William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

and I was certainly not trying to make excuses for it. I don’t need to explain myself to anyone else—”
    “Which is as well, because you can’t!” She cut across him. “Not to me, or to my family.”
    He kept his temper with difficulty. “I was not thinking of you as someone else.” They were both still standing, as if physical ease were impossible. He thought of asking if he could sit down, or even simply doing it, but he decided not to. She might take it as an implication that he thought he belonged here, and that he saw it as a right, not a privilege.
    “How were you thinking of me, then?” she asked.
    “As my wife, and—at one time at least—also as my friend,” he said.
    Without warning the tears filled her eyes.
    For an instant he thought that there was hope. He started to take a step toward her.
    “You threw that away,” she said quickly, raising her head a fraction, as if to ward him off.
    “I did what I had to do!” he protested. “Everything the law allowed me, to defend him. He was guilty, Margaret!”
    “How often do you repeat that to yourself, Oliver?” she said bitterly. “Have you convinced yourself yet?”
    “He admitted it to me,” he said wearily. They had been over all of this before. He had lived out the whole wretched tragedy for her—Ballinger’s desperate fight for life, then finally his admission of guilt. He had given her few details, to spare her distress, and her knowledge of details that were ugly and cruel, things she need never know.
    “And that’s enough for you?” She flung the words at him like an accusation. “What about the reasons, Oliver? Or didn’t you want to know them? Can’t you for once be honest and stop hiding behind the law? Or is it all you know, all you understand? ‘The book says this! The book says that!’ ”
    “That’s not fair, Margaret,” he protested. “I can’t work outside the law—”
    “You mean you can’t think outside it,” she corrected him, her eyes burning with contempt. “You are a liar, perhaps first to yourself; you can consider actual morality when you want to. You can for Hester. You’ll bend all your own precious rules when she asks you to.”
    “Is that what this is?” he said with painful understanding. “Jealousy of Hester, because you think I would have done differently for her? Can’t you understand that she would never have asked me to?”
    Margaret gave a harsh, bitter laugh. The sound of it lacerated the last of his emotions. “You’re a coward, Oliver! Is that why you care for her so much? Because she’ll fight the battles for you, and never expect anything of you but to follow? What about Monk? Would you fight for him?”
    He did not know how to answer her. Could any of what she said be true?
    “Did you ask my father why he did all those things you accused him of?” she went on, perhaps sensing her victory. “Or did you not want to know? It might disturb your comfortable world of right and wrong where everything is decided for you by generations of lawyers from the past. No need to think! No need to make any difficult decisions, or stand alone. Certainly no need to take any dangerous action yourself, question any of your own comfortable certainties, or risk anything.”
    At last he was angry enough to reply. “I’ll risk my own safety, Margaret, but not anyone else’s.”
    Her eyes widened in amazement. “That man, Mickey Parfitt, he was filth!” she said with scorching contempt. “Worse than vermin. You know what he did.”
    “And the girl?” he said quietly.
    “What girl?” She looked blank.
    “The girl he killed as well?”
    “The prostitute!”
    “Yes, the
prostitute
,” he replied coldly. “Was she vermin, too?”
    “She would have had him hanged!” she exclaimed.
    “So that justified him killing her? That’s your courage, your brave morality? Personally deciding who lives and who dies, rather than leaving it to the law?”
    “He had reasons, terrible choices to make.” Now the tears ran freelydown her cheeks. “He was my father! I loved him.” She said it as if that explained it all. He began to realize at last that for her, it did.
    “So I should forgive him, no matter what he did?” he asked.
    “Yes! Is that so difficult?” It was a challenge, demanded in fury and despair.
    “Then what a pity you did not love me also.” He said the words so softly, they were little more than a whisper.
    She gasped. Her eyes went wide. “That’s not