Funeral in Blue - Anne Perry [33]
Then he moved his hands very slightly. “But she certainly wasn’t foolish or unaware of the dangers of speaking out against tyranny, or of making friends with others who did. She marched with the students and the ordinary people in the streets, against the emperor’s soldiers. She saw people killed, young men and women who only wanted the freedom to read and write as they chose. She knew it could be she at any time. Bullets make no moral choices.”
“She sounds like a very fine lady,” Runcorn said unhappily.
Pendreigh turned to him. “You must suppose me prejudiced in my opinion. Of course I am; she was my daughter. But ask anyone who was there, especially Kristian. He would tell you the same. And I am aware of her failings as well. She was impatient, she did not tolerate foolishness or indecision. Too often she did not listen to the views of others, and she was hasty in her judgment, but when she was wrong she apologized.” His voice softened and he blinked rapidly. “She was a creature of high idealism, Superintendent, the imagination to put herself in the place of those less fortunate and to see how their lot could be made better.”
“No wonder Dr. Beck fell in love with her,” Runcorn said.
Monk was afraid he was beginning to suspect Kristian of jealousy, because he could not keep the thought from his own mind.
“He was far from the only one.” Pendreigh sighed. “It was not always easy to be so admired. It gives one . . . too much to live up to.”
“But she chose Dr. Beck, not any of the others.” Monk made it a statement. He saw Runcorn’s warning look and ignored it. “Do you know why?”
Pendreigh thought for several moments before he replied. “I’m trying to remember what she wrote at the time.” He drew his fair brows into a frown of concentration. “I think he had the same kind of resolve that she did, the nerve to go through with what he planned even when circumstances changed and the cost became higher.” He looked at Monk intently. “He was a very complex man, a disciple of medicine and its challenges, and yet at the same time of great personal physical courage. Yes, I think that was it, the sheer nerve in the face of danger. That appealed to her. She had a certain pity for people who wavered, she entirely understood fear. . . .”
Monk looked quickly at Runcorn and saw the puzzlement in his face. This all seemed so far away from an artist’s studio in Acton Street and the beautiful woman they had seen in the morgue. And yet it was easily imaginable of the woman in the painting of the funeral in blue.
Pendreigh shivered, but he was standing a little straighter, his head high. “I remember one incident she wrote about to me. It was in May, but still there was danger in the air. For months there had been hardly anything to buy in the shops. The emperor had left Vienna. The police had banished all unemployed servants from the city, but most of them had come back, one way or another.” Anger sharpened his voice. “There was chaos because the secret police had been done away with and their duties taken over by the National Guard and the Academic Legion. There was an immediate crime wave, and anyone remotely well-dressed was likely to be attacked in the street. That was when she first noticed Kristian. Armed only with a pistol, and quite alone, he faced a mob and made them back down. She said he was magnificent. He could easily have walked the other way, effected not to notice, and no one would necessarily have thought the worse of him.”
“You said he was complex,” Monk prompted. “That sounds like a fairly simple heroism to me.”
Pendreigh stared into the distance. “I knew only what she told me. But even the most idealistic battles are seldom as easy as imagined by those not involved. There are good people on the enemy side also, and at times weak and evil people on one’s own.”
Runcorn shifted position a little uncomfortably, but he did not interrupt, nor did he look away from Pendreigh.
“And battle requires sacrifice,” Pendreigh continued, “not always of oneself, sometimes of others.