The William Monk Mysteries_ The First Three Novels - Anne Perry [319]
“Thank you—thank you, Major Tallis.” She forced a sickly smile, her mind whirling. “I am most grateful to you.”
“What are you going to do?” he said urgently.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what I can do. I shall consult with the police officer on the case; I think that would be wisest.”
“Please do, Miss Latterly—please be most careful. I—”
“I know,” she said quickly. “I have learned much in confidence. Your name will not be mentioned, I give you my word. Now I must go. Thank you again.” And without waiting for him to add anything further, she turned and left, almost running down the long corridor and making three wrong turnings before she finally came to the exit.
She found Monk at some inconvenience, and was obliged to wait at his lodgings until after dark, when he returned home. He was startled to see her.
“Hester! What has happened? You look fearful.”
“Thank you,” she said acidly, but she was too full of her news to carry even an irritation for more than an instant. “I have just been to the War Office—at least I was this afternoon. I have been waiting here for you interminably—”
“The War Office.” He took off his wet hat and overcoat, the rain falling from them in a little puddle on the floor. “From your expression I assume you learned something of interest?”
Only hesitating to draw breath when it was strictly necessary, she told him everything she had learned from Septimus, then all that had been said from the instant of entering Major Tallis’s office.
“If that was where Octavia had been on the afternoon of her death,” she said urgently, “if she learned what I did today, then she must have gone back to Queen Anne Street believing that her father had deliberately contrived her husband’s promotion and transfer from what was a fine middle-order regiment to Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade, where he would be honor- and duty-bound to lead a charge in which casualties would be murderous.” She refused to visualize it, but it crowded close at the back of her mind. “Cardigan’s reputation is well known. Many would be bound to die in the first onslaught itself, but even of those who survived it, many would be so seriously wounded the field surgeons could do little to help them. They’d be transferred piled one upon another in open carts to the hospital in Scutari, and there they’d face a long convalescence where gangrene, typhus, cholera and other fevers killed even more than the sword or the cannon had.”
He did not interrupt her.
“Once he was promoted,” she went on, his chances of glory, which he did not want, were very slight; his chances of death, quick or slow, were appallingly high.
“If Octavia did learn this, no wonder she went home ashen-faced and did not speak at dinner. Previously she thought it fate and the chances of war which bereaved her of the husband she loved so deeply and left her a dependent widow in her father’s house, without escape.” She shivered. “Trapped even more surely than before.”
Monk agreed tacitly, allowing her to go on uninterrupted.
“Now she discovered it was not a blind misfortune which had taken everything from her.” She leaned forward. But a deliberate betrayal, and she was imprisoned with her betrayer, day after day, for as far as she could see into a gray future.
“Then what did she do? Perhaps when everyone else was asleep, she went to her father’s study and searched his desk for letters, the communication which would prove beyond doubt the terrible truth.” She stopped.
“Yes,” he said very slowly. “Yes—then what? Basil purchased Harry’s commission, and then when he proved a fine officer, prevailed upon his friends and purchased him a higher commission in a gallant and reckless regiment. In whose eyes would that be more than a very understandable piece of favor seeking?”
“No one’s,” she answered bitterly. “He would protest innocence. How