William Monk 02 - A Dangerous Mourning

difficult.”
    Beatrice dropped her eyes. “I’d rather not have known. I guessed some of it, of course. I knew Septimus gambled, and I thought he took wine occasionally from the cellars.” She smiled. “In fact it rather amused me. Basil is so pompous about his claret.” Her face darkened again and the humor vanished. “I didn’t know Septimus took it for Fenella, and even then I wouldn’t have cared about it if it were sympathy for her—but it isn’t. I think he hates her. She’s everything in a woman that is different from Christabel—that is the woman he loved. That isn’t a good reason for hating anyone, though, is it?”
    She hesitated, but Hester did not interrupt.
    “Strange how being dependent, and being reminded of it all the time, sours you,” Beatrice went on. “Because you feel helpless and inferior, you try to get power again by doing just the same to someone else. God how I hate investigations! It will take us years to forget all we’ve learned about each other—maybe by then it will be too late.”
    “Maybe you can learn to forgive instead?” Hester knew she was being impertinent, but it was the only thing she could say with any truth, and Beatrice not only deserved truth, she needed it.
    Beatrice turned away and traced her finger on the dry inside of the window, following the racing drops.
    “How do you forgive someone for not being what you wanted them to be, or what you thought they were? Especially when they are not sorry—perhaps they don’t even understand?”
    “Or again, perhaps they do?” Hester suggested. “And how do they forgive us for having expected too much of them, instead of looking to see what they really were, and loving that?”
    Beatrice’s finger stopped.
    “You are very frank, aren’t you!” It was not a question. “But it isn’t as easy as that, Hester. You see, I am not even sure that Percival is guilty. Am I wicked still to have doubts in my mind when the court says he is, and he’s been sentenced, and the world says it is all over? I dream, and wake up with my mind torn with suspicions. I look at people and wonder, and I hear double and triple meanings behind what they say.”
    Again Hester was racked with indecision. It would seem somuch kinder to suggest that no one else could be guilty, that it was only the aftermath of all the fear still lingering on, and in time it would melt away. Daily life would comfort, and this extraordinary tragedy would ease until it became only the grief one feels for any loss.
    But then she thought of Percival in Newgate prison, counting the few days left to him until one morning there was no more time at all.
    “Well if Percival is not guilty, who else could it have been?” She heard the words spoken aloud and instantly regretted her judgment. It was brutal. She never for an instant thought Beatrice would believe it was Rose, and none of the other servants had even entered the field of possibility. But it could not be taken back. All she could do was wait for Beatrice’s answer.
    “I don’t know.” Beatrice measured each word. “I have lain in the dark each night, thinking this is my own house, where I came when I was married. I have been happy here, and wretched. I have borne five children here, and lost two, and now Octavia. I’ve watched them grow up, and themselves marry. I’ve watched their happiness and their misery. It is all as familiar as bread and butter, or the sound of carriage wheels. And yet perhaps I know only the skin of it all, and the flesh beneath is as strange to me as Japan.”
    She moved to the dressing table and began to take the pins from her hair and let it down in a shining stream like bright copper.
    “The police came here and were full of sympathy and respectfully polite. Then they proved that no one could have broken in from outside, so whoever killed Octavia was one of us. For weeks they asked questions and forced us to find the answers—ugly answers, most of them, things about ourselves that were shabby, or selfish, or cowardly.” She put the pins in a neat little pile in one of the cut glass trays and picked up the silver-backed brush.
    “I had forgotten about Myles and that poor maid. That may seem incredible, but I had. I suppose I never thought about it much at the time, because Araminta didn’t know.” She pulled at her hair with the brush in long, hard strokes. “lama coward, aren’t I,” she said very quietly. It was a statement, not a question. “I saw