She awoke late and still tired, but she had slept better than any night since she came to Ebury Street. She went immediately to Rhys and found him restless, but not yet ready to wake sufficiently to take breakfast.
Downstairs she met Sylvestra who came across the hall as soon as she saw Hester, her face tense with anxiety.
"How is he? Has he spoken yet?" She closed her eyes, impatient with herself. "I'm sorry. I swore I would not ask that. Dr. Wade says I must be patient… but…" she stopped.
"Of course it is difficult," Hesterassured her. "Every day seems like a week. But we sat reading till very late last night, and he seems to have slept well. He was much more at ease.”
Some of the tension slipped out of Sylvestra's body, her shoulders lowered a little and she attempted to smile.
"Come into the dining room. I'm sure you have not breakfasted yet.
Neither have I.”
"Thank you." Hesteraccepted not only because it was a request from her employer, but because she hoped that gradually she might learn a little more about Rhys, and thus be able to be of more comfort to him. Comfort of mind was about all she could offer him, apart from helping him to eat, to stay clean and attend to his immediate personal wants. So far Dr. Wade had not permitted her to change any dressings but the most superficial, and Rhys's greatest injuries were internal where no one could reach them.
The dining room was pleasantly furnished, but like the rest of the house, in too heavy a style for Hester's taste. The table and sideboard were Elizabethan oak, solid and powerful, an immense weight of wood. The carver chairs at each end of the table had high backs and ornate arm rests. There were no mirrors, which might have given more light and impression of space. The curtains were wine and pink brocade, tied back with tasselled cords and splayed wide to show their richness, and the burgundy-coloured lining. The walls were hung with a dozen or more pictures.
But it was extremely comfortable. The chairs were padded on their seats and the fire blazed up in the inglenook hearth, filling the room with warmth.
Sylvestra did not wish to eat. She picked at a piece of toast, undecided whether to have Dundee marmalade or apricot preserves. She poured a cup of tea and sipped it before it was cool enough.
Hester wondered what kind of a man Leighton Duff had been, how they had met and what had happened in the relationship during its twenty-five or so years. What friends had Sylvestra to help her in her grief? They would all have been at the funeral, but that had been almost immediate, in the few days when Rhys had been in hospital, and before Hester had arrived. Now the formal acknowledgements of death were over and Sylvestra was left alone to face the empty days afterwards.
Apparently Dr. Wade's sister was one who was eager to call as soon as she could and he himself seemed to be more than merely a professional acquaintance.
"Have you always lived here?" Hesterasked.
"Yes," Sylvestra replied, looking up quickly as if she too were grateful for something to say, but had simply not known how to begin.
"Yes, ever since I was married.”
"It's extremely comfortable.”
"Yes…" Sylvestra answered automatically, as if it were the expected thing to observe and she did it as she had always done. It no longer had meaning. The poverty and hour to hour dangers of St. Giles were further away than the quarrels and the gods of the Iliad, because they were beyond the horizons of the imagination. Sylvestra recalled herself. "Yes, it is. I suppose I have become so accustomed to it I forget. You must have had very different experiences, Miss Latterly. I admire your courage and sense of duty in going to the Crimea. My daughter Amalia would particularly have liked to meet you. I believe you would have liked her also. She has a most enquiring mind, and the courage to follow her dreams.”
"A superb quality," Hester said sincerely. "You have many reasons to be most proud of her.”
Sylvestra smiled. "Yes… thank you, of course, thank you. Miss Latterly…”
"Yes?”
"Does Rhys remember what happened to him?”
"I don't know. Usually people do, but not always. I have a friend who had an accident and was struck on the head. He has only the vaguest flashes of his life before that day. At times a sight or a sound, a smell, will recall something to him, but only fragments. He has to piece it together as well as he can, and leave the rest. He has re-created a good life for himself." She abandoned the pretence of eating. "But Rhys was not struck on the head. He knows he's home, he knows you. It is simply that night he may not recall, and perhaps that is best. There are some memories we cannot bear. To forget is nature's way of helping us to keep our sanity. It is a way for the mind to heal, when natural forgetting would be impossible.”
Sylvestra stared at her plate. "The police are going to try to make him remember. They need to know who attacked him, and who murdered my husband." She looked up. "What if he can't bear to remember, Miss Latterly? What if they force him, show him evidence, bring a witness or whatever, and make him relive it? Will it break his mind? Can't you stop that? Isn't there a way we can protect him? There has to be!”
"Yes, of course," Hester said before she really thought. Her mind was filled with memories of Rhys trying desperately to speak, of his eyes wide with horror, of his sweat-soaked body as he struggled in nightmare, rigid with terror, his throat contracted in a silent scream as pain ripped through him, and no one heard, no one came. "He is far too ill to be harassed, and I am sure Dr. Wade will tell them so.
Anyway, since he cannot speak or write, there is little he can do except to indicate yes or no. They will have to solve this case by other means.”
"I don't know how!" Sylvestra's voice rose in desperation. "I cannot help them. All they asked me were useless questions about what Leighton was wearing and when he went out. None of that is going to achieve anything!”
"What would help?" Hester poured her cold tea into the slop basin and reached for the pot, tactfully offering it to Sylvestra as well. At her nod, she refilled both cups.
"I wish I knew," Sylvestra said almost under her breath. "I've racked my brain to think what Leighton would have been doing in a place like that, and all I can imagine is that he went after Rhys. He was… he was very angry when he left home, far angrier than I told that young man from the police. It seems so disloyal to discuss family quarrels with strangers.”
Hester knew she meant not so much strangers as people from a different social order, as she must consider Evan to be. She would not know his father was a minister of the church, and he had chosen police work from a sense of dedication to justice, not because it was his natural place in society.
"Of course," she agreed. "It is painful to admit, even to oneself, of a quarrel which cannot now be repaired. One has to set it amid the rest of the relationship, and see it as merely a part, only by mischance the last part. It was probably far less important than it seems. Had Mr. Duff lived they would surely have made up their differences." She did not leave it exactly a question.
Sylvestra sipped her fresh tea. "They were quite unlike each other.
Rhys is the youngest. Leighton said I indulged him. Perhaps I did? I… I felt I understood him so well." Her face puckered with hurt.
"Now it looks as if I didn't understand him at all. And my failure may have cost my husband his life…" Her fingers gripped the cup so tightly Hester was afraid she would break it and spill the hot liquid over herself, even cut her hands on the shards.
"Don't torture yourself with that, when you don't know if it is true!” she urged. "Perhaps you can think of something which may help the police learn why they went to St. Giles. It may stem from something that happened some time before that evening. It is a fearful place.
They must have had a very compelling reason. Could it have been on someone else's account? A friend in trouble?”