William Monk 08 - The Silent Cry

to see. “I still find it hard to accept that Leighton … Mr. Duff … is dead. I had known him for years. We had shared … a great deal. That it should all end”—he took a deep breath—“like this … is appalling. Rhys is much more than a patient to me. I know …” He made a slight gesture with his hands. “I know a good doctor, or a good nurse, should not allow himself or herself to become personally involved with any patient. It can affect their judgment to offer the best care possible. Relatives can lend sympathy and grief, moral support and love. They look to us to provide the best professional treatment, not emotion. I know all this as well as anyone. Still, I cannot help being moved by Rhys’s plight.”
    “And I too,” she confessed. “I don’t think anyone expects us not to care. How could we dedicate our time to helping the sick and injured if we did not care?”
    He looked at her closely for several moments.
    “You are a remarkable woman, Miss Latterly. And of courseyou are right. I shall go up and see Rhys. Perhaps you will keep the ladies company and …”
    “Yes?” She was now used to his pattern of seeing Rhys alone, and no longer questioned it.
    “Please, do not offer them too much encouragement. I do not know if he is progressing as well as I had hoped. His outer wounds are healing, but he seems to have no energy, no will to recover. I detect very little returning strength, and that disturbs me. Can you tell me if I have missed something, Miss Latterly?”
    “No … no, I wish I could, but I also have wished he would develop more desire to sit up longer, even get into a chair for a while. He is still very weak and not able to take as much food as I had expected.”
    He sighed. “Perhaps we hope too much. But guard your words, Miss Latterly, or we may unintentionally cause even more pain.” And with an inclination of his head, he went up the stairs past her and disappeared across the landing.
    Hester went to the withdrawing room and knocked on the door. She had a fear of interrupting a moment that could be confidential. However, she was invited in immediately and with apparently genuine pleasure.
    “Do come in, Miss Latterly,” Eglantyne said warmly. “Mrs. Duff was telling me about Constance’s letters from India. It sounds extraordinarily beautiful, in spite of the heat and the disease. Sometimes I regret there is so much of the world I shall never see. Of course, my brother has traveled a great deal …”
    “He was a naval surgeon, wasn’t he?” Hester sat in the chair offered her. “He mentioned something of it to me.”
    Eglantyne’s face showed little expression. It was plain that her brother’s career did not excite in her either the imagination of danger, personal courage, and desperate conditions or the knowledge of suffering that it did in Hester. But then how could it? Eglantyne Wade had probably never witnessed anything more violent or distressing than a minor carriage accident, the odd broken bone or cut hand. Her grief would be … what? Boredom, a sense of life passing by without touchingher, of being very little real use to anyone. Almost certainly a loneliness, perhaps a broken romance, a love known and lost, or merely dreamed of. She was pretty—in fact, very pretty—and it seemed she was also kind. But that was not enough to understand a man like Corriden Wade.
    Eglantyne avoided Hester’s eyes. “Yes, he does speak of it occasionally. He believes very strongly in the power of the navy, and the life at sea, to build character. He says it is nature’s way of refining the race. At least I think that is what he said.” She seemed uninterested. There was no life in her voice, no lift of understanding or care.
    Sylvestra looked at her quickly, as if sensing some emotion, perhaps loneliness, beyond her words.
    “Would you like to travel?” Hester asked to fill the silence.
    “Sometimes I think so,” Eglantyne answered slowly, recalling herself to the polite necessities of conversation. “I am not sure where. Fidelis … Mrs. Kynaston … speaks of it sometimes. But of course it is only a dream. Still, it is pleasant to read, is it not? I daresay you read a great deal to Rhys?”.
    The conversation continued for nearly an hour, touching on a dozen things, exploring none of them.
    Eventually Corriden Wade returned looking very grave, his face deeply lined, as if he were close to exhaustion. He closed the door behind him and