Wiliam Monk 01 - The Face of a Stranger

but let your poor father-in-law rest in peace." He crossed the air absently. "Yes—in peace."
    Monk stood up. Mrs. Latterly; so she was married—or a widow? He was being absurd.
    "If I learn anything more, Mrs. Latterly"—his voice was tight, almost choking—"do you wish me to inform you?" He did not want to lose her, to have her disappear into the past with everything else. He might not discover anything, but he must know where she was, have a reason to see her.
    She looked at him for a long moment, undecided, fighting with herself. Then she spoke carefully.
    "Yes please, if you will be so kind, but please remember your promise! Good night." She swiveled around, her skirts brushing Monk's feet. "Good night, Vicar. Come, Hester, it is time we returned home; Charles will be expecting us for dinner." And she walked slowly up towards
    the door. Monk watched her go arm in arm with the other woman as if she had taken the light away with her.
    * * * * *
    Outside in the sharper evening air Hester Latterly turned to her sister-in-law.
    "I think it is past time you explained yourself, Imogen," she said quietly, but with an edge of urgency in her voice. "Just who is that man?"
    "He is with the police," Imogen replied, walking briskly towards their carriage, which was waiting at the curbside. The coachman climbed down, opened the door and handed them in, Imogen first, then Hester. Both took his courtesy for granted and Hester arranged her skirts merely sufficiently to be comfortable, Imogen to avoid crushing the fabric.
    "What do you mean, 'with'?" Hester demanded as the carriage moved forward. "One does not accompany the police; you make it sound like a social event! 'Miss Smith is with Mr. Jones this evening.' "
    "Don't be pedantic," Imogen criticized. "Actually you can say it of a maid as well—'Tilly is with the Robinsons at present'!"
    Hester's eyebrows shot up. "Indeed! And is that man presently playing footman to the police?"
    Imogen remained silent.
    "Ifri sorry," Hester said at length. "But I know there is something distressing you, and I feel so helpless because I don't know what it is."
    Imogen put out her hand and held Hester's tightly.
    "Nothing," she said in a voice so low it could only just be heard above the rattle of the carriage and the dull thud of hooves and the noises of the street. "It is only Papa's death, and all that followed. None of us are over the shock of it yet, and I do appreciate your leaving everything and coming home as you did."
    "I never thought of doing less," Hester said honestly, although her work in the Crimean hospitals had changed her beyond anything Imogen or Charles could begin to
    understand. It had been a hard duty to leave the nursing service and the white-hot spirit to improve, reform and heal that had moved not only Miss Nightingale but so many other women as well. But the death of first her father, then within a few short weeks her mother also, had made it an undeniable duty that she should return home and be there to mourn, and to assist her brother and his wife in all the affairs that there were to be attended to. Naturally Charles had seen to all the business and the finances, but there had been the house to close up, servants to dismiss, endless letters to write, clothes to dispose of to the poor, bequests of a personal nature to be remembered, and the endless social facade to be kept up. It would have been desperately unfair to expect Imogen to bear the burden and that responsibility alone. Hester had given no second thought as to whether she should come, simply excused herself, packed her few belongings and embarked.
    It had been an extraordinary contrast after the desperate years in the Crimea with the unspeakable suffering she had seen, the agony of wounds, bodies torn by shot and sword; and to her even more harrowing, those wasted by disease, the racking pain and nausea of cholera, typhus and dysentery, the cold and the starvation; and driving her almost beyond herself with fury, the staggering incompetence.
    She, like the other handful of women, had worked herself close to exhaustion, cleaning up human waste where there were no sanitary facilities, excrement from the helpless running on the floor and dripping through to the packed and wretched huddled in the cellars below. She had nursed men delirious with fever, gangrenous from amputations of limbs lost to everything from musket shot, cannon shot, sword thrust, even frostbite on the exposed and fearful bivouacs