"I gathered Mrs. Haslett was still missing her husband," Monk said slowly, hoping Myles would read the less delicate implication behind his words.
Myles laughed outright.”Good God, no. What a prude you are." He leaned back in his chair. "She mourned Haslett- but she's a woman. She'd have gone on making a parade of sorrow, of course. It's expected. But she's a woman like any other. I daresay Percival, at any rate, knows that. He'd take a little protestation of reluctance, a few smiles through the eyelashes and modest glances for what they were worth."
Monk felt the muscles in his neck and scalp tightening in anger, but he tried to keep his emotion out of his voice.
"Which, if you are right, was apparently a great deal. She meant exactly what she said."
"Oh-" Myles sighed and shrugged. "I daresay she
changed her mind when she remembered he was a footman, by which time he had lost his head.''
"Have you any reason for suggesting this, Mr. Kellard, other than your belief that it seems likely to you?"
"Observation," he said with a shadow of irritation across his face. "Percival is something of a ladies' man, had considerable flirtations with one or two of the maids. It's to be expected, you know." A look of obscure satisfaction flickered across his face. "Can't keep people together in a house day in, day out and not have something happen now and again. He's an ambitious little beggar. Go and look there, Inspector. Now if you'll excuse me, there really is nothing I can tell you, except to use your common sense and whatever knowledge of women you have. Now I wish you good-day."
Monk returned to Queen Anne Street with a sense of darkness inside. He should have been encouraged by his interview with Myles Kellard. He had given an acceptable motive for one of the servants to have killed Octavia Haslett, and that would surely be the least unpleasant answer. Runcorn would be delighted. Sir Basil would be satisfied. Monk would arrest the footman and claim a victory. The press would praise him for his rapid and successful solution, which would annoy Run-corn, but he would be immensely relieved that the danger of scandal was removed and a prominent case had been closed satisfactorily.
But his interview with Myles had left him with a vague feeling of depression. Myles had a contempt for both Octavia and the footman Percival. His suggestions were born of a kind of malice. There was no gentleness in him.
Monk pulled his coat collar a little higher against the cold rain blowing down the pavement as he turned into Leadenhall Street and walked up towards Comhill. Was he anything like Myles Kellard? He had seen few signs of compassion in the records he had found of himself. His judgments were sharp. Were they equally cynical? It was a frightening thought. He would be an empty man inside if it were so. In the months since he had awoken in the hospital, he had found no one who cared for him deeply, no one who felt gratitude or love for him, except his sister, Beth, and her love was born of loyalty, memory rather than knowledge. Was there no one else? No
woman? Where were his relationships, the debts and the dependencies, the trusts, the memories?
He hailed a hansom and told the driver to take him back to Queen Anne Street, then sat back and tried to put his own life out of his mind and think of the footman Percival-and the possibility of a stupid physical flirtation that had ran out of control and ended in violence.
He arrived and entered by the kitchen door again, and asked to speak to Percival. He faced him in the housekeeper's sitting room this time. The footman was pale-faced now, feeling the net closing around him, cold and a great deal tighter. He stood stiffly, his muscles shaking a little under his livery, his hands knotted in front of him, a fine beading of sweat on his brow and lip. He stared at Monk with fixed eyes, waiting for the attack so he could parry it.
The moment Monk spoke, he knew he would find no way to frame a question that would be subtle. Percival had already guessed the line of his thought and leaped ahead.
"There's a great deal you don't know about this house," he said with a harsh, jittery voice. "Ask Mr. Kellard about his relationship with Mrs. Haslett."
"What was it, Percival?" Monk asked quietly. "All I have heard suggests they were not particularly agreeable."
"Not openly, no." There was a slight sneer in Percival's thin mouth. "She never did like him much, but he lusted after her-"
"Indeed?" Monk said with raised brows. "They seem to have hidden it remarkably well. Do you think Mr. Kellard tried to force his attentions on her, and when she refused, he became violent and killed her? There was no struggle."
Percival looked at him with withering disgust.
"No I don't. I think he lusted after her, and even if he never did anything about it at all, Mrs. Kellard still discovered it- and boiled with the kind of jealousy that only a spurned woman can. She hated her sister enough to kill her." He saw the widening of Monk's eyes and the tightening of his hands. He knew he had startled the policeman and at least for a time confused him.
A tiny smile touched the corner of Percival’s mouth.
"Will that be all, sir?"
"Yes-yes it will," Monk said after a hesitation. "For the moment."
"Thank you, sir." And Percival turned and walked out, a lift in his step now and a slight swing in his shoulders.
Chapter 5
Hester did not find the infirmary any easier to bear as days went by. The outcome of the trial had given her a sense of bitter struggle and achievement. She had been brought face-to-face again with a dramatic adversarial conflict, and for all its darkness and the pain she knew accompanied it, she had been on the side which had won. She had seen Fabia Grey's terrible face as she left the courtroom, and she knew the hate that now shriveled her life. But she also had seen the new freedom in Lovel Grey, as if ghosts had faded forever, leaving a beginning of light. And she chose to believe that Menard would make a life for himself in Australia, a land about which she knew almost nothing, but insofar as it was not England, there would be hope for him; and it was the best for which they could have striven.
She was not sure whether she liked Oliver Rathbone or not, but he was unquestionably exhilarating. She had tasted battle again, and it had whetted her appetite for more. She found Pomeroy even harder to endure than previously, his insufferable complacency, the smug excuses with which he accepted losses as inevitable, when she was convinced that with greater effort and attention and more courage, better nurses, more initiative by juniors, they need not have been lost at all. But whether that was true or not-he should fight. To be beaten was one thing, to surrender was another-and intolerable.
At least John Airdrie had been operated on, and now as she stood in the ward on a dark, wet November morning she could
see him asleep in his cot at the far end, breathing fitfully. She walked down closer to him to find if he was feverish. She straightened his blankets and moved her lamp to look at his face. It was flushed and, when she touched it, it was hot. This was to be expected after an operation, and yet it was what she dreaded. It might be just the normal reaction, or it might be the first stage of infection, for which they knew no cure. They could only hope the body's own strength would outlast the disease.
Hester had met French surgeons in the Crimea and learned of treatments practiced in the Napoleonic Wars a generation earlier. In 1640 the wife of the governor of Peru had been cured of fever by the administration of a distillation from tree bark, first known as Poudre de la Comtesse, then Poudre de Jesuites. Now it was known as loxa quinine. It was possible Pomeroy might prescribe such a thing for the child, but he might not; he was extremely conservative-and he was also not due to make his rounds for another five hours.