William Monk 17 - Acceptable Loss

what he has helped them to do. He profited from the torture and humiliation of children, and he murdered Parfitt. I still don’t know why. Thatseems to have been a pointless piece of violence, and completely unnecessary. And he murdered Hattie Benson because she would have testified that it wasn’t Rupert Cardew, the only other obvious suspect.”
    He took a shaky breath, and went on. “If Margaret doesn’t even acknowledge that, then she’s going to spend her whole life angry, and bitter because her father was unjustly hanged. That’s a kind of terrible madness. It will destroy her.”
    Hester put out her hand and touched him very gently. “Give her time, Oliver. Some things we can’t face immediately. As long as he protests his innocence she can’t turn her back on him, whatever the evidence. Could you, if it were your father?”
    “My father would …” He stopped. What he had been going to say only supported Hester’s point. His father would never do such a thing? No, he wouldn’t. But, then, perhaps Margaret believed just as passionately in her father, regardless of evidence. Hester was right; she would not be released from it until Ballinger admitted his guilt. Perhaps she couldn’t be, without betraying herself, and the guilt for that would destroy her also.
    How terribly wide the damage spread.
    Hester smiled. “I know. I love your father, and I don’t believe he would ever even think of anything like this. But, then, Margaret would feel the same. Sometimes we only know one side of a person we love so intensely.”
    He could think of nothing to say.
    “Parents especially are part of who we are,” she went on. She looked down, away from meeting his eyes. “I still can’t tell myself that my father failed because he took his own life. I wonder if I fight so hard over the things I believe in, to prove I’m not like that. I don’t give in.” She looked up again, and her eyes were full of tears. “I identify with the soldiers I nursed in the Crimea, and delude myself I’m like them, because I saw how they suffered and I loved their courage so much.”
    Rathbone realized that he too was suffering a disillusion, not in Ballinger, because he had never cared for him, but in Margaret herself. Perhaps he had expected her to be more like Hester—more ableto face the unbearable, more foolishly, passionately brave. And yet it was those very qualities in Hester that had frightened him, and had made her such an unsuitable wife for him. He had wanted Hester’s virtues, but without the danger. He loved Margaret, but not with the reckless fervor that counts no risk and no price too high.
    Was he disillusioned in her, or in himself?
    “She wants me to mount an appeal,” he said, remembering the scene vividly, although it had been a couple of days ago.
    They had been standing in the withdrawing room, the dusk heavy outside, the gas lamps burning but the curtains still open onto the garden. She was dressed in dark gray, as if ready for mourning, and her face was colorless. She was so angry she trembled.
    “Are you?” Hester asked, interrupting his thoughts. “Do you have any grounds? Did Winchester make some mistake?”
    “No,” he said simply.
    She swallowed and cleared her throat. “Did you?”
    “Not so far as I know. Tactical, perhaps. Maybe if I had tried harder, I could have persuaded him not to take the stand himself, but he was adamant. I don’t think you can refuse to let a man speak in his own defense, if you have warned him of the danger and he still insists. But perhaps I should have thought of something.”
    “You can’t go on retrying a case every different way until you get the verdict you want,” she pointed out.
    He looked down at the desktop. He knew he shouldn’t say what he was going to, and yet the words spilled out.
    “Margaret says I should have built in some error, so that I could have appealed afterward. She believes I have put my own career before her father’s life, because I am ambitious and essentially selfish.” He met her eyes. “Is that true? If I really loved her, more than I loved myself, would I have?”
    “Have you ever made a deliberate mistake?” she asked, as if turning the thought over in her mind.
    “No.” He smiled bitterly. “Not deliberate. Many accidental. Would an appeal court know the difference?”
    “Possibly,” she granted. “But unless you were totally incompetent, it wouldn’t make them grant a new trial, would it? Anyway,