evan’s eyes. What would he think or feel when he knew the truth, what bitter disillusion and sense of betrayal? He was so afraid of it, it was as if it had already happened.
“Thank you,” he said with his voice choking in his throat. He wanted to add more, but could think of nothing. “Thank you.”
Hester was also deeply afraid for Monk, not for what he might have done—she had not concerned herself with that—but for the ruin it would bring him when Drusilla made her charges public. The fact that she could not prove them was immaterial. She had chosen her time and place to be melodramatic with great skill. Not a man or woman emerging from the party in North Audley Street would forget the sight of her pitching headlong out of the moving cab, her clothes torn, screaming that she had been assaulted. Whatever reason told them, they would relive the emotions, the horror and the sense of outrage. And they would be totally unprepared to accept that they had been duped. It would make them foolish, and that would be intolerable.
Something must be done to help him, something practical and immediate. There was little use trying to limit the damage after it was done.
She and Callandra had talked about it sitting late at night in the small room in the Limehouse hospital, in the few moments when they were not either working or asleep. Callandra was deeply distressed, even in the face of the disease and death around her, and Hester realized with a quick uprush of pleasure how fond she must be of Monk. Callandra’s regard for him was far more than mere interest, and the adding of a new dimension to her life.
But she had been able to offer no practical counsel.
Now Hester sat in the warmth and clean, sweet-smelling comfort of Enid’s bedroom in Ravensbrook House and watched Enid’s frail form, at last peacefully asleep. Genevieve had gone home, weary with grief and the mounting anxiety and loneliness of her loss, dreading the trial of Caleb which must shortly begin.
Hester tidied a few things which were hardly out of place, then returned to her seat. It was so different from just a few days ago. Then Monk faced no greater danger than failing on a case which had seemed hopeless from the beginning. Two weeks ago Enid had been delirious and fighting for her life. She had tossed from side to side, moaning in pain as her body ached and her mind wandered in nightmare and delusion, mixing past and present and distorting everything.
Hester smiled in spite of herself. One heard some very strange things in a sickroom. Perhaps that was one of the reasons certain people were wary of