William Monk 03 - Defend and Betray

the slop pots is your place. Scrubbing the pans, slicing the vegetables, food, food, food! Keep their stomachs full—you leave their minds to me.”
    “Buckie, what have you been saying to Master Cassian?” Edith asked her.
    Miss Buchan went very white. “Only that his mother’s not a wicked woman, Miss Edith. No child should be told his mother’s wicked and doesn’t love him.”
    “She murdered his father, you daft old bat!” the cook yelled at her. “They’ll hang her for it! How’s ’e goin’ to understand that, if he doesn’t know she’s wicked, poor little creature?”
    “We’ll see,” Miss Buchan said. “She’s got the best lawyer in London. It’s not over yet.”
    “ ’Course it’s over,” the cook said, scenting victory. “They’ll ’ang ’er, and so they should. What’s the city coming to if women can murder their ’usbands any time they take a fancy to—and walk away with it?”
    “There’s worse things than killing people,” Miss Buchan said darkly. “And you know nothing.”
    “That’s enough!” Edith slipped between the two of them. “Cook, you are to go back to the kitchen and do your own job. Do you hear me?”
    “She should be got rid of,” the cook repeated, looking over Edith’s shoulder at Miss Buchan. “You mark my words, Miss Edith, she’s a—”
    “That’s enough.” Edith took the cook by the arm and physically turned her around, pushing her down the stairs.
    “Miss Buchan,” Hester said quickly, “I think we should leave them. If there is to be any dinner in the house, the cook should get back to her duties.”
    Miss Buchan stared at her.
    “And anyway,” Hester went on, “I don’t think there’s really any point in telling her, do you? She isn’t listening, and honestly I don’t think she’d understand even if she were.”
    Miss Buchan hesitated, looking at her with slow consideration, then back at the retreating cook, now clasped firmly by Edith, then at Hester again.
    “Come on,” Hester urged. “How long have you known the cook? Has she ever listened to you, or understood what you were talking about?”
    Miss Buchan sighed and the rigidity went out of her. She turned and walked back up the stairs with Hester. “Never,” she said wearily. “Idiot,” she said again under her breath.
    They reached the landing and went on up again to the schoolroom floor and Miss Buchan’s sitting room. Hester followed her in and closed the door. Miss Buchan went to the dormer window and stared out of it across the roof and into the branches of the trees, leaves moving in the wind against the sky.
    Hester was not sure how to begin. It must be done very carefully, and perhaps so subtly that the actual words were never said. But perhaps, just perhaps, the truth was at last within her grasp.
    “I’m glad you told Cassian not to think his mother was wicked,” she said quietly, almost casually. She saw Miss Buchan’s back stiffen. She must go very carefully. There was no retreat left now, nothing must be said in haste or unguardedly. Even in fury she had betrayed nothing, still less would she here, and to a stranger. “It is an unbearable thing for a child to think.”
    “It is,” Miss Buchan agreed, still staring out of the window.
    “Even though, as I understand it, he was closer to his father.”
    Miss Buchan said nothing.
    “It is very generous of you to speak well of Mrs. Carlyon to him,” Hester went on, hoping desperately that she was saying the right thing. “You must have had a special affection for the general—after all, you must have known him since his childhood.” Please heaven her guess was right. Miss Buchan had been their governess, hadn’t she?
    “I had,” Miss Buchan agreed quietly. “Just like Master Cassian, he was.”
    “Was he?” Hester sat down as if she intended to stay some time. Miss Buchan remained at the window. “You remember him very clearly? Was he fair, like Cassian?” A new thought came into her mind, unformed, indefinite. “Sometimes people seem to resemble each other even though their coloring or their features are not alike. It is a matter of gesture, mannerism, tone of voice …”
    “Yes,” Miss Buchan agreed, turning towards Hester, a half smile on her lips. “Thaddeus had just the same way of looking at you, careful, as if he were measuring you in his mind.”
    “Was he fond of his father too?” Hester tried to picture Randolf as a young man, proud of his only son, spending time