William Monk 05 - The Sins of the Wolf

she was all right, but really because hewanted the comfort of being with her himself. She was frightened too; I can still see her face in my mind, white-skinned, wide-eyed, but busy telling Alastair about Burke having been hanged and that he was quite dead.” She gave a dry little laugh. “She described it in detail, she was so certain of it.”
    Hester could picture it. Two children sitting together, each pretending to assure the other, and whispering in hushed voices of the horrors of body snatchers, resurrectionists, secret murder in dark alleys, and the dissector’s bloody table. Such memory runs deep, perhaps below the surface of consciousness, but those things shared forge a trust which excludes other, later, comers. She had no such moments with her elder brother, Charles. He had always been a little on his dignity, even from the earliest times she could recall. It had been James with whom she had had adventures and secrets. But James had been killed in the Crimea.
    “I’m sorry,” Mary said quietly, her voice cutting across Hester’s thoughts. “I have said something that distressed you.” It was not a question but an observation.
    Hester was startled. She had not thought Mary was more than peripherally aware of her, certainly not enough to notice her feelings.
    “Perhaps resurrectionists were not the most sensitive of subjects to raise,” Mary said ruefully.
    “Not at all,” Hester assured her. “I was thinking of the two children together, and remembering my younger brother. My elder brother was always a little pompous, but James was fun.”
    “You speak of him in the past. Is he—gone?” Mary’s voice was suddenly gentle, as if she knew bereavement only too well.
    “Yes, in the Crimea,” Hester replied.
    “I’m so sorry. To say I know how you feel would be ridiculous, but I have some idea. I had a brother killed at Waterloo.” She said the word carefully, rolling it off hertongue as if it held some mystic quality. To many of Hester’s age that would have been incomprehensible, but she had heard too many soldiers speak of it for it not to give her a shiver through the flesh. It had been the greatest land battle in Europe, the end of an empire, the ruin of dreams, the beginning of the modern age. Men of all nations had fought to exhaustion till the fields were strewn with the wounded and the dead, the armies of Europe, as Lord Byron had said, “in one red burial blent.”
    She looked up and smiled at Mary, so she would know Hester understood at least something of its immensity.
    “I was in Brussels then,” Mary said with a wry turn of her lips. “My husband was in the army, a major in the Royal Scots Greys….”
    Hester did not hear the rest of what she said. The clanking of the train wheels over the tracks drowned out a word here and there, and her mind was filled with a picture of the man in the portrait, with his fair sweep of hair and the face which at once had such emotion and ambiguous power and vulnerability. It was easy to imagine him, tall, straight-backed, wildly elegant in uniform, dancing the night away in some Brussels ballroom, knowing all the while that in the morning he would ride out to a battle to decide the rise or fall of nations and from which thousands would not return and more thousands would come home blind or maimed. And then she thought of the painting she had seen of the charge of the Royal Scots Greys at Waterloo, the light on the white horses plunging through the heat of battle, manes flying, scarlet riders bent forward, the dust and gun smoke clouding the rest, darkening the scene behind them.
    “He must have been a very fine man,” she said impulsively.
    Mary looked surprised. “Hamish?” She sighed gently. “Oh yes, yes he was. It seems like another world, so very long ago, Waterloo. I hadn’t thought of it in years.”
    “He came through the battle all right?” Hester was notafraid to ask because she knew he had died only eight years before, and Waterloo was forty-two years in the past.
    “He had a few cuts and bruises, but nothing worth calling a wound,” Mary replied. “Hector had a musket ball in his shoulder and a saber cut on his leg, but he healed quickly enough.”
    “Hector?” Why should she be surprised? Forty-two years ago Hector Farraline might have been a very different man from the drunkard he was now.
    The look in Mary’s eyes was far away, sad and sweet and full of memory. “Oh yes, Hector was a captain. He was a