“It doesn't make sense as it is,” she said quietly, lowering her eyes and looking away from him. “You said he was an excellent father, with the exception a couple of years ago of forcing Sabella to marry instead of taking the veil.”
“Then if it doesn't make sense as it is,” Henry said thoughtfully, “it means that either there is some element which you have not thought of, or else you are seeing something wrongly.”
Hester looked at his mild, ascetic face and realized what intelligence there was in his eyes. It was the cleverest face she had seen that held absolutely nothing spiteful or ungenerous whatever. She found herself smiling, without any specific reason.
“Then we had better go back and look at it again,” she resolved aloud. “I think perhaps it is the second of those two cases, and we are seeing something wrongly.”
“Are you sure it is worth it?” Henry asked her gently. “Even if you do discover why she killed him, will it alter anything? Oliver?”
“I don't know. Quite possibly not,” Oliver confessed. “But I cannot go into court with no more than I know now.”
“That is your pride,” Henry said frankly. “What about her interests? Surely if she wished you to defend her with the truth, she would have told it you?”
“I suppose so,” he conceded. “But I should be the judge of what is her best defense in law, not she.”
“I think you simply don't wish to be beaten,” his father said, returning to his plate. “But I fear you may find the victory very small, even if you can obtain it. Who will it serve? It may merely demonstrate that Oliver Rathbone can discover the tram and lay it bare for all to see, even if the wretched accused would rather be hanged than reveal it herself.”
“I shan't reveal it if she does not give me permission,” Oliver said quickly, his face pink, his dark eyes wide. “For heaven's sake, what do you take me for?”
“Occasionally hotheaded, my dear boy,” Henry replied. “And possessed of an intellectual arrogance and curiosity, which I fear you have inherited from me.”
They continued the evening very pleasantly speaking of any number of things other than the Carlyon case. They discussed music, of which all were fond. Henry Rathbone was quite knowledgeable, having a great love of Beethoven's late quartets, composed when Beethoven himself was already severely deaf. They had a darkness and a complexity he found endlessly satisfying, and a beauty wrought out of pain which excited his pity but also reached a deeper level of his nature and fed a hunger there.
They also spoke of political events, the news from India and the growing unrest there. They touched only once on the Crimean War, but Henry Rathbone was so infuriated by the incompetence and the unnecessary deaths that after a quick glance at each other, Hester and Oliver changed the subject and did not hark back to it again.
Before leaving Hester and Oliver took a slow stroll around the garden and down to the honeysuckle hedge at the border of the orchard. The smell of the first flowers was close and sweet in the hazy darkness and she could see only the outline of the longest upflung branches against the starlit sky. For once they did not talk of the case.
“The news from India is very dark,” she said, staring across at the pale blur of the apple blossoms. “It is so peaceful here it seems doubly painful to think of mutiny and battle. I feel guilty to have such beauty…”
He was standing very close to her and she was aware of the warmth of him. It was an acutely pleasant feeling.
“There is no need for guilt,” he replied. She knew he was smiling although she had her back to him, and could scarcely have seen him in the dark anyway. “You could not help them,” he went on, “by not appreciating what you have. That would merely be ungrateful.”
“Of course you are right,” she agreed. “It is self-indulgent for the sake of conscience, but actually achieves nothing at all, except ingratitude, as you say. I used to walk near the battlefields sometimes, in the Crimea, and knew what had happened so close by, and yet I needed the silence and the flowers, or I could not have gone on. If you don't keep your strength, both physical and spiritual, you are of no help to those who need you. All my intelligence knows that.”
He took her elbow gently and they walked towards the herbaceous border, lupin spears just visible against the pale stones of the wall and the dusky outline of a climbing rose.
“Do you find hard cases affect you like that?” she asked presently.”Or are you more practical? I don't know-do you often lose?”
“Certainly not.” There was laughter in his voice.
“You must lose sometimes!”
The laughter vanished. “Yes, of course I do. And yes-I find myself lying awake imagining how the prisoner must feel, tormenting myself in case I did not do everything I could have, and I was lying in my warm bed, and will do the next night, and the next… and that poor devil who depended on me will soon lie in the cold earth of an unhallowed grave.”
“Oliver!” She swung around and stared at him, without thinking, reaching for both his hands.
He clasped her gently, fingers closing over hers.
“Don't your patients die sometimes, my dear?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And don't you wonder if you were to blame? Even if you could not have saved them, could not have eased their pain, their fear?”
“Yes. But you have to let it go, or you would cripple yourself, and then be of no more use to the next patient.”
“Of course.” He raised her hands and touched his lips to them, first the left, and then the right. “And we shall both continue to do so, all we can. And we shall both also look at the moonlight on the apple trees, and be glad of it without guilt that no one else can see it precisely as we do. Promise me?”
“I promise,” she said softly. “And the stars and the honeysuckle as well.”
“Oh, don't worry about the stars,” he said with laughter back in his voice. “They are universal. But the honeysuckle on the orchard fence and the lupins against the wall belong peculiarly to an English garden. This is ours.”
Together they walked back to where Henry was standing by the French doors of the sitting room just as the clear song of a nightingale trilled through the night once and vanished.
Half an hour later Hester left. It was remarkably late, and she had enjoyed the evening more than any other she could recall for a very long time indeed.
It was now May 28, and more than a month since the murder of Thaddeus Carlyon and since Edith had come to Hester asking her assistance in finding some occupation that would use her talents and fill her time more rewardingly than the endless round of domestic pleasantries which now occupied her. And so far Hester had achieved nothing in that direction.
And quite apart from Edith Sobell, Major Tiplady was progressing extremely well and in a very short time would have no need of her services, and she would have to look for another position herself. And while for Edith it was a matter of finding something to use her time to more purpose, for Hester it was necessary to earri her living.
“You are looking much concerned, Miss Latterly,” Major Tiplady said anxiously. “Is something wrong?”
“No-oh no. Not at all,” she said quickly. “Your leg is healing beautifully. There is no infection now, and in a week or two at the outside, I think you may begin putting your weight on it again.”
“And when is the unfortunate Carlyon woman coming to trial?”
“I'm not sure, precisely. Some time in the middle of June.”
“Then I doubt I shall be able to dispense with you in two weeks.” There was a faint flush in his cheeks as he said it, but his china-blue eyes did not waver.
She smiled at him. “I would be less than honest if I remained here once you are perfectly well. Then how could you recommend me, should anyone ask?”