William Monk 15 - Dark Assassin

flustered. “The details are not there, young lady, and I hardly think it is something about which you would have any knowledge, even if you can read a little and bandy words around as if you understood them.”
    “Oh, she does!” Rose said with a sweet smile. “Mrs. Monk was in the Crimea with Miss Nightingale. She is acquainted with battlefield surgery, in the most distressing circumstances.”
    “You didn’t say so!” he accused, the color now hot in his face. “That is, if I may be candid, most deceiving of you!”
    “Is it?” Rose said ingenuously. “I’m so sorry. I had imagined you would say exactly the same to whomever you spoke to. Had she been of a delicate disposition and likely to faint, I would not have brought her, of course. But that is quite different. I cannot imagine what you would have said differently had you known Mrs. Monk is very practiced in such tragic and terrible things.”
    He glared at her but apparently could think of nothing to escape from the pit he had unwittingly dug for himself.
    “I shall just make a few notes so that we cannot find ourselves mistaken. It would be dreadful to quote figures that are not true. And embarrassing,” Rose continued, keeping her smile fixed. She looked straight at him; his face was tight-lipped, but he did not argue.
    Outside on the steps, with the wind tugging at their skirts, victory seemed already fading. Rose turned to Hester. “Now what do we do?”
    “We have addresses,” Hester replied. “We find a cup of tea, or better, chocolate, if we can. Then we go and see some of these people and find out which of them, if any, Mary Havilland asked also.”
    Fortified by a cup each of thick, rich cocoa and a ham sandwich bought from a peddler, then hot chestnuts a hundred yards farther on, they set out to the nearest of the addresses. The early afternoon turned colder. The sleet changed into intermittent snow, but still the street was too wet for it to stick except on the windowsills and lower eaves. Of course the roofs were white except for around the chimneys, where the heat melted the snow and sent it in dribbles down the slates. Cab horses looked miserable. Peddlers shivered. The wind flurried, scattering newspapers, and gray smoke hung in the air like shadows of the night to come.
    At the first house the woman refused to allow them in. At the second there was no answer. At the third, the woman was busy with three children, the oldest of whom looked barely five.
    Hester glanced at Rose and saw the pity in her eyes. However, Rose masked it before the woman could recognize its nature.
    “I in’t got time ter talk to yer,” the woman said bitterly. “Wot d’yer think I am? I got washin’ ter do wot in’t never gonna dry in this weather, an’ summink ter find fer tea. Wot’s a member o’ Parliament ter me? I in’t got no vote, nor’s any o’ me fam’ly. We in’t never ’ad an ’ouse wot’s ours, let alone big enough ter let us vote. Anyway, me man’s crippled.” She started to push the door closed, pushing the small girl behind her and moving her skirts awkwardly.
    “We don’t want your vote,” Hester said quickly. “We just want to talk to you. I’ll help. I’m good at laundry.”
    The woman looked her up and down, disbelief growing into anger at being mocked. “I ’ear yer, misses. Ladies ’oo talk like you, all proper, don’ know a scrubbin’ brush from an ’airbrush.” She pushed the door again.
    Hester pushed it back. “I’m a nurse and I keep a clinic for street women in Portpool Lane.” She remembered too late that it was no longer true. “I’ll wager you a good dinner I’ve done more dirty washing than you have!” she added.
    The woman’s hand went slack with surprise, allowing the door to swing open, and Rose took full advantage of it.
    Inside, the house was bare and cold with the sort of poverty that teeters on the edge of starvation. Hester heard Rose draw in her breath, then very carefully let it out silently while she tried to compose her face as if she saw such things every day.
    It was like the Collards again, only worse. This man was sickly pale, his eyes hollow and defeated. He had been crushed from the waist but his legs were still there, deformed and—from the way he lay and the pinching around his mouth—a constant agony.
    Patiently and with trembling gentleness Rose tried to elicit facts from him, and he refused. No one was to blame. It was an accident. Could have happened to