William Monk 03 - Defend and Betray

serve? It may merely demonstrate that Oliver Rathbone can discover the truth and lay it bare for all to see, even if the wretched accused would rather be hanged than reveal it herself.”
    “I shan’t reveal it if she does not give me permission,” Oliver said quickly, his face pink, his dark eyes wide. “For heaven’s sake, what do you take me for?”
    “Occasionally hotheaded, my dear boy,” Henry replied. “And possessed of an intellectual arrogance and curiosity, which I fear you have inherited from me.”
    They continued the evening very pleasantly speaking of any number of things other than the Carlyon case. They discussed music, of which all were fond. Henry Rathbone was quite knowledgeable, having a great love of Beethoven’s late quartets, composed when Beethoven himself was already severely deaf. They had a darkness and a complexity he found endlessly satisfying, and a beauty wrought out of pain which excited his pity but also reached a deeper level of his nature and fed a hunger there.
    They also spoke of political events, the news from India and the growing unrest there. They touched only once on the Crimean War, but Henry Rathbone was so infuriated by the incompetence and the unnecessary deaths that after a quick glance at each other, Hester and Oliver changed the subject and did not hark back to it again.
    Before leaving Hester and Oliver took a slow stroll around the garden and down to the honeysuckle hedge at the border of the orchard. The smell of the first flowers was close and sweet in the hazy darkness and she could see only the outline of the longest upflung branches against the starlit sky. For once they did not talk of the case.
    “The news from India is very dark,” she said, staring across at the pale blur of the apple blossoms. “It is so peaceful here it seems doubly painful to think of mutiny and battle. I feel guilty to have such beauty …”
    He was standing very close to her and she was aware of the warmth of him. It was an acutely pleasant feeling.
    “There is no need for guilt,” he replied. She knew he was smiling although she had her back to him, and could scarcely have seen him in the dark anyway. “You could not help them,” he went on, “by not appreciating what you have. That would merely be ungrateful.”
    “Of course you are right,” she agreed. “It is selfindulgent for the sake of conscience, but actually achieves nothing at all, except ingratitude, as you say. I used to walknear the battlefields sometimes, in the Crimea, and knew what had happened so close by, and yet I needed the silence and the flowers, or I could not have gone on. If you don’t keep your strength, both physical and spiritual, you are of no help to those who need you. All my intelligence knows that.”
    He took her elbow gently and they walked towards the herbaceous border, lupin spears just visible against the pale stones of the wall and the dusky outline of a climbing rose.
    “Do you find hard cases affect you like that?” she asked presently. “Or are you more practical? I don’t know—do you often lose?”
    “Certainly not.” There was laughter in his voice.
    “You must lose sometimes!”
    The laughter vanished. “Yes, of course I do. And yes—I find myself lying awake imagining how the prisoner must feel, tormenting myself in case I did not do everything I could have, and I was lying in my warm bed, and will do the next night, and the next … and that poor devil who depended on me will soon lie in the cold earth of an unhallowed grave.”
    “Oliver!” She swung around and stared at him, without thinking, reaching for both his hands.
    He clasped her gently, fingers closing over hers.
    “Don’t your patients die sometimes, my dear?”
    “Yes, of course.”
    “And don’t you wonder if you were to blame? Even if you could not have saved them, could not have eased their pain, their fear?”
    “Yes. But you have to let it go, or you would cripple yourself, and then be of no more use to the next patient.”
    “Of course.” He raised her hands and touched his lips to them, first the left, and then the right. “And we shall both continue to do so, all we can. And we shall both also look at the moonlight on the apple trees, and be glad of it without guilt that no one else can see it precisely as we do. Promise me?”
    “I promise,” she said softly. “And the stars and the honeysuckle as well.”
    “Oh, don’t worry about the stars,” he said with laughter