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“Well I am not. And I do like him… sometimes. And…” She took a deep breath. “And there are matters in which I would trust him absolutely. Matters of honor where justice is concerned, or courage. He would fight against any odds, and without counting the cost, to defend what he believed to be right.”
Imogen looked at her with a strange mixture of amusement and pain.
“I think, my dear, you are painting him with your own virtues, but that is no harm. We all tend to do that…”
“I am not!”
“If you say so.” Imogen dismissed the matter with disbelief. “What about Mr. Rathbone? I must say I rather like him. He is such a gentleman and yet I formed the opinion he is extremely clever.”
“Of course he is.” She had never doubted it, and as she spoke, memories of a startling moment of intimacy returned with a sweetness she was not sure now if she imagined or not. She would never in the world have kissed a man in such a way without meaning it intensely. But she did not know men in that way, and perhaps they were very different. All she had observed told her that they were. She was disinclined to attach any importance to it at all. She realized with a hollow ache how little she knew, and that now she would almost certainly die without ever having loved or been loved in return. Self-pity welled up inside her like a tide, and ashamed of it as she was, it still filled her.
“Hester,” Imogen said gravely, “you are giving in. It is not like you to be pathetic, and when all this is over you are going to hate yourself for not having matched up to the moment.”
“Brave words are all very well when you are talking to somebody else,” Hester replied with a twisted smile. “It is a different matter when you are facing the reality of death. Then there isn’t any afterwards.”
Imogen looked very pale and there was distress plain in her eyes, but she did not flinch. “You mean your death would be somehow different from other people’s? Different from the soldiers you nursed?”
“No… no, of course not. That would be arrogant and ridiculous.” Being reminded of the soldiers brought back their agonized faces and broken bodies to her mind. She would die quickly, without being mutilated or wasted with fevers or dysentery. She should be ashamed of her cowardice. Many of them had been younger than she was now; they had tasted even less of life.
Imogen forced a smile, and their eyes met for a long, steady moment. There was no need for Hester to speak her thanks. She was still painfully afraid, still uncertain what lay after the hangman’s shed and the sudden darkness, but she would face it with the same dignity she had seen in others, and be fit to belong to the vast company who had already taken that path, and done it with head high and eyes unblinking.
Imogen knew when to leave, and she did not mar what was achieved by staying and talking of trivialities. She hugged Hester quickly, then with a swirl of her skirts, went to the door and demanded to be let out. The wardress came, regarded Imogen with contempt in her scrubbed face with its screwed-back hair, and then as Imogen stared back at her without flinching or averting her eyes, the contempt died away and was replaced by something that held envy and a flicker of respect. She held the door open and Imogen sailed through it without a word.
The last visitor in Newgate was Oliver Rathbone. He found Hester much calmer than on the previous occasion. She faced him with none of the barely suppressed emotion of earlier times, and far from being comforted, he found himself alarmed.
“Hester! What has happened?” he demanded. The moment the cell door was closed and they were alone, he went straight to her and took her hands in his. “Has someone said or done something to distress you?”
“Why? Because I am not so afraid anymore?” she said with a ghost of a smile.
It was on his tongue to say that she had given up. The very lack of anguish in her face meant that she was no longer struggling between hope and despair. There was no possibility of knowledge that she would be exonerated.
At this late date that could not be. She must have accepted defeat. Not for an instant did it occur to him that she had in fact killed Mary Farraline, either intentionally or by accident. He was furious with her for surrendering. How could she, after all the battles they had fought together for other people, and won? She had known physical danger the equal of most soldiers in the field, long hours, hardship, privation, and come through it all with high heart and passionate spirit intact. She had faced her parents’ ruin and death and survived it. How dare she crumble now?
And yet he was bitterly aware that she could lose. The courage required was that which goes on fighting when there is no cause to hope, a blind courage without reason, even in the face of reason. How could he expect that of anyone?
Except that to see her vilified and snuffed out, her spirit silenced, never to be able to speak with her again, was a prospect which filled him with a void which was intolerably painful. His own professional failure did not even cross his mind. It was only long afterwards that the realization occurred to him with amazement.
“I have had a great deal of time to think about it,” she went on quietly, cutting across his thoughts. “All the fear in the world is not going to change anything, only rob me of what little I have.” She laughed a little jerkily. “And perhaps I am just too tired for anything which requires so much energy of mind.”
All sorts of words of encouragement hovered on his lips: that there was plenty of time yet in which they could still learn something damning to one of the Farraline family, at least enough to raise doubts in any juror’s eyes; that Monk was brilliant and ruthless, and would never give up; that Callandra had hired the services of the finest criminal lawyer in Edinburgh, and Rathbone would be at his elbow throughout; even that prosecutors frequently tripped themselves with overconfidence or that witnesses lied, were afraid, condemned each other out of fear or spite or greed, that they recanted lies when faced with me majesty of the law in session, contradicted themselves and each other. And all of the words died before he spoke them. All the truth had already been thought and known between them. To put words to them yet again, now when it was too late, would only show that after all he had not understood.
“We leave the day after tomorrow,” he said instead.
“For Edinburgh?”
“Yes. I ca
“They danced all night on the eve of Waterloo,” he said suddenly for no reason, except that the British had won that epochal battle.
“Who did?” she said with a wry smile. “Wellington-or the Emperor of the French?”
He smiled back. “Wellington, of course. Remember you are British!”
“The charge of the Light Brigade?” she countered.
He held her hands very hard. “No, my dear, never under my command. I have been desperate at times, but never foolhardy. If we must have that miserable war, then the Thin Red Line.” He knew they were both familiar with those incredible hours when the Highland infantry had withstood charge after charge of the Russian cavalry. At times they had been only one man deep, and as each man had fallen another had replaced him. All through the dreadful slaughter-the line had not broken, and in the end it was the enemy who had retreated. Hester would have nursed men injured in that stand, perhaps she had even seen it from the heights.