William Monk 14 - The Shifting Tide

subject.
    “Carbolic?” Hester asked.
    “Oh, some,” he conceded. “But we need more money, an’ I dunno where yer gonna get it, ’less’n yer let me foller a few ideas o’ me own.”
    Margaret raised her cup to conceal a smile.
    Hester could make an educated guess as to what Squeaky’s ideas might be. “Not yet,” she said firmly. “And we don’t need to attract any attention that we could avoid. Give Bessie what she’ll need for food, but be sure to keep back at least two pounds. Tell me when we get that low.”
    “I can tell yer now,” Squeaky said, shaking his head. “It’ll be day arter termorrer.” He sniffed. “Sometimes I think yer live in a dream. Yer needs me ter wake yer up, an’ that’s a fact.” He rose to his feet slowly, clutching the book. There was an air of profound satisfaction in him, the ease of his body, the smug line of his lips, the way his hands folded over the ledger.
    Remembering his previous occupation, and his outrage at being tricked into yielding the house and all its furniture, which was his entire livelihood, Hester smiled back at him. “Of course I do,” she agreed. “That’s why I kept you.”
    His satisfaction vanished. He swallowed hard. “I know that!”
    “I’m glad you do it so diligently,” she added.
    Mollified, he turned and went out, closing the door with a snick behind him.
    Margaret put down her cup, and her face was grave. “We do need to get more money,” she agreed. “I’ve tried the usual sources, but it’s getting more difficult.” She looked rueful. “They’re all generous enough when they think it’s for missionary work in Africa or somewhere like that. Speak about lepers and they are only too willing. I began two evenings ago at a soiree. I was with”—she colored slightly—“Sir Oliver, and the opportunity presented itself to approach the subject of charitable gifts without the least awkwardness.”
    Hester bit her lip to disguise her smile. Oliver Rathbone was one of the most brilliant—and successful—barristers in London. He had not long before been in love with Hester, but an uncertainty about a step as irrevocable as marriage, and to someone as unsuitable in her outspokenness as Hester, had made him hesitate to ask her. Not that she would have accepted him. She could never have loved anyone else as she did Monk—in spite of their continual quarrels, the erratic nature of his income and his future, let alone the dark shadow of amnesia across his past. To marry him was a risk; to marry anyone else would have been to accept safety and deny the fullness of life, the heights and the depths of emotion, and the happiness that went with them.
    She believed that Rathbone could find that same joy with Margaret. And deep as her friendship with him still was, being a woman, she felt most sensitively for Margaret, and read her with an ease she would never have betrayed.
    “But the moment they knew that it was for a clinic for street women here,” Margaret went on, “they balked at it.” She bit her lip. “They make me so angry! I stand there feeling like a fool because I’m full of hope that this time they’ll give something. I know it shows in my face, and I can’t help it. I’m trying to be polite, and inside I am veering wildly from pleading with them, thanking them overmuch as if I were a beggar and the money were for me, and fury if they refuse me.”
    She did not add that she had been acutely conscious of Rathbone beside her, and what he would think of her manners, her decorum, her suitability to be his wife. But on the other hand, would he lose all respect for her, and she for herself, were she to do less than her best for a cause she believed in so passionately?
    “And they say
no
?” Hester said gently, although something of her own anger crept into her tone. Cowardice and hypocrisy were the two vices she hated the most, perhaps because they seemed to give rise to so many others, especially cruelty. They were woven into each other. She had learned how many men used the street women, and she refrained from judgment on that. She also knew that quite often their wives were perfectly aware of it, even if only by deduction. What she hated was the hypocrisy of then turning and condemning those same women. Perhaps the interdependence was what frightened them, or even the knowledge that what separated them was often an accident of circumstance rather than any moral superiority.
    Where there really was a moral