William Monk 02 - A Dangerous Mourning

recently, and one of my brothers waskilled in the Crimea, but I have a surviving brother, and I am very fond both of him and of his wife.”
    Mrs. Willis was satisfied. “Good. I am sorry about your brother who died in the Crimea, but many fine young men were lost in that conflict. To die for one’s Queen and country is an honorable thing and to be borne with such fortitude as one can. My own father was a soldier—a very fine man, a man to look up to. Family is very important, Miss Latterly. All the staff here are most respectable.”
    With great difficulty Hester bit her tongue and forbore from saying what she felt about the Crimean War and its political motives or the utter incompetence of its conduct. She controlled herself with merely lowering her eyes as if in modest consent.
    “Mary will show you the female servants’ staircase.” Mrs. Willis had finished the subject of personal lives and was back to business.
    “I beg your pardon?” Hester was momentarily confused.
    “The female servants’ staircase,” Mrs. Willis said sharply.
    “You will have to go up and down stairs, girl! This is a decent household—you don’t imagine you are going to use the male servants’ stairs, do you? Whatever next? I hope you don’t have any ideas of that sort.”
    “Certainly not, ma’am.” Hester collected her wits quickly and invented an explanation. “I am just unused to such spaciousness. I am not long returned from the Crimea.” This in case Mrs. Willis had heard only the reputation of nurses in England, which was far from savory. “We had no menservants where I was.”
    “Indeed.” Mrs. Willis was totally ignorant in the matter, but unwilling to say so. “Well, we have five outside menservants here, whom you are unlikely to meet, and inside we have Mr. Phillips, the butler; Rhodes, Sir Basil’s valet; Harold and Percival, the footmen; and Willie, the bootboy. You will have no occasion to have dealings with any of them.”
    “No ma’am.”
    Mrs. Willis sniffed. “Very well. You had best go and present yourself to Lady Moidore and see if there is anything you can do for her, poor creature.” She smoothed her apron fiercely and her keys jangled. “As if it wasn’t enough to be bereaved of a daughter, without police creeping all over thehouse and pestering people with questions. I don’t know what the world is coming to! If they were doing their job in the first place all this would never have happened.”
    Since she was not supposed to know it, Hester refrained from saying it was a bit unreasonable to expect police, no matter how diligent, to prevent a domestic murder.
    “Thank you, Mrs. Willis,” she said in compromise, and turned to go upstairs and meet Beatrice Moidore.
    She tapped on the bedroom door, and when there was no answer, went in anyway. It was a charming room, very feminine, full of flowered brocades, oval framed pictures and mirrors, and three light, comfortable dressing chairs set about to be both ornamental and useful. The curtains were wide open and the room full of cold sunlight.
    Beatrice herself was lying on the bed in a satin peignoir, her ankles crossed and her arms behind her head, her eyes wide, staring at the ceiling. She took no notice when Hester came in.
    Hester was an army nurse used to caring for men sorely wounded or desperately ill, but she had a small experience of the shock and then deep depression and fear following an amputation, and the feeling of utter helplessness that overwhelms every other emotion. What she thought she saw in Beatrice Moidore was fear, and the frozen attitude of an animal that dares not move in case it draws attention to itself and does not know which way to run.
    “Lady Moidore,” she said quietly.
    Beatrice realized it was a voice she did not know, and an unaccustomed tone, firmer and not tentative like a maid’s. She turned her head and stared.
    “Lady Moidore, I am Hester Latterly. I am a nurse, and I have come to look after you until you feel better.”
    Beatrice sat up slowly on her elbows. “A nurse?” she said with a faint, slightly twisted smile. “I’m not—” Then she changed her mind and lay back again. “There has been a murder in my family—that is not an illness.”
    So Araminta had not even told her of the arrangements, let alone consulted her—unless, of course, she had forgotten?
    “No,” Hester agreed aloud. “I would consider it more in the nature of an injury. But I learned most of my nursing inthe