William Monk 16 - Execution Dock

whether he was or not. Are your dreams, or Durban's memory, worth more than the lives of other boys like Fig?” She bit her lip. “Or Scuff?”
    He winced. He had been lulled into forgetting how honest she could be, even if her words were harsh.
    “I know it's intrusive to examine the whole man,” she said. “Even indecent, when he's dead and cannot defend himself, or explain, or even repent. But the alternative is to let it go, and isn't that worse?”
    It was a bitter choice, but if Durban had been careless, or even dishonest, that had to be faced. “Yes,” he conceded. “Pass me the papers. We'll sort them into those we understand, those we don't, and those I expect we never will. I'll get that bastard Phillips, however long or hard the trail. I made the mistake, and I'll undo it.”
    “We did,” she corrected him, her face pinched a little. “I let Oliver paint me as an overemotional woman whose childlessness led her to hysterical and ill-thought-out judgments.”
    He saw the pain in her face, the self-mockery, and for that he would not forgive Rathbone until he had paid the last ounce, and maybe not even then. That was something else she had lost, the real and precious friendship with Rathbone. Like Monk, she had no close, loving family left. She had lost a brother in the Crimea, her father to suicide, and her mother to a broken heart. Her one surviving brother was a stiff and distant man, not really a friend. One day, when he had time, Monk must go and visit the sister he barely remembered. He did not think they had been close, even when his memory had been whole, and that was probably his fault.
    He put the papers down and leaned over, touching Hester gently, then drawing her closer to him and kissing her, then closer again. “There's tomorrow,” he whispered. “Let it be—for now.”
    Monk rose early and went to buy the newspapers. He considered not taking them home so Hester would not see how bad they were, andthen discarded the idea. She did not need his protection, and probably would not wish for it. It would not mean tenderness to her as much as exclusion. And after both the honesty and the passion of the previous night, she deserved better from him. He thought, with a smile, that perhaps he was beginning to understand women, or at least one woman.
    There was nothing else to smile at. When he sat at the breakfast table opposite her, each with their newspapers propped open in front of them, the full ugliness of the situation was extremely clear. Durban was drawn as incompetent, a man whose death saved him from the indignity of having been removed from office for at best a personal vengeance against a particularly grubby criminal on the river, at worst a seriously questionable professional ethic.
    Monk himself was painted as little better, an amateur drafted in over the heads of more experienced men. He was out of his depth and beyond his skill. He had been trying too hard to pay a debt that he imagined he owed a friend, but whom in truth he barely knew.
    Hester came off more lightly, at first glance. She was portrayed as overemotional, driven by loyalty to her husband and a foolish attachment to a class of child her thwarted maternal instincts had fastened on, and caused her to reach out and cherish, quite inappropriately. But from a woman denied her natural role in society by a misguided devotion to charitable causes, and a certain belligerence that made her unattractive to decent men of her own station, what else could one expect? It should be a lesson to all young ladies of good breeding to remain in the paths that nature and society had set for them. Only then might they expect fulfillment in life. It was immeasurably condescending.
    When Hester read it she used some language about the writer and his antecedents that she had learned in her Army days. After several minutes she looked nervously at Monk, and apologized, concerned in case she had shocked him.
    He grinned at her, possibly a little bleakly, because the remarks about her had stung him perhaps even more than they had hurt her.
    “You'll have to tell me what that means,” he responded. “I think I may have use for some of those expressions myself.”
    She colored deeply, and looked away, but the tension eased out of her body, and her hands unknotted in her lap.
    The worst thing in the papers actually was a single line suggesting, almost as an afterthought, that possibly the River Police had outlived their usefulness. Perhaps