William Monk 08 - The Silent Cry

well with a competent lady’s maid, but she felt more dramatic with a nurse and impressed her friends endlessly by likening her plight to that of the war heroes Hester had nursed before her.
    Hester kept a civil tongue with difficulty, and only because she required the employment in order to survive. Her father’s financial ruin had meant she had no inheritance. Her elder brother, Charles, would always have provided for her, as men were expected to provide and care for their unmarried female relations, but such dependence would be suffocating to a womanlike Hester, who had tasted an extraordinary freedom in the Crimea and a responsibility at once both exhilarating and terrifying. She was certainly not going to spend the rest of her days in quiet domesticity being obedient and grateful to a rather unimaginative if kindly brother.
    It was infinitely preferable to bite one’s tongue and refrain from telling Miss Golightly she was a fool … for the space of a few weeks.
    Hester thought, as she settled herself in the hansom that was to take her to this new position, that there were other very considerable advantages to her independent situation. She could make friends where and with whom she chose. Charles would not have had any objection to Lady Callandra Daviot; well, not any severe objection. Callandra was well-bred and had been highly respectable while her army surgeon husband was alive. Now, as a fairly wealthy widow, she was becoming rather less so. Indeed, some might have considered her a trifle eccentric. She had made a pact with Monk when he became a private agent of enquiry that she would support him financially during his lean times as long as he shared with her his more interesting cases. That was not in any sense respectable, but it was enormously diverting, at times tragic and always absorbing. Frequently it accomplished, if not happiness, at least a resolution and some kind of justice.
    The hansom was moving at a brisk pace through the traffic. Hester shivered in the cold.
    And there was the agent of enquiry himself. Charles would never have approved of William Monk. How could society possibly accept a man without a memory? He could be anyone! He could have done anything! The possibilities were endless, and almost all of them unpleasant. Had he been a hero, an aristocrat, or a gentleman, someone would have recognized him and owned him.
    Since the one thing he knew about himself for certain was that he was a policeman, that automatically placed him in a social category somewhere beneath even the most regrettable trade. And of course trade was beneath any of the professions. Younger sons of the gentry went into the army or the church orthe law—those who did not marry wealth and relieve themselves of the necessity of having to do anything. Elder sons, naturally, inherited land and money, and lived accordingly.
    Not that Hester’s friendship with Monk could easily be categorized. Pressing through the traffic in the rain, she thought of it with a mixture of emotions, all of them disturbingly powerful. It had lurched from an initial mutual contempt to a kind of trust which was unique in her life, and she believed in his also. And then, as if suddenly afraid of such vulnerability, they had been quick to quarrel, to find fault and keep little rein on temper.
    But in times of need, and the mutual caring for some cause, they had worked together in an understanding that ran deeper than words, or the need or time for explanations.
    In one fearful hour in Edinburgh, when they had believed they faced death, it had seemed to be that kind of love which touches only a few lives, a depth of unity which is of the heart and mind and soul, and for one aching moment of the body also.
    In the lurching of the cab and the hiss of wheels in the rain she could remember Edinburgh as if it had been yesterday.
    But the experience had been too dangerous to the emotions, too demanding for either of them to dare again.
    Or had it only been he who would not dare?
    That was a question she did not want to ask herself; she had not meant to allow the thought into her mind … and there it was, hard and painful. Now she refused to express it. She did not know. She did not want to. Anyway, it was all irrelevant. There were parts of Monk she admired greatly: his courage; his strength of will; his intelligence; his loyalty to his beliefs; his passion for justice; his ability to face almost any kind of truth, no matter how dreadful; and