Wiliam Monk 01 - The Face of a Stranger

to that, and moved on to Rosamond, who was more prepared to make light conversation and fall in with whatever mood he wished.
    When dinner was announced there was no gentleman to escort her into the dining room, so she was obliged to go in with Callandra, and at table found herself seated opposite the general.
    The first course was served and everyone began to eat, the ladies delicately, the men with appetite. At first conversation was slight, then when the initial hunger had been assuaged and the soup and fish eaten, Ursula began to speak about the hunt, and the relative merits of one horse over another.
    Hester did not join in. The only riding she had done had been in the Crimea, and the sight of the horses there injured, diseased and starving had so distressed her she put it from her mind. Indeed so much did she close her attention from their speech that Fabia had addressed her three times before she was startled into realizing it.
    "I beg your pardon!" she apologized in some embarrassment.
    "I believe you said, Miss Latterly, that you were briefly acquainted with my late son, Major Joscelin Grey?"
    "Yes. I regret it was very slight—there were so many wounded." She said it politely, as if she were discussing some ordinary commodity, but her mind went back to the reality of the hospitals when the wounded, the frostbitten and those wasted with cholera, dysentery and starvation
    were lying so close there was barely room for more, and the rats scuttled, huddled and clung everywhere.
    And worse than that she remembered the earthworks in the siege of Sebastopol, the bitter cold, the light of lamps in the mud, her body shaking as she held one high for the surgeon to work, its gleam on the saw blade, the dim shapes of men crowding together for a fraction of body's warmth. She remembered the first time she saw the great figure of Rebecca Box striding forward over the battlefield beyond the trenches to ground lately occupied by Russian troops, and lifting the bodies of the fallen and hoisting them over her shoulder to carry them back. Her strength was surpassed only by her sublime courage. No man fell injured so far forward she would not go out for him and carry him back to hospital hut or tent.
    They were staring at her, waiting for her to say something more, some word of praise for him. After all, he had been a soldier—a major in the cavalry.
    "I remember he was charming." She refused to lie, even for his family. "He had the most delightful smile."
    Fabia relaxed and sat back. "That was Joscelin," she agreed with a misty look in her blue eyes. "Courage and a kind of gaiety, even in the most dreadful circumstances. I can still hardly believe he is gone—I half think he will throw the door open and stride in, apologizing for being late and telling us how hungry he is."
    Hester looked at the table piled high with food that would have done half a regiment at the height of the siege. They used the word hunger so easily.
    General Wadham sat back and wiped his napkin over his lips.
    "A fine man," he said quietly. "You must have been very proud of him, my dear. A soldier's life is all too often short, but he carries honor with him, and he will not be forgotten."
    The table was silent but for the clink of silver on porcelain. No one could think of any immediate reply. Fabia's face was full of a bleak and terrible grief, an almost devastating loneliness. Rosamond stared into space, and Lovel looked quietly wretched, whether for their pain or his own was impossible to know. Was it memory or the present which robbed him?
    Menard chewed his food over and over, as if his throat were too tight and his mouth too dry to swallow it.
    "Glorious campaign," the general went on presently. "Live in the annals of history. Never be surpassed for courage. Thin Red Line, and all that."
    Hester found herself suddenly choked with tears, anger and grief boiling up inside her, and intolerable frustration. She could see the hills beyond the Alma River more sharply than the figures around the table and the winking crystal. She could see the breastwork on the forward ridges as it had been that morning, bristling with enemy guns, the Greater and Lesser Redoubts, the wicker barricades filled with stones. Behind them were Prince Menshikoff's fifty thousand men. She remembered the smell of the breeze off the sea. She had stood with the women who had followed the army and watched Lord Raglan sitting in frock coat and white shirt, his back ramrod stiff in