William Monk 17 - Acceptable Loss

regained her control with difficulty. “Obviously Rupert killed her! So she would not be called to the stand and say that she’d lied before, and she’d no more taken his cravat than I had. He kept it, as everyone supposes, and later strangled Mickey Parfitt with it, because he could not go on paying him blackmail. If you were a little less blinded by your own crusades, you would have seen that in the first place. I’m sorry Hattie had to die for you to face reality.”
    Hester could feel her fingernails dig into the palms of her hands. “The reality throughout is that Hattie was the one person who couldhave cleared Rupert,” she answered. “And you took her to the door and let her out into the street, out of the place where she was safe, and someone killed her. It might have been Rupert Cardew. It might just as easily have been your father. He was the one her testimony would have hurt. And you were the one who sent her out.”
    Margaret stared at her, her face white to the lips, her eyes glittering. “Are you likening my father—my father—to Rupert Cardew? Rupert is dissolute, weak, and perverted … a … a vile man, who, for some unknown reason, in your own morality, your memory, or your need, you don’t seem able to see for what he is.”
    “Of course I can see he’s weak!” Hester’s voice was rising in spite of her efforts to keep it level. “I don’t know how dissolute he is, and neither do you. But your loyalty to your father blinds you from seeing that he too could be just as greedy, as cruel, and in his own way as dissolute. He may not watch little boys being raped and abused, but is he any better if he imprisons them and causes it to happen, so he can blackmail the wretched men who do it? Is corrupting others any better, any nobler than being corrupt yourself? I think it’s worse!”
    “My loyalty makes me know it could not be true,” Margaret said between her teeth. “But you wouldn’t understand that. You were in the Crimea being noble, saving strangers when your own father needed you. He died alone in despair while you were off glory-hunting. And if that weren’t enough, who supported your mother in her grief? Not you! You didn’t even come home for his funeral.”
    Hester was speechless. She could not catch her breath. Her whole body hurt as if she had been beaten.
    “You don’t know what loyalty is,” Margaret went on, seeing her advantage and forcing it home. “I used to be sorry for you that you don’t have any children of your own, only that little urchin you’ve picked up from the dockside to fill your emptiness. When it comes down to it, you don’t understand what family is. You’re too selfish, too absorbed with the image of love to know what the reality is.” She took a gulp of air, then pushed past Hester and went out into the hallway again, leaving the door swinging on its hinges.
    Was it true? Only part of it! Hester had had no idea of her father’s despair, no idea he had been cheated, lied to, and betrayed. She heardof his suicide only after it had happened. Letters to and from the Crimea took weeks, and often she was away from Scutari when the ships from England landed.
    Could she have known? Should she have? Her brother James had kept it from her. Her younger brother had already been killed in action. Was there something else she should have done? Should she have stayed at home in the first place?
    No! She had followed not only her heart but her beliefs, in joining the nurses in the hellhole of Scutari, and even on the blood-soaked battlefields. She had eased pain, saved lives. And she had loved her father more than Margaret could ever know.
    And she loved Monk. She would have wanted children to please him, to give him everything love can ever give, but she did not ache for them for herself. Yes, she loved Scuff. Why should she deny that? But for who he was, not to ease an emptiness within herself. Monk alone was sufficient—companion, ally, lover, and friend.
    Had she made mistakes, perhaps even profound ones? Yes, of course. But never through indifference.
    She stood still, dizzy, the room blurring in her vision, and waited until she was sufficiently composed to return to the courtroom and observe the afternoon’s trial.
    R ATHBONE WAS FIGHTING FOR the defense as Hester had known he must do. He had no choice, legally or emotionally.
    He called witnesses who, one by one, painted a picture of the trade Parfitt had run, and its patrons among the