The Shifting Tide - Anne Perry [124]
Monk shook his head slowly, like a man in a fog of thought, too harried on every side to find his way. “You’ll have to play for time,” he said unhappily. “I need to find something to raise a doubt.”
Rathbone hated forcing the issue. Monk was exhausted, and Rathbone could barely guess at the fear which must be eating him alive. Margaret was safe. Rathbone had everything to look forward to. If he lost her, it would be his own doing: his cowardice, moral or emotional. The solution lay in his own hands. But Monk was powerless. There was nothing he could do to help. He did not even know from hour to hour if Hester was alive, still well, or already infected, suffering terribly. She was imprisoned with virtual strangers. Would they even care for her in her moments of extremity? Would they stay to nurse her, as she had nursed so many others? Would they run away in terror or inadequacy? Or would they be too close to death themselves to be able to raise a hand to fetch water, or whatever one did to ease the terror or pain of the dying? The thought made him sick with misery.
“What is it?” Monk demanded, cutting across his thoughts.
Rathbone recalled himself. “To raise reasonable doubt I have to suggest a believable alternative,” he answered. “If Gould didn’t kill him, either someone else did or it was an accident. Can you get evidence to back your original decision? Louvain wrote that paper swearing to get Hodge’s killer if you found the ivory. That’ll come out, because the undertaker will swear to it to protect himself. I can’t afford to question the medical evidence at all. They would dig the body up, and that’s a nightmare I don’t even want to imagine.”
Monk said nothing. He seemed to be lost in thought. As if noticing the tea for the first time, he poured himself a cup and drank it, wincing at the heat, and yet obviously grateful for it.
Rathbone poured some for himself as well. “Does Louvain know the truth?” he asked.
Monk looked up at him. “I really don’t know.”
“Then you’ve got to find out. At least one of us has to. If you . . .”
“I’ll do it,” Monk said with such biting decision that Rathbone knew he would not raise the question again.
“If he didn’t know,” Rathbone said quietly, “then you will have to tell him. The only way he can protect himself is to testify that he was mistaken, and Hodge could have fallen and hit his head.”
“Or that Gould killed him, exactly as I first believed.”
“Do you believe it now?”
“No.” Again there was no hesitation.
“Then we’ll have to find a way of getting Louvain to testify for him, or he’ll hang,” Rathbone warned him. “We can’t let the plague loose in London to save one man, however innocent.”
Monk took a deep breath and rubbed the heel of his hand over his face. “I know. How many days till the trial?”
“Day after tomorrow.”
“I’ll see Louvain,” Monk promised. He straightened up, but there was a weariness inside him that bowed his shoulders and his face was ashen. “Durban is still hoping to find the crew.” His face crumpled. “How many people are there, Rathbone, that disappear and no one misses? How many can fall, and we all just press onward without even seeing the space they’ve left? Does anyone care? Are there people suffering, crippled with grief, and we don’t notice that either?”
Rathbone wished he had a lie good enough to give even the remotest comfort, but he hadn’t. Whether anyone missed the crewmen he had no idea. They might be dead of plague in any town in the south of England, or more probably already at sea on another ship. There was no terror spreading, no cry of quarantine, evacuation, or fire to burn it out, to exorcise it like a thing from hell. But Monk was speaking of the void in his own life that Hester’s loss would create, and Rathbone knew that.
And he was contemplating allowing himself to love Margaret just as