William Monk 13 - Death of a Stranger

disease, most often syphilis or tuberculosis, but other things as well. I don’t ask more than their first names, merely for something to call them. I do what I can, and often that is not much. When they are well enough, they go away again.”
    “But don’t you know how they were injured?” Livia pressed, her voice rising. “You must know what happened!”
    Hester looked down at the tabletop. “I don’t need to ask. Either a customer lost his temper, or they kept a bit of the money for themselves and their pimps beat them,” she replied. “And now and again they took a bit of trade in someone else’s patch and got into a fight that way. The competition is pretty rough. Whatever it is, it really doesn’t make any difference to what I need to do.”
    Livia obviously did not understand. It was a world, even a language, beyond her experience or imagination. “What is a . . . pimp?”
    “The man who looks after them,” Hester replied. “And takes most of what they earn.”
    “But why?” There was no comprehension in Livia’s eyes.
    “Because it’s dangerous for a woman on her own,” Hester explained. “Most of them have no choice. The pimps own the buildings, in a way they almost own the streets. They keep other people from hurting the women, but if they think they’re lazy, or cheating them, then they beat the women themselves, usually not badly enough to scar their faces or make them unfit to work. Only a fool damages his own property.”
    Livia shook her head as if to get rid of the idea. “Then who hurts them when they come here to you?”
    “Customers, perhaps, who are drunk and don’t know their own strength, or just lose their tempers,” Hester said. “Other women sometimes. Quite often they come because of disease.”
    “Lots of people get tuberculosis,” Livia pointed out. “All sorts of people. I had a cousin who died of it. She was only twenty-eight. They call it the White Death, don’t they.” That was a statement. “And the other is . . .” She would not speak the words. Her own embarrassment at the subject was too deep to allow such candor. At last she let herself look around the room at the whitewashed walls and the cupboards, some of them locked.
    Hester saw her glance. “Carbolic, lye, potash, vinegar,” she said. “It’s good for cleaning. And tobacco. We keep that locked.”
    Livia’s eyes widened. “Tobacco? You let people use tobacco? Even women?”
    “For burning,” Hester explained. “It’s a good fumigant, especially if we have lice or ticks, or things like that.”
    Livia’s face twisted as if she could smell the reek of it already. “I just want to know what they saw,” she begged. “What happened to my father?”
    Hester studied her, the youth in the soft curves of her cheek and throat, the unlined skin, the earnest gaze. But already the shadow of grief had touched her; there was a hollowness, a papery quality around her eyes and a tightness to her mouth. The world was a different place from the one it had been three days before, and that innocence could not be found again.
    Hester struggled for something to say that would stop this girl, for that is all she was in spite of her years, and send her back to her own life to believe whatever she wanted to. Unless there were a trial, she would never have to know what her father had been doing in Leather Lane. “Let the police find out, if they can,” she said aloud.
    “They’re finding nothing!” Livia answered indignantly. “These women won’t talk to them! Why should they? It’s someone they know who killed him. They’re probably afraid to tell.”
    “What was your father like?” Hester asked, then instantly regretted it. It was a stupid question. What does any woman say her dead father was like? Everything she wanted him to be, reality blurred by loss, loyalty, the sense of decency that says you speak no ill of the dead. “I mean, why might he have come to Leather Lane at night?” she amended.
    Livia looked slightly embarrassed and defensive. “I don’t know. It must have been business of some kind.”
    “What does your mother say?”
    “We don’t discuss it,” Livia responded, as if it were the most usual thing to say. “Mama is an invalid. We try to keep anything troublesome or distressing from her. Jarvis . . . my brother . . . says he must have been going to meet someone, possibly to do with navvies, or something like that. My father owned a railway company. They have a new