The William Monk Mysteries_ The First Three Novels - Anne Perry [455]
Miss Buchan stared at her.
“And anyway,” Hester went on, “I don’t think there’s really any point in telling her, do you? She isn’t listening, and honestly I don’t think she’d understand even if she were.”
Miss Buchan hesitated, looking at her with slow consideration, then back at the retreating cook, now clasped firmly by Edith, then at Hester again.
“Come on,” Hester urged. “How long have you known the cook? Has she ever listened to you, or understood what you were talking about?”
Miss Buchan sighed and the rigidity went out of her. She turned and walked back up the stairs with Hester. “Never,” she said wearily. “Idiot,” she said again under her breath.
They reached the landing and went on up again to the schoolroom floor and Miss Buchan’s sitting room. Hester followed her in and closed the door. Miss Buchan went to the dormer window and stared out of it across the roof and into the branches of the trees, leaves moving in the wind against the sky.
Hester was not sure how to begin. It must be done very carefully, and perhaps so subtly that the actual words were never said. But perhaps, just perhaps, the truth was at last within her grasp.
“I’m glad you told Cassian not to think his mother was wicked,” she said quietly, almost casually. She saw Miss Buchan’s back stiffen. She must go very carefully. There was no retreat left now, nothing must be said in haste or unguardedly. Even in fury she had betrayed nothing, still less would she here, and to a stranger. “It is an unbearable thing for a child to think.”
“It is,” Miss Buchan agreed, still staring out of the window.
“Even though, as I understand it, he was closer to his father.”
Miss Buchan said nothing.
“It is very generous of you to speak well of Mrs. Carlyon to him,” Hester went on, hoping desperately that she was saying the right thing. “You must have had a special affection for the general—after all, you must have known him since his childhood.” Please heaven her guess was right. Miss Buchan had been their governess, hadn’t she?
“I had,” Miss Buchan agreed quietly. “Just like Master Cassian, he was.”
“Was he?” Hester sat down as if she intended to stay some time. Miss Buchan remained at the window. “You remember him very clearly? Was he fair, like Cassian?” A new thought came into her mind, unformed, indefinite. “Sometimes people seem to resemble each other even though their coloring or their features are not alike. It is a matter of gesture, mannerism, tone of voice …”
“Yes,” Miss Buchan agreed, turning towards Hester, a half smile on her lips. “Thaddeus had just the same way of looking at you, careful, as if he were measuring you in his mind.”
“Was he fond of his father too?” Hester tried to picture Randolf as a young man, proud of his only son, spending time with him, telling him about his great campaigns, and the boy’s face lighting up with the glamour and the danger and the heroism of it.
“Just the same,” Miss Buchan said with a strange, sad expression in her face, and a flicker of anger coming and going so rapidly Hester only just caught it.
“And to his mother?” Hester asked, not knowing what to say next.
Miss Buchan looked at her, then away again and out of the window, her face puckered with pain.
“Miss Felicia was different from Miss Alexandra,” she said with something like a sob in her voice. “Poor creature. May God forgive her.”
“And yet you find it in your heart to be sorry for her?” Hester said gently, and with respect.
“Of course,” Miss Buchan replied with a sad little smile. “You know what you are taught, what everyone tells you is so. You are all alone. Who is there to ask? You do what you think—you weigh what you value most. Unity: one face to the outside world. Too much to lose, you see. She lacked the courage …”
Hester did not understand. She groped after threads of it, and the moment she had them the next piece made no sense. But how much dare she ask without risking Miss Buchan