William Monk 08 - The Silent Cry

to ask questions. I cannot believe they will trouble you, since naturally you can know nothing. When Rhys regains his speech, he will tell them, but of course they don’t wish to wait.” A bleakness came over her face. “I don’t suppose they will ever find who did it anyway. It will be some pack of nameless ruffians, and the slums will protect their own.” She started up the stairs, back very straight, head high, but there was no life in her step.
    Following after her, Hester imagined that Sylvestra was barely beginning to lose the numbness of shock, and only in her mind did she turn over and over the details as their reality emerged. Hester could remember feeling the same when she first heard of the suicide of her father, and then, within weeks, of her mother’s death from loneliness and despair. She had kept on worrying at the details, and yet at the same time never really believed the man responsible for her family’s ruin would be caught.
    But that was all in the past, and all that needed to be retained in her mind from it was her understanding of the changing moods of grief.
    The Duff house was large and very modern in furnishings. Everything she had seen in the morning room and in the hall dated from no further back than the accession of the Queen. There was none of the spare elegance of the Georgian period, or of William IV. There were pictures everywhere, ornate wallpaper, tapestries and woven rugs, flower arrangements and stuffed animals under glass. Fortunately, both the hall and the upstairs landings were large enough not to give an air of oppression, but it was not a style Hester found comfortable.
    Sylvestra opened the third door along, hesitated a moment, then invited Hester to accompany her inside. This room was completely different. The long windows faced south and such daylight as there was fell on almost bare walls. The space was dominated by a large bed with carved posts, and in it lay a young man with pale skin, his sensitive, moody face mottled with blue-black bruises and in several places still scabbed with dried blood. His hair, as black as his mother’s, was parted toone side and fell forward over his brow. Because of the disfigurement of his injuries and the pain he must feel, it was difficult to read his expression, but he stared at Hester with what looked like resentment.
    It did not surprise her. She was an intruder in a very deep and private grief. She was a stranger, and yet he would be dependent upon her for his most personal needs. She would witness his pain and still be detached from it, able to come and go, to see and yet not to feel. He would not be the first patient to find that humiliating, an emotional and physical nakedness in front of someone who always had the privacy of clothing.
    Sylvestra went over to the bed, but she did not sit.
    “This is Miss Latterly, who is going to care for you now you are home again. She will be with you all the time, or else in the room along the landing, where the bell will ring to summon her if you need her. She will do everything she can to make you comfortable and help you to get better.”
    He turned his head to regard Hester with only mild curiosity, and still what she could not help feeling was dislike.
    “How do you do, Mr. Duff,” she said rather more coolly than she had originally intended. She had nursed very awkward patients before, but for all her realization, it was still disturbing to be disliked by someone for whom she had an instinctive pity and with whom she would spend the next weeks, or months, constantly—and in most intimate circumstances.
    He blinked but stared back at her in silence. It was going to be a difficult beginning, whatever might follow.
    Sylvestra looked faintly embarrassed. She turned from Rhys to Hester.
    “Perhaps I had better show you your room?”
    “Thank you,” Hester accepted. She would change into a plainer and more practical dress, and return alone to try to get to know Rhys Duff and learn what there was she could do to help him.
    Her first evening in the Duff house was unfamiliar and oddly lonely. She had frequently been among people who were profoundly distressed by violence or bereavement, even by crime.She had lived with people under the pressure of investigation by strangers into the most private and vulnerable parts of their lives. She had known people whom dreadful circumstances had caused to be suspicious and frightened of each other. But she had never before nursed a patient who