William Monk 09 - A Breach of Promise

tried to argue him out of it, but I am almost sure I failed.”
    “I am afraid you did,” Martha agreed, looking at her over the top of her cup. “He believes that the least that is said the soonest it will be mended—which is absolute nonsense!” Her voice was urgent with an anger she knew she should not express. “She is so lonely because she has no idea even what he is closing her out from. It isn’t just the physical pain … or the memories.” She stared ahead of her, her eyes on something far beyond this quiet, domestic room and the household around them, settled for the night, no sound but the hissing of the gas and the occasional creak of a floorboard.
    Hester did not interrupt her.
    “It is not being whole,” Martha went on. “It is being used to beauty and then suddenly having to accept ugliness, deformity …” She obviously found even the word painful to say.
    “Disfigurement,” Hester contradicted her. “It isn’t really the same.”
    Martha looked at her quickly. “No—no, of course not. I’m sorry. I was half thinking of something else. I …” She regarded Hester with a curious almost shyness, and yet her eyes were searching.
    “You have experienced it before?” Hester asked very quietly, then took the first hot sip of her tea, not to press too hard.
    Martha turned away again, pushing the plate of shortbread across closer to Hester. “My brother Samuel married a very pretty woman … twenty-five years ago now, it must be—or nearly. Dolly, her name was. She had the most perfect skin. Not a blemish anywhere. And lovely eyes … and fine features.” She stopped, anger, pity and confusion in her face. The memory hurt her and there was something in it still fiercely unresolved.
    Hester waited.
    “They were happy, I think,” Martha went on. “Sam adored her. They had a baby, a little girl. Phemie, they called her. That was Dolly’s idea. Sam wanted to call her by a biblical name, something old-fashioned.” She sipped her tea. “I can remember the day he came to tell me.” She stopped and took a moment or two to master her emotions. She breathed deeply, her thin chest rising and falling with the effort. “She wasn’t right.” Her voice was choked. “Little Phemie was deformed. Her face. Her mouth. Her lips were all twisted. Dolly couldn’t suckle her herself. She was too upset. She got a wet nurse in, but even she had terrible difficulty getting the baby to feed. She was a poor little thing for long enough, but in the end she did survive.”
    “I’m sorry,” Hester said quietly. She had almost no knowledge of caring for babies. All her experience had been with the results of violence and disease, and always with adults. There was something particularly wrenching to the heart about a tiny creature, new in the world, struggling to live.
    Martha drank some of her tea. “It wasn’t until Leda was born about two years later that they realized Phemie was deaf too.”
    Hester said nothing. She knew from Martha’s face that she was trying to collect her self-control sufficiently to say something else which still tore at her, over twenty years afterwards, intruding into Perdita Sheldon’s grief and confusion and, for a moment at least, pushing it aside.
    “Leda was deformed as well,” Martha said in a whisper. “It was her mouth and an eye. She could see, but she couldn’t hear either, except a tiny bit.” She looked at Hester, waiting for her to say something.
    “I’m so sorry.” Hester could only try to imagine what the mother must have felt, the overwhelming tide of pity, anger, confusion, guilt, and also consuming fear for the future of the children she had borne into a world which would treat them with terrible cruelty, sometimes without even realizing it. What would become of them when she was not there to protect and defend and love them?
    “What happened?” she asked.
    “Sam loved them,” Martha answered, biting her lip and staring straight ahead. “He looked after them, even when Dolly was too distraught to manage.” She stopped again, unable for a moment to continue.
    Hester sat motionless, ignoring the tea and the shortbread; in fact, she had forgotten them.
    “Then Sam died,” Martha said abruptly. “It was something with his stomach. It was very quick. Dolly couldn’t manage without him. She was completely distracted with grief. Phemie and Leda were put into an institution and Dolly went away. She didn’t tell us where. I expect she