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 snipped back to England.
"He was a little above average height," she said aloud. "Slender, rair-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 Jerribly 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 them all proud to hear.
"Naturally they also asked him about his own exploits. He saw the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. He said the courage was sublime: never were soldiers braver or more loyal to their duty. But he said the slaughter was the most dreadful thing he had ever seen, because it was so needless. They rode right into the guns; he told them that." She shivered as she remembered the cartloads of dead and wounded, the labor all through the night, the helplessness, all the blood. Had Joscelin Grey felt anything of the overwhelming emotions of anger and pity that she had?
"There was never any chance whatsoever that they could have survived,'' she said quietly, her voice so low it was almost carried away by the murmur of the wind. "Imogen said he was very angry about it. He said some terrible things about Lord Cardigan. I think that was the moment I most thought I should have liked him."
Deeply as it hurt, Monk also most liked him for it. He had heard of that suicidal charge, and when the brief thrill of admiration had passed, he was left with a towering rage at the monumental incompetence and the waste, the personal vanity, the idiotic jealousies that had uselessly, senselessly squandered so many lives.
For what, in heaven's name, could he have hated Joscelin Grey?
She was talking and he was not listening. Her face was earnest, pinched for the loss and the pain. He wanted to touch her, to tell her simply, elementally, without words that he felt the same.
What sort of revulsion would she feel if she knew it was he who had beaten Joscelin Grey to death in that dreadful room?
"-as they got to know him," she was saying, "they all came to like him better and better for himself. Mama used to look forward to his visits; she would prepare for them days before. Thank heavens she never knew what happened to him."
He refrained at the last moment, when it was on the tip of his tongue, from asking her when her mother had died. He remembered something about shock, a broken heart.
"Go on," he said instead. "Or is that all about him?"
"No." She shook her head. "No, there is much more. As I said, they were all fond of him; Imogen and Charles also. Imogen used to like to hear about the bravery of the soldiers, and of the hospital in Scutari, I suppose at least in part because of me."
He remembered what he had heard of the military hospital-of Florence Nightingale and her women. The sheer physical labor of it, quite apart from the social stigma. Nurses were traditionally mostly men; the few women were of the strongest, the coarsest, and they did little but clean up the worst of the refuse and waste.
She was speaking again. "It was about four weeks after they first met him that he first mentioned the watch-"
"Watch?" He had heard nothing of a watch, except he recalled they had found no watch on the body. Constable Harrison had found one at a pawnbroker's-which had turned out to be irrelevant.
"It was Joscelin Grey's," she replied. "Apparently it was a gold watch of great personal value to him because he had been given it by his grandfather, who had fought with the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. It had a dent in it where a ball from a French musket struck it and was deflected, thus saving his grandfather's life. When he had first expressed a desire to be a soldier himself, the old man had given it to him. It was considered something of a talisman. Joscelin Grey said that poor George had been nervous that night, the night before the Battle of the Alma, perhaps something of a premonition, and Joscelin had lent him the watch. Of course George was killed the next day, and so never returned it. Joscelin did not make much of it, but he said that if it had been returned to them with George's effects, he would be most grateful if he might have it again. He described it most minutely, even to the inscription inside."
"And they returned it to him?" he asked.
"No. No, they did not have it. They had no idea what could have happened to it, but it was not among the things that the army sent them from George's body, nor his personal possessions. I can only presume someone must have stolen it. It is the most contemptible of crimes, but it happens. They felt quite dreadful about it, especially Papa."