William Monk 14 - The Shifting Tide

even certain that she wanted to know. It had to be someone here, and she cared for each of them. Was the bond of fear and survival greater than whatever had driven one of them to kill? She did not want to know the answer.
    “You’ve not asked to have any message sent to your family,” she said to Mercy. She did not want to intrude. Mercy had never spoken of her home. She had not even said if she knew it was her brother who had brought Ruth Clark here, although Hester had assumed that she must have known. She seemed to be in her early twenties, pleasing to look at, and certainly she had an agreeable nature. Why was she not enjoying the social life her position offered her? Was there a love affair that had gone so badly for her that she was still too hurt to think of someone new? Was that why she was here, to escape a greater pain? Hester realized that that was what she had assumed, but there was no evidence for it.
    Mercy shook her head. “My brother knows I am here,” she replied. “I left him a letter. I cannot tell him why I am remaining, but he won’t worry.”
    “I’m sorry,” Hester apologized. “You must be missing many things you would have attended could you leave.”
    “No point in thinking about them.” Mercy shrugged. “And I don’t suppose any of them matter anyway. One puts on one’s best clothes and one’s best manners, and ends up being so polite that all one ever talks of is the weather or what book one has just read—as long as it is not controversial, of course! Heaven protect us from having to think! Everybody is hoping to meet someone of such interest you can hardly wait to see him again, but unless you are terribly easily pleased, does it really happen? I am in greater danger of making myself believe it has, when my better self knows it hasn’t.” She smiled, rubbing absentmindedly at the smear of coal dust on her apron. “I say to myself ’Next time—next time,’ and then it’s exactly the same. At least this is real.”
    “Doesn’t your mother insist on your meeting as many young gentlemen as possible? Mine did,” Hester remembered with embarrassment and sadness. Her mother had died of grief, and perhaps shame, after her father’s suicide when he had been ruined in a financial scandal. Their deaths had been her reason for returning early from the Crimea.
    Mercy must have caught the momentary grief in her face. “My parents are dead,” she said quietly. “From the way you speak, your mother is also?”
    “Yes, and my father,” Hester acknowledged, straightening up to go over to the table. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I just wanted you to send a message if you wished. Sutton would see that it was delivered.”
    “There isn’t anyone,” Mercy replied, getting the bread out of the bin and passing it to her. “My elder sister, Charity, married a doctor. That was seven years ago. They stayed in England for a year, then he decided to go abroad, and of course Charity went with him.”
    “That must have been hard for you.”
    Mercy shrugged very slightly. “It was at first,” she said, turning her face away so Hester could see only the angle of her cheek and the way the muscles pulled in her neck. “But she was ten years older than I, so we were not as close as we might have been.”
    “And your brother is older, too,” Hester observed, remembering Clement Louvain as he had been when he brought Ruth Clark in.
    “I was an afterthought,” Mercy said, lifting her chin a little, her wide mouth curved in a smile. “My mother was nearly forty when I was born. But I think she was especially fond of me, for that.” She turned back to face Hester. “I’ll make us a cup of tea. I expect Claudine would like one too, and perhaps Mr. Robinson.” She did not mention the others because they were taking an hour or two’s rest before the night duty.
    In the kitchen, Claudine was preparing vegetables for a soup. Many of the sick women found eating difficult. Fever robbed them of all appetite, but some nourishment was essential, and above all they should drink. She stood at the bench, a large knife in her hand, her lips compressed as she tried to cut a raw carrot into small squares. She was muttering to herself under her breath.
    Hester considered offering to help her, but she had already had a taste of Claudine’s temper when she was angry with herself for her ineptitude.
    Mercy gave Hester a wry glance, more than a little because she was domestically