Sylvestra opened the third door along, hesitated a moment, then invited Hester to accompany her inside. This room was completely different.
The long windows faced south and such daylight as there was fell on almost bare walls. The space was dominated by a large bed with carved posts and in it lay a young man with pale skin, his sensitive, moody face mottled with blue-black bruises, and in several places still scabbed with dried blood. His hair, as black as his mother's, was parted to one side, and fell forward over his brow. Because of the disfigurement of his injuries, and the pain he must feel, it was difficult to read his expression, but he stared at Hester with what looked like resentment.
It did not surprise her. She was an intruder in a very deep and private grief. She was a stranger, and yet he would be dependent upon her for his most personal needs. She would witness his pain, and be detached from it, able to come and go, to see and yet not to feel. He would not be the first patient to find that humiliating, an emotional and physical nakedness in front of someone who always had the privacy of clothing.
Sylvestra went over to the bed, but she did not sit.
"This is Miss Latterly, who is going to care for you, now you are home again. She will be with you all the time, or else in the room along the landing, where the bell will ring to summon her if you need her.
She will do everything she can to make you comfortable, and help you to get better.”
He turned his head to regard Hester with only mild curiosity, and still what she could not help feeling was dislike.
"How do you do, Mr. Duff," she said rather more coolly than she had originally intended. She had nursed very awkward patients before, but for all her realisation, it was still disturbing to be disliked by someone for whom she had an instinctive pity, and with whom she would spend the next weeks, or months, constantly, and in most intimate circumstances.
He blinked, but stared back at her in silence. It was going to be a difficult beginning, whatever might follow.
Sylvestra looked faintly embarrassed. She turned from Rhys to Hester.
"Perhaps I had better show you your room?”
"Thank you," Hesteraccepted. She would change into a plainer and more practical dress, and return alone to try to get to know Rhys Duff, and learn what there was she could do to help him.
Her first evening in the Duff house was unfamiliar and oddly lonely.
She had frequently been among people who were profoundly distressed by violence, bereavement, even by crime. She had lived with people under the pressure of investigation by strangers into the most private and vulnerable parts of their lives. She had known people whom dreadful circumstances had caused to be suspicious and frightened of each other.
But she had never before nursed a patient who was conscious and yet unable to speak. There was a silence in the whole house which gave her a sense of isolation. Sylvestra herself was a quiet woman, not given to conversing except when she had some definite message to impart, not talking simply for companionship, as most women do.
The servants were muted, as if in the presence of the dead, not chattering or gossiping among themselves as was habitual.
When Hester returned to Rhys's room she found him lying on his back staring up at the ceiling, his eyes wide and fixed, as if in great concentration upon something. She hesitated to interrupt him. She stood watching the firelight flickering, looked to make certain there were enough coals in the bucket for several hours, then studied the small bookcase on the nearer wall to see what he had chosen to read before the attack. She saw books on various other countries, Africa, India, the Far East, and at least a dozen on forms of travel, letters and memoirs of explorers, botanists and observers of the customs and habits of other cultures. There was one large and beautifully bound book on the art of Islam, another on the history of Byzantium. Another seemed to be on the Arab and Moorish conquests of North Africa and Spain before the rise of Ferdinand and Isabella had driven them south again. Beside it was a book on Arabic art, mathematics and inventions.
She must make some contact with him. If she had to force the issue, then she would. She walked forward where he must see her, even if only from the corner of his eye.
"You have an interesting collection of books," she said conversationally. "Have you ever travelled?”
He turned his head to stare at her.
"I know you cannot speak, but you can nod your head," she went on.
"Have you?”
He shook his head very slightly. It was communication, but the animosity was still in his eyes.
"Do you plan to, when you are better?”
Something closed inside his mind. She could see the change in him quite clearly, although it was so slight as to defy description.
"I've been to the Crimea," she said, disregarding his withdrawal. "I was there during the war. Of course I saw mostly battlefields and hospitals, but there were occasions when I saw something of the people, and the countryside. It is always extraordinary, almost indecent to me, how the flowers go on blooming and so many things seem exactly the same, even when the world is turning upside down with men killing and dying in their hundreds. You feel as if everything ought to stop, but of course it doesn't.”
She watched him, and he did not move his eyes away, even though they seemed filled with anger. She was almost sure it was anger, not fear.
She looked down to where his broken and splinted hands lay on the sheets. The ends of the fingers below the bandages were slender and sensitive. The nails were perfectly shaped, except one which was badly torn. He must have injured them when he had fought to try to save himself… and perhaps his father too. What did he remember of it?
What terrible knowledge was locked up in his silence?
"I met several Turkish people who were very charming and most interesting," she went on, as if he had responded wishing to know. She described a young man who had helped in the hospital, talking about him quite casually, remembering more and more as she spoke. What she could not recall she invented.
Once, during the whole hour, she saw the beginning of a smile touch his mouth. At least he was really listening. For a moment they had shared a thought or a feeling.
Later she brought a salve to put on the broken skin of his face where it was drying and would crack, painfully. She reached out with it on her finger, and the moment her skin touched his, he snatched his cheek away, his body clenched up, his eyes black and angry.
"It won't hurt," she promised. "It will help to stop the scab from cracking.”
He did not move. His muscles were tight, his chest and shoulders so locked, the pain of it must have pulled on the bruises which both Dr.
Riley and Dr. Wade had said covered his body.
She let her hands fall.
"All right. It doesn't matter. I'll ask you later, and see if you've changed your mind.”
She left and went downstairs to the kitchen to fetch him something to eat. Perhaps the cook would prepare him a coddled egg, or a light custard. According to Dr. Wade, he was well enough to eat, and must be encouraged to do so.
The cook, Mrs. Crozier, had quite an array of suitable dishes, either already prepared, or easy to make even as Hester waited. She offered beef tea, eggs, steamed fish, bread and butter pudding, baked custard or cold chicken.
"How is he, Miss?" she asked with concern in her face.
"He seems very poorly still," Hesteranswered honestly. "But we should keep every hope. Perhaps you know which dishes he likes?”