William Monk 12 - Funeral in Blue

impatient, she did not tolerate foolishness or indecision. Too often she did not listen to the views of others, and she was hasty in her judgment, but when she was wrong she apologized.” His voice softened and he blinked rapidly. “She was a creature of high idealism, Superintendent, the imagination to put herself in the place of those less fortunate and to see how their lot could be made better.”
    “No wonder Dr. Beck fell in love with her,” Runcorn said.
    Monk was afraid he was beginning to suspect Kristian of jealousy, because he could not keep the thought from his own mind.
    “He was far from the only one.” Pendreigh sighed. “It was not always easy to be so admired. It gives one . . . too much to live up to.”
    “But she chose Dr. Beck, not any of the others.” Monk made it a statement. He saw Runcorn’s warning look and ignored it. “Do you know why?”
    Pendreigh thought for several moments before he replied. “I’m trying to remember what she wrote at the time.” He drew his fair brows into a frown of concentration. “I think he had the same kind of resolve that she did, the nerve to go through with what he planned even when circumstances changed and the cost became higher.” He looked at Monk intently. “He was a very complex man, a disciple of medicine and its challenges, and yet at the same time of great personal physical courage. Yes, I think that was it, the sheer nerve in the face of danger. That appealed to her. She had a certain pity for people who wavered, she entirely understood fear. . . .”
    Monk looked quickly at Runcorn and saw the puzzlement in his face. This all seemed so far away from an artist’s studio in Acton Street and the beautiful woman they had seen in the morgue. And yet it was easily imaginable of the woman in the painting of the funeral in blue.
    Pendreigh shivered, but he was standing a little straighter, his head high. “I remember one incident she wrote about to me. It was in May, but still there was danger in the air. For months there had been hardly anything to buy in the shops. The emperor had left Vienna. The police had banished all unemployed servants from the city, but most of them had come back, one way or another.” Anger sharpened his voice. “There was chaos because the secret police had been done away with and their duties taken over by the National Guard and the Academic Legion. There was an immediate crime wave, and anyone remotely well-dressed was likely to be attacked in the street. That was when she first noticed Kristian. Armed only with a pistol, and quite alone, he faced a mob and made them back down. She said he was magnificent. He could easily have walked the other way, effected not to notice, and no one would necessarily have thought the worse of him.”
    “You said he was complex,” Monk prompted. “That sounds like a fairly simple heroism to me.”
    Pendreigh stared into the distance. “I knew only what she told me. But even the most idealistic battles are seldom as easy as imagined by those not involved. There are good people on the enemy side also, and at times weak and evil people on one’s own.”
    Runcorn shifted position a little uncomfortably, but he did not interrupt, nor did he look away from Pendreigh.
    “And battle requires sacrifice,” Pendreigh continued, “not always of oneself, sometimes of others. She told me what a fine leader Kristian was, decisive, farsighted. Where some men would see what would happen one or two moves ahead, he could see a dozen. There was strength in him that set him apart from those less able to keep a cause in mind and understand the cost of victory as well as that of defeat.” His voice was edged with admiration, and now even his shoulders were straight, as if an inner courage had been imparted to him by the thought.
    Monk admired it, too, but he was confused. Pendreigh was painting a picture of a man utterly unlike the compassionate and scrupulous person Monk had seen in the fever hospital in Limehouse, or all that he had heard from Callandra. The leader of such inner certainty and strength was of a nature unlike the doctor who labored without judgment of any kind, risking his own life as much for the fever- and lice-ridden beggar as for the nurse like Enid Ravensbrook. How had Hester seen him? A man of compassion, idealism, dedication, moral courage perhaps, but not a man capable of the ruthless leadership Pendreigh described. The Kristian Beck that Hester saw would not have