William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

sale of opium. It will cost to measure and label everything, and require that all medicines are sold only by people qualified to say what they are, but not that much. There are those who consider it to be limiting the freedom of poor people to buy the only relief from pain that we know, but it won’t. What they’re really concerned about is their own freedom to sell it to the desperate as often and as easily as possible.
    “But there’s no point in your asking me who ‘they’ are, because Lambourn didn’t tell me. Said I was safer not to know it. But I’m certain he knew.”
    “But it’s someone here in London?” Hester persisted.
    Doulting nodded, his face haunted by other people’s pain. “Killing Lambourn, gutting poor Zenia Gadney and seeing Dinah Lambourn hang for it would not add more weight to their souls. Perhaps there is nothing left that would.”
    She believed that he was telling the truth as he had heard it. The fear was written in his face, and the meager instruments and few medicines in the room testified to it. But would Lambourn have had proof of someone creating an addiction in order to feed it? And was that even acrime? A sin, of course—but a crime punishable by law? And how would Lambourn have used that proof, even if he did have it? It would not have furthered his cause of regulating sales.
    Was it not a completely separate issue, to be faced at another time, if at all? Who would listen? People did not want to hear that those they trusted were capable of such brutality and greed, such utter disregard for human destruction. Would they even believe it, or would they say that if a man chose to go to hell, he had the right to do it in his own fashion? It was so much easier, and safer, to condemn the bringer of such news, destroy the words rather than the fearful, indelible acts.
    “If he was collecting information on illness and death from ignorance of dosage, how would he learn of the deeper addiction caused by using the needle?” Hester asked. “He was looking at harassed mothers who’d lost children: ordinary people, who’d never been more than a few miles from their homes.”
    Doulting looked tired. “I don’t know. I don’t know where he went or who else he spoke to. He probably found it by accident from old soldiers. He didn’t say.”
    “Old soldiers?” she said quickly.
    He smiled very bitterly. “From the Crimean War, and the Opium Wars: men with injuries that will always pain them. They take opium to ease the ache of old wounds, to sleep through the nightmares of memory. For some it is to take the edge off the fevers and cramps of returning malaria and ague, and other things they don’t even know the names of.”
    She felt stupid for not having realized. Her mind had been fixed on Lambourn’s concern for infant mortality.
    “You won’t get it into evidence to save Dinah Lambourn,” Doulting said quietly, no hope at all in his eyes. “We won’t admit its evils because we sold it to an entire nation. We robbed, plundered, we murdered civilians, poisoned the men, women, and children of a nation too militarily backward to resist us, and we are barbarians: all of us, those who did it, and those who let them, and we who choose not to admit it now.” He let out a quiet sigh. “If we admit it, then we have to make reparation, and we have to give back the profits. Can you see anyone doing that?”
    Hester could think of no answer. “There’s still time to find out who is behind this!” she said, not as a reply but as an admission.
    “But who will we help if we die trying to prove it?” he asked.
    “All I want at the moment is to save Dinah from being hanged,” she told him.
    “And you think knowing what Lambourn found out will help?” He smiled, but there was no belief of it in his eyes.
    “Yes! It’s possible,” she insisted. “It will at least make the jury realize that there is a very great deal more to this than domestic jealousy. Tell me where I can find the soldiers Dr. Lambourn saw?” she asked. “I could look for them myself, but I haven’t any time to waste.”
    “I’ll write down for you what I know,” Doulting offered. “Then I need to get back to work.”
    She finished her tea and set the mug down in one of the few clear spaces. “Thank you.”

CHAPTER

18
    R ATHBONE KNEW THAT THE case was slipping out of his grasp. He could not help his conviction that Dinah was innocent, yet he wondered if he felt that way because he was drawn to