William Monk 12 - Funeral in Blue

You think the next time you will make it up again. Reason doesn’t have any part in it. In the end, all you think about is the next chance to test your luck, to feel the excitement in the mind, the blood beating as you wait for the card, or the dice, or whatever it is.”
    She looked around the room, her throat tightening in misery for the emptiness of it. “But it can cost you everything,” she said, her voice choking in spite of herself. Anger boiled inside her at the futility of it. She turned to face him. “And you can’t ever win unless somebody else loses.”
    This time his eyes did not waver. He was not evading the truth anymore, and there was a mark of defiance in him. “I know. If there were no real danger, no loss, it wouldn’t make the heart go faster and the stomach knot inside. If you are a real gambler, you must risk more than you can afford to lose. I don’t think it was even the winning that mattered anymore; it was the defying of fate and walking away.”
    But she had not. She had lost. It had taken from her the warmth and beauty of her home, then even the necessities of it, and it had cost her husband grief, exhaustion and the comfort of a home he had labored to provide, and a shame that was almost insupportable. All social life had been swept away. He could not accept an invitation from anyone, because he could not return it. He was cut off, isolated, and surely terrified of ever-increasing debt he would not be able to meet. This would become public disgrace, perhaps eventually even the utter despair of debtor’s prison, as other bills of life could not be met and creditors closed in, angry and vengeful.
    It was like a disease of the mind—a madness! Elissa was a woman he had once loved, perhaps still did, but there was a part of her he could not reach, and it was destroying both of them.
    She did not want to think of it, still less to face it. But it was blazingly, luminously clear even to her, with all her friendship for Kristian and her love for Callandra, that he had a supreme motive for killing Elissa. It was so powerful, so totally understandable, that she did not deny to herself the possibility that in a moment of engulfing panic, as ruin faced him, he could have done it. She felt grieved and guilty and frightened, but above all she felt wrenchingly sorry.
    “Did Pendreigh know?” she asked.
    “No. She always managed to keep it from him. She only called on him when she was winning, and she managed to find excuses never to invite him here. I think that was easy enough. She used my work as excuse.” He shivered and pushed his hand over his brow, hard back, as if the pressure of it eased some pain inside. “She wouldn’t have to explain,” he went on, his voice husky. “She didn’t know much about it; I never really shared it with her. I brought her here from the passion and excitement of Vienna, and expected her to be happy in a domestic life amid people she did not know, and with no cause to fight, no admiration, no danger, no loyalties . . .”
    “There are plenty of battles to fight here,” she said softly. “Not at the barricades, not with plain enemies, and not always with any glory, but they are real.”
    He pressed his hands over his eyes. “Not for her. I did nothing to help her find them. I was too drawn into my own work. I expected her to change. You should never expect that . . . people don’t.”
    She struggled for something to say, a way of denying it to offer some comfort. But there was an element of truth in it, and that was all he could see. All the ways in which Elissa could have found causes worth all her efforts, he would see only as excuses for his own failure to make her happy.
    “Perhaps we all have something of that hunger in us,” she said at last. “But when we love someone we do learn to change its direction. I went to the Crimea to nurse, but I also went for the adventure. It’s wonderful to be so very alive, even if some of it is horror and rage, and grief. Not to have lived is the worst death of all.” She smiled briefly. “I was going to say that we have the right to make those dreams only for ourselves, not for others, but there’s hardly anything we do that doesn’t take others along with us, in some way. If I’d stayed at home my family’s lives would have been different, and their deaths.” It hurt to say that. She had never allowed herself even to think it before. Perhaps life would be different for Charles if she had been