William Monk 14 - The Shifting Tide

felt she should be careful not to breathe near the candle flame.
    “Oh!” she said as the inner fire of it hit her stomach. “Thank you.”
    “Thought you needed it,” Claudine replied, turning to go, then she stopped. “Want me to watch her for a bit? I’ll call you if anything happens, I swear.”
    Hester’s head was pounding and she was so tired her eyes felt gritty. If she closed them for longer than a second she might drift off to sleep. The thought of letting go and allowing herself to be carried away into unconsciousness, without fighting, was the best thing she could imagine, better than laughter, good food, warmth, even love—just to stop struggling for a while. “I can’t.” She heard the words and wondered how she could make herself say them.
    “I’ll get another chair to sit here,” Claudine replied. “Then if she needs you I can wake you just by speaking. I wouldn’t have to leave her.”
    Hester accepted. She was asleep even before Claudine sat down.
    She sat up with a gasp an hour later when Claudine woke her to say that Martha was very restless and seemed to be in a lot of pain. One of the wounds was bleeding again.
    They did what they could to help her, working with surprising ease together, but it was little enough. Hester was grateful not to be alone, and she told Claudine so as they sat down again to watch and wait.
    Claudine was embarrassed. She was not used to being thanked; to be praised twice in one night was overwhelming, and she did not know how to answer. She looked away, her face pink.
    Hester wondered what the other woman’s marriage was like that she apparently lived in such bitter loneliness, uncomplimented, without laughter or sharing. Was it filled with quarrels, or silence, two people within one house, one name, one legal entity, who never touched each other at heart? How could she reach out to Claudine without making it worse, or ask anything without prying and perhaps exposing a wound which could be endured only because no one else saw it? She remembered Ruth Clark’s cruel words and the mockery and contempt in them, as if she really had known something about Claudine, not just guessed at it. Perhaps she had, and perhaps it was bitter and wounding enough that Claudine had seen the chance to kill her and protect herself. But Hester refused even to allow that into her mind. One day she might have to, but not now.
    “Would you like Sutton to have another message sent to your home?” Hester asked aloud. “You could let them know you are all right, but that with so many ill we can’t do without you. That would be more or less the truth, or at any rate it’s not a lie.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” Claudine replied, her eyes fixed steadily on Martha. “I said that in the first message.” She was silent for a moment or two. “My husband will be annoyed because it is a break in his routine, and he was not consulted,” she went on. “There may be social events he would like me to have attended, but otherwise it will not matter.” Her voice caught for a moment. “I don’t wish to appear to be explaining myself. For the first time in my life I am doing something that matters, and I don’t intend to stop.”
    She had said little, and yet beneath the surface it was an explanation of everything. Hester heard the emptiness behind the words, a whole bruised and aching lifetime of it. But there was no answer to give, nothing to make it different or better. The only decent response was silence.
    She drifted back into sleep again, and Claudine woke her a little before four. Martha was slipping into deeper unconsciousness. Claudine stared at Hester, the question in her eyes, the answer already known. Martha was dying.
    “Is it the plague or the dogs?” Claudine asked in a whisper.
    “I don’t know,” Hester said honestly. “But if it is the dogs, perhaps that isn’t a bad thing. I—”
    “I know,” Claudine interrupted. “Best thing not to linger.”
    Martha was struggling for breath. Every few moments she stopped altogether, then gasped again. Hester and Claudine looked at each other, then at Martha. Finally it was the last time, and she lay still.
    Claudine shivered. “Poor soul,” she said softly. “I hope there’s some kind of peace for her now. Do . . . I mean, should we . . .” She blinked rapidly. “Say something?”
    “Yes, we should,” Hester answered without any doubt at all. “Will you say it with me?”
    Claudine was startled.
    “I