The William Monk Mysteries_ The First Three Novels - Anne Perry [133]
A couple in immaculate riding habits cantered down the Row. Monk still held her hand.
“My family first met Joscelin Grey in March. They had none of them heard of him before and he called on them quite unexpectedly. He came one evening. You never met him, but he was very charming—even I can remember that from his brief stay in the hospital where I was in Scutari. He went out of his way to befriend other wounded men, and often wrote letters for those too ill to do it for themselves. He often smiled, even laughed and made small jokes. It did a great deal for morale. Of course his wound was not as serious as many, nor did he have cholera or dysentery.”
Slowly they began to walk, so as not to draw attention to themselves, close together.
She forced her mind back to that time, the smell, the closeness of pain, the constant tiredness and the pity. She pictured Joscelin Grey as she had last seen him, hobbling away down the steps with a corporal beside him, going down to the harbor to be shipped back to England.
“He was a little above average height,” she said aloud. “Slender, fair-haired. I should think he still had quite a limp—I expect he always would have had. He told them his name, and that he was the younger brother of Lord Shelburne, and of course that he had served in the Crimea and been invalided home. He explained his own story, his time in Scutari, and that his injury was the reason he had delayed so long in calling on them.”
She looked at Monk’s face and saw the unspoken question.
“He said he had known George—before the battle of the Alma, where George was killed. Naturally the whole family made him most welcome, for George’s sake, and for his own. Mama was still deeply grieved. One knows with one’s mind that if young men go to war there is always a chance they will be killed, but that is nothing like a preparation for the feelings when it happens. Papa had his loss, so Imogen said, but for Mama it was the end of something terribly precious. George was the youngest son and she always had a special feeling for him. He was—” She struggled with memories of childhood like a patch of sunlight in a closed garden. “He looked the most like Papa—he had the same smile, and his hair grew the same way, although it was dark like Mama’s. He loved animals. He was an excellent horseman. I suppose it was natural he should join the cavalry.
“Anyway, of course they did not ask Grey a great deal about George the first time he called. It would have been very discourteous, as if they had no regard for his own friendship, so they invited him to return any time he should find himself free to do so, and would wish to—”
“And he did?” Monk spoke for the first time, quietly, just an ordinary question. His face was pinched and there was a darkness in his eyes.
“Yes, several times, and after a while Papa finally thought it acceptable to ask him about George. They had received letters, of course, but George had told them very little of what it was really like.” She smiled grimly. “Just as I did not. I wonder now if perhaps we both should have? At least to have told Charles. Now we live in different worlds: And I should be distressing him to no purpose.”
She looked beyond Monk to a couple walking arm in arm along the path.
“It hardly matters now.” Joscelin Grey came again, and stayed to dinner, and then he began to tell them about the Crimea. Imogen says he was always most delicate; he never used unseemly language, and although Mama was naturally terribly upset, and grieved to hear how wretched the conditions were, he seemed to have a special sense of how much he could say without trespassing beyond sorrow and admiration into genuine horror. He spoke of battles, but he told them nothing of the starvation and the disease. And he always spoke so well of George, it made