The Silent Cry - Anne Perry [117]
She started to shake her head.
“I thought honesty was best,” he went on. “Perhaps it wasn’t. I thought I knew that, now I don’t.”
“It would have been hard either way,” she answered him, meeting his eyes with the same candor as in the past, in their best moments. “If I know, tonight will be hard, and tomorrow. But when Evan does come, then I shall have prepared myself, and I shall have the strength to help, instead of being stunned with my own shock. I shan’t be busy trying to deny it, to find arguments or ways to escape. This is best. Please don’t doubt it.”
He hesitated for an instant, wondering if she were being brave, taking the responsibility to herself to spare his feelings. Then he looked at her again and knew it was not so. There was a kind of understanding in her which bridged the singleness of this incident and was part of all the triumphs and disasters they had ever shared.
He walked over to her and very gently bent forward and kissed her temple above the brow, then laid his cheek against hers, his breath stirring the loose tendrils of her hair.
Then he turned and walked away without looking back. If he did, he might make an error he could never redeem, and he was not yet ready for that.
9
Evan knew that Monk had crossed into St. Giles, although, of course, they were on different cases.
“Wot does ’e want?” Shotts said suspiciously as they were walking back towards the station.
“To find out who raped the women in Seven Dials,” Evan replied. “It’s a problem we can’t help.”
Shotts swore under his breath and then apologized. “Sorry, guv.”
“You don’t need to be,” Evan said sincerely. His father might have been offended, but that case angered him so profoundly the release of shouting and using language otherwise forbidden seemed very natural. “If anyone can deal with it, it will be Monk,” he added.
Shotts gave a snort of derision edged with something which could have been fear. “If ’e catches the bastards I’ll lay they’ll wish they were never born. I wouldn’t want Monk on my back, even if I hadn’t done anything wrong.”
Evan looked at him curiously. “If you hadn’t done anything wrong, would he be on your back?”
Shotts looked at him, hesitated a moment on the edge of confiding, then changed his mind.
“ ’Course not,” he denied.
It was a lie, at least in intent, and Evan knew it, but it was pointless to pursue. Nor was it the only time Shotts had told him something which he had later learned to be false. There was time unaccounted for, small errors of fact. He glanced sideways at Shotts’s stolid face as they crossed the street, avoiding the gutter and the horse droppings awash in the rain, ducked past a coal cart and onto the farther footpath. What else was there that he had not yet learned? Why should Shotts lie to him about anything?
He had a sudden acutely unpleasant feeling of loneliness, as if the ground had given way beneath him and old certainties had vanished without anything to replace them. All around him was gray poverty, people whose lives were bounded by hunger, cold and danger. They were so used to it they could eat and sleep in its midst, laugh and beget children, bury their dead, steal from each other, and practice their trades and their crafts, legal or otherwise. Illegality was probably the least of their problems, except insomuch as it trespassed certain safeguards. The cardinal principle was to survive. If he had spoken to them of his father’s notion of a just God, one who loved them, he would have been greeted with utter incomprehension. Even good fairy stories had some relevance to fact, some meaning that a person could understand.
They entered an alley too narrow to walk abreast, and Shotts went first, Evan behind him. It was a shortcut back to the main thoroughfare. They crossed a tanner’s yard stinking of hides and went through a gate that was loosely chained and into