William Monk 15 - Dark Assassin

seemed impossible to him. She was acid-tongued—at least he had thought so—opinionated and unwise in her expression of it, hasty to judge and quick-tempered, but even he, who had found her so irritating, had never doubted her courage or her iron will.
    Of course he had seen the passion, the laughter, and the vulnerability in her since then. Was he imagining in Mary Havilland something she had never possessed? Whatever the cost to Mrs. Argyll, he wanted to know.
    “I understand that your father met his death recently,” he said gravely. “And that Miss Havilland found it very difficult to come to terms with.”
    She looked at him wearily. “She never did,” she answered. “She couldn’t accept that he took his own life. She wouldn’t accept it, in spite of all the evidence. I’m afraid she became…obsessed.” She blinked. “Mary was very…strong-willed, to put it at its kindest. She was close to Papa, and she couldn’t believe that something could be so wrong and he would not confide in her. I’m afraid perhaps they were not as…as close as she imagined.”
    “Could she have been distressed over the breaking of her betrothal to Mr. Argyll?” Monk asked, trying to grasp on to some reason why a healthy young woman should do something so desperate as plunge over the bridge. And had she meant to take Argyll with her, or was he trying, even at the risk of his own life, to save her? Did he still love her so much? Or was it out of guilt because he had abandoned her, possibly for someone else? They really did need the surgeon to ascertain if she had been with child. That might explain a great deal. It was a hideous thought, but if he would not marry her, perhaps she had felt suicide the only answer, and had determined to take him with her. He was, in a sense, the cause of her sin. But that would be true only if she were with child and certain of it.
    “No,” Mrs. Argyll said flatly. “She was the one who broke it. If anything, it was Toby who was distressed. She…she became very strange, Mr. Monk. She seemed to take against us all. She became fixed upon the idea of a dreadful disaster that was going to happen in the new sewer tunnels that my husband’s company is constructing.” She looked very tired, as if revisiting an old and much-battled pain. “My father had a morbid fear of enclosed spaces, and he was rather reactionary. He was afraid of the new machines that made the work far faster. I imagine you are aware of the urgency of building a new system for the city?”
    “Yes, Mrs. Argyll, I think we all are,” he answered. He did not like the picture that was emerging, and yet he could not deny it. It was only his own emotion that drove him to fight it, a completely irrational link in his mind between Mary Havilland and Hester. It was not even anything so definite as a thought, just words used to describe her by a landlady who barely knew her, and the protective grief over the suicide of a father.
    “My father allowed it to become an obsession with him,” she went on. “He spent his time gathering information, campaigning to have the company alter its methods. My husband did everything to help him see reason and appreciate that deaths in construction are unavoidable from time to time. Men can be careless. Landslips happen; the London clay is dangerous by its nature. The Argyll Company has fewer incidents than most others. That is a fact he could have checked with ease, and he did. He could point to no mishaps at all on this job, in fact, but it did not calm his fears.”
    “Reason does not calm irrational fears,” Argyll said quietly, his voice hoarse with his own emotion, unable to reach towards hers. Perhaps he feared that if he did, they might both lose what control they had. “Don’t harrow yourself up anymore,” he went on. “There was nothing you could have done then, or now. His terrors finally overtook him. Who knows what another man sees in the dark hours of the night?”
    “He took his life at night?” Monk asked.
    It was Argyll who answered, his voice cold. “Yes, but I would be obliged if you did not press the matter further. It was thoroughly investigated at the time. No one else was in the least at fault. How could anyone have realized that his madness had progressed so far? Now it appears that poor Mary was also far more unstable than we knew, and it had preyed upon her to the point where she herself could not exercise her human or Christian judgment