The Silent Cry - Anne Perry [48]
Hester wondered what kind of a man Leighton Duff had been, how they had met and what had happened in the relationship during its twenty-five or so years. What friends had Sylvestra to help her in her grief? They would all have been at the funeral, but that had been almost immediate, in the few days when Rhys had been in the hospital and before Hester had arrived. Now the formal acknowledgments of death were over and Sylvestra was left alone to face the empty days afterwards.
Apparently Dr. Wade’s sister was one who was eager to call as soon as she could and he himself seemed to be more than merely a professional acquaintance.
“Have you always lived here?” Hester asked.
“Yes,” Sylvestra replied, looking up quickly as if she too were grateful for something to say but had simply not known how to begin. “Yes, ever since I was married.”
“It’s extremely comfortable.”
“Yes …” Sylvestra answered automatically, as if it were the expected thing to say and she did it as she had always done. It no longer had meaning. The poverty and hour-to-hour dangers of St. Giles were farther away than the quarrels and the gods of the Iliad, because they were beyond the horizons of the imagination. Sylvestra recalled herself. “Yes it is. I suppose I have become so accustomed to it I forget. You must have had very different experiences, Miss Latterly. I admire your courage and sense of duty in going to the Crimea. My daughter Amalia would particularly have liked to meet you. I believe you would have liked her also. She has a most enquiring mind, and the courage to follow her dreams.”
“A superb quality,” Hester said sincerely. “You have many reasons to be most proud of her.”
Sylvestra smiled. “Yes … thank you, of course, thank you. Miss Latterly …”
“Yes?”
“Does Rhys remember what happened to him?”
“I don’t know. Usually people do, but not always. I have a friend who had an accident and was struck on the head. He has only the vaguest flashes of his life before that day. At times a sight or a sound, a smell, will recall something to him, but only fragments. He has to piece it together as well as he can and leave the rest. He has re-created a good life for himself.” She abandoned the pretense of eating. “But Rhys was not struck on the head. He knows he’s home, he knows you. It is simply that night he may not recall, and perhaps that is best. There are some memories we cannot bear. To forget is nature’s way of helping us keep our sanity. It is a way for the mind to heal, when natural forgetting would be impossible.”
Sylvestra stared at her plate. “The police are going to try to make him remember. They need to know who attacked him and who murdered my husband.” She looked up. “What if he can’t bear to remember, Miss Latterly? What if they force him, show him evidence, bring a witness or whatever, and make him relive it? Will it break his mind? Can’t you stop that? Isn’t there a way we can protect him? There has to be!”
“Yes, of course,” Hester said before she really thought. Her mind was filled with memories of Rhys trying desperately to speak, of his eyes wide with horror, of his sweat-soaked body as he struggled in nightmare, rigid with terror, his throat contracted in a silent scream and pain ripping through him, and no one heard, no one came. “He is far too ill to be harassed, and I am sure Dr. Wade will tell them so. Anyway, since he cannot speak or write, there is little he can do except to indicate yes or no. They will have to solve this case by other means.”
“I don’t know how!” Sylvestra’s voice rose in desperation. “I cannot help them. All they asked me were useless questions about what Leighton was wearing and when he went out. None of that is going to achieve anything.”
“What would help?” Hester poured her cold tea into the slop basin and reached for the pot, politely offering it to Sylvestra as well. At Sylvestra’s nod, she refilled both cups.
“I wish I knew,” Sylvestra said almost under her breath. “I’ve racked my brain to think what Leighton