William Monk 03 - Defend and Betray

with him, telling him about his great campaigns, andthe boy’s face lighting up with the glamour and the danger and the heroism of it.
    “Just the same,” Miss Buchan said with a strange, sad expression in her face, and a flicker of anger coming and going so rapidly Hester only just caught it.
    “And to his mother?” Hester asked, not knowing what to say next.
    Miss Buchan looked at her, then away again and out of the window, her face puckered with pain.
    “Miss Felicia was different from Miss Alexandra,” she said with something like a sob in her voice. “Poor creature. May God forgive her.”
    “And yet you find it in your heart to be sorry for her?” Hester said gently, and with respect.
    “Of course,” Miss Buchan replied with a sad little smile. “You know what you are taught, what everyone tells you is so. You are all alone. Who is there to ask? You do what you think—you weigh what you value most. Unity: one face to the outside world. Too much to lose, you see. She lacked the courage …”
    Hester did not understand. She groped after threads of it, and the moment she had them the next piece made no sense. But how much dare she ask without risking Miss Buchan’s rebuffing her and ceasing to talk at all? One word or gesture of seeming intrusion, a hint of curiosity, and she might withdraw altogether.
    “It seems she had everything to lose, poor woman,” she said tentatively.
    “Not now,” Miss Buchan replied with sudden bitterness. “It’s all too late now. It’s over—the harm is all done.”
    “You don’t think the trial might make a difference?” Hester said with fading hope. “You sounded before as if you did.”
    Miss Buchan was silent for several minutes. Outside a gardener dropped a rake and the sound of the wood on the path came up through the open window.
    “It might help Miss Alexandra,” Miss Buchan said at last. “Please God it will, although I don’t see how. But what willit do to the child? And God knows, it can’t alter the past for anyone else. What’s done is done.”
    Hester had a curious sensation, almost like a tingling in the brain. Suddenly shards of a pattern fell together, incomplete, vague, but with a tiny, hideous thread of sense.
    “That is why she won’t tell us,” she said very slowly. “To protect the child?”
    “Tell you?” Miss Buchan faced Hester, a pucker of confusion between her brows.
    “Tell us the real reason why she killed the general.”
    “No—of course not,” she said slowly. “How could she? But how did you know? No one told you.”
    “I guessed.”
    “She’ll not admit it. God help her, she thinks that is all there is to it—just the one.” Her eyes filled with tears of pity and helplessness, and she turned away again. “But I know there are others, of course there are. I knew it from his face, from the way he smiles, and tells lies, and cries at night.” She spoke very quietly, her voice full of old pain. “He’s frightened, and excited, and grown up, and a tiny child, and desperately, sickeningly alone, all at the same time like his father before him, God damn him!” Miss Buchan took a long, shuddering breath, so deep it seemed to rack her whole, thin body. “Can you save her, Miss Latterly?”
    “I don’t know,” Hester said honestly. All the pity in the world now would not permit a lie. It was not the time. “But I will do everything I can—that I swear to you.”
    Without saying anything else she stood up and left the room, closing the door behind her and walking away towards the rest of the small rooms in the wing. She was looking for Cassian.
    She found him standing in the corridor outside the door to his bedroom, staring up at her, his face pale, his eyes careful.
    “You did the right thing to get Edith to stop the fight,” she said matter-of-factly. “Do you like Miss Buchan?”
    He continued to stare at her without speaking, his eyelids heavy, his face watchful and uncertain.
    “Shall we go into your room?” she suggested. She wasnot sure how she was going to approach the subject, but nothing now would make her turn back. The truth was almost reached, at least this part of it.
    Wordlessly he turned around and opened the door. She followed him in. Suddenly she was furious that the burden of so much tragedy, guilt and death should rest on the narrow, fragile shoulders of such a child.
    He walked over to the window; the light on his face showed the marks of tears on his soft, blemishless skin.