William Monk 14 - The Shifting Tide

Rathbone added.
    Louvain’s shoulders clenched under his jacket, and his hands on the railing looked as if he could break the wood. “A drunken man could miss his footing,” he conceded.
    “And fall a considerable distance. I believe you said eight or ten feet?”
    “Yes.”
    “And sustain serious injuries?”
    “Yes.”
    “And was Hodge sober?”
    Louvain’s eyes narrowed. “Not from the smell of him, no.”
    “Then what makes you believe he was murdered, rather than simply having missed his footing, slipped and fell?” Rathbone walked a step farther forward into the middle of the floor. “Let me assist you, Mr. Louvain. Could it be that since your cargo had been stolen, you automatically assumed that the watchman was a victim of the same crime? You looked at the scene and concluded that the thief had come aboard your ship, attacked your watchman and stolen your goods, rather than that your watchman had died an accidental death. His absence from his post had allowed a thief to come aboard your ship and steal your goods? Is that possible, Mr. Louvain?”
    “Yes,” Louvain said bitterly. “That is possible.” His voice was barely audible. “In fact, I believe that is what happened.”
    “Thank you, sir.” Rathbone returned to his seat.
    The rest of the trial was a formality; the other witnesses, including Monk, gave their evidence the following day, substantiating all that Louvain had said. The jury returned a verdict on the third day—Gould was guilty of theft, as he had pleaded, but there was more than reasonable doubt that any murder had been committed at all. Of that charge he was not guilty.
    Rathbone walked out into the mid-morning rain with a sense of one very small victory, one man’s life saved, at least for the time being.

THIRTEEN
    In Portpool Lane time was measured not in nights and days but in loads of laundry, whether it was light enough to blow out the candles, or dark enough to ask the men in the yard to fetch water from the well at the end of the street. Everything still had to be done by signs from the back door. No one must come close enough to risk catching the contagion.
    Four women had died now, including Ruth Clark and Martha. Hester went to each of the survivors as often as she could. For those with pneumonia or bronchitis it was a matter of keeping the fever down and making sure they drank as much as possible: water, tea, soup—anything to make up for the fluid loss.
    For the three whose illness was recognizably plague there was less to be done, and a more desperate desire to try anything at all to lessen the pain, which was acute. It was not only the knowledge of almost certain death, but the poison that raged through their bodies before it erupted in the blackened, putrefying flesh of the buboes, that made a person so ill that he or she longed for oblivion. The moments of awareness between one delirium and another were so agonizing that they cried out, and there was nothing Hester or any of the others could do but administer cool cloths, a sip of water, and not leave them alone.
    “I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Flo said softly, pulling uncomfortably on the sleeve of her blouse—like all of them, conscious every moment of her arms and groin. She set down another bowl of water on the table outside one of the rooms so Hester could wring out cloths for the woman inside. “Not even that Ruth Clark, the lyin’ bampot.” Her face was pale with tiredness, the freckles on it standing out like dirty marks, her eyes dark ringed. “I may be a tart, Miss ’Ester, an’ a few other things, I daresay, but I in’t never bin a thief. I got a name like anybody else, an’ she got no right to take it from me by tellin’ lies. Why’d she do that? I in’t never done nothin’ to ’er?”
    “She was an angry woman,” Hester replied, putting the cloths over her arm, then picking up the bowl. “A man she trusted, maybe even loved, threw her aside like so much rubbish when she most needed him. She just lashed out at everyone.”
    Flo shrugged. “If she trusted a man wot paid for ’er, the more fool ’er!” She looked at Hester defiantly, and Hester stared straight back at her. Flo sighed and lowered her gaze. “Well . . . I s’pose we’re all stupid sometimes, poor cow,” she said reluctantly. Then she smiled. “I’m alive, an’ she ain’t, so I reckon I don’t ’old no grudges. I won, eh?”
    Hester felt the cold grasp her as if the outside door had been