A sudden, fearful death (20 page)

He was aware of a sharp inner sense
of frustration, of questions and answers that led nowhere, of knowing that
someone was lying, but not who. They had been days on the case and learned
nothing that made sense, no string of evidence that began to form a story.

Except that this was the first day.
Prudence Barrymore had died only yesterday. The emotion came from the past,
whatever he and Runcorn had been doing however many years ago—was it ten,
fifteen? Runcorn had been different. He had had more confidence, less
arrogance, less need to exert his authority, less need to show he was right.
Something had happened to him in the years between which had destroyed an
element of belief in himself, injuring some inner part so that now it was
maimed.

Did Monk know what it was? At least
had he known before the accident? Was Runcom's hatred of him born of that: his
vulnerability, and Monk's use of it?

The train was going through
Paddington now. Not long till he was home. He ached to be able to stand up.

He closed his eyes again. The heat
in the carriage and the rhythmic swinging to and fro, the incessant clatter as
the wheels passed over the joins in the rails, were hypnotic.

There had been another constable on the case as well, a
slight young man with dark hair that stood up from the brow. The memory of him
was vivid and acutely uncomfortable, but Monk had no idea why. He racked his
brain but nothing came. Had he died? Why was there this unhap-piness in his
mind when he pictured him?

Runcorn was different; for him he
felt anger and a swift harsh contempt. It was not that he was stupid. He was
not: his questions were perceptive enough, well phrased, well judged, and he
obviously weighed the answers. He was not gullible. So why did Monk find
himself unconsciously curling his lip?

What had the case been? He could
not remember that either! But it had mattered, of that he had no doubt at all.
It was serious. The superintendent had been asking them every day for
progress. The press had been demanding someone be caught and hanged. But for
what?

Had they succeeded?

He sat up with a jolt. They were at
Euston Road and it was time he got off or he would be carried past his stop.
Hastily, apologizing for treading on people's feet, he scrambled out of his
seat and made his way out onto the platform.

He must stop dwelling in the past
and think what next to do in the murder of Prudence Barrymore. There was nothing
to report to Callandra yet, but she might have something to tell him, although
it was a trifle early. Better to leave it a day or two, then he might have
something to say himself.

He strode along the platform,
threading his way among the people, bumping into a porter and nearly tripping
over a bale of papers.

What had Prudence Barrymore been
like as a nurse? Better to begin at the beginning. He had met her parents, her
suitor, albeit unsuccessful, and her rival. In time he would ask her superiors,
but they were, or might be, suspects. The best judge of the next stage in her
career would be someone who had known her in the Crimea, apart from Hester. He
dodged around two men and a woman struggling with a hat box.

What about Florence Nightingale
herself? She would know something about all her nurses, surely? But would she
see Monk? She was now feted and admired all over the city, second in public
affection only to the Queen.

It was worth trying.

Tomorrow he would do that. She was
immeasurably more famous, more important, but she could not be more opinionated
or more acid-tongued than Hester.

Unconsciously he quickened his
step. It was a good decision. He smiled at an elderly lady who glared back at
him.

* * * * *

Florence Nightingale was smaller
than he had expected, slight of build and with brown hair and regular features,
at a glance quite unremarkable. It was only the intensity of her eyes under the
level brows which held him, and the way she seemed to look right into his mind,
not with interest, simply a demand that he meet her honesty with equal candor.
He imagined no one dared to waste her time.

She had received him in some sort
of office, sparsely furnished and strictly functional. He had gained
admittance only with difficulty, and after explaining his precise purpose. It
was apparent she was deeply engaged in some cause and had set it aside only for
the duration of the interview.

"Good afternoon, Mr.
Monk," she said in a strong clear voice. "I believe you have come in
connection with the death of one of my nurses. I am extremely sorry to hear of
it. What is it you wish of me?"

He would not have dared
prevaricate, even if it had been his intention.

"She was murdered, ma'am,
while serving in the Royal Free Hospital. Her name was Prudence
Barrymore." He saw the shadow of pain pass over Florence Nightingale's
calm features, and liked her the better for it. "I am inquiring into her
murder," he went on. "Not with the police but at the wish of one of
her friends."

"I am deeply sorry. Please be
seated, Mr. Monk." She indicated a hard-backed chair and sat in one
opposite, holding her hands in her lap and staring at him.

He obeyed. "Can you tell me
something of her nature and her abilities, ma'am?" he asked. "I have
already heard that she was dedicated to medicine to the exclusion of all else,
that she had refused a man who had admired her for many years, and that she
held her opinions with great conviction."

A flicker of amusement touched
Florence Nightingale's mouth. "And expressed them," she agreed.
"Yes, she was a fine woman, with a passion to learn. Nothing deterred her
from seeking the truth and acknowledging it."

"And telling it to
others?" he asked.

"Of course. If you know the
truth, it takes a gentler and perhaps a wiser woman than Prudence Barrymore not
to speak it aloud. She did not understand the arts of diplomacy. I fear that
perhaps I do not either. The sick cannot wait for flattery and coercion to do
their work."

He did not flatter her with
agreement. She was not a woman who would have valued the obvious.

"Might Miss Barrymore have
made enemies profound enough to have killed her?" he asked. "I mean,
was her zeal to reform or her medical knowledge sufficient for that?"

For several moments Florence
Nightingale sat silent, but Monk knew perfectly well that she had understood
him and that she was considering the question before answering.

"I find it unlikely, Mr.
Monk," she said at last "Prudence was more interested in medicine
itself than in ideas of reforming such as I have. I desire above all things to
see the simple changes that would save so many lives and cost little, such as
proper ventilation of hospital wards." She looked at him with brilliant
eyes, burning with the intensity of her feeling. Already the timbre of her
voice had altered and there was a new quality of urgency in it. "Have you
any idea, Mr. Monk, how stuffy most wards are, how stale the air and full of
noxious vapors and fumes? Clean air will do as much to heal people as half the
medicines they are given." She leaned forward a fraction. "Of course
our hospitals here are nothing like the hospitals in Scutari, but still they
are places where as many people die of infections caught there as of the
original complaints that brought them! There is so much to do, so much
suffering and death which could be avoided." She spoke quietly, and yet
Monk, listening to her, felt a quiver of excitement inside himself. There was a
passion in her eyes which lit them from within. No longer could Monk possibly say
she was ordinary. She possessed a fierceness, a solitary fire, and yet a
vulnerability which made her unique. He caught a glimpse of what it was that
had inspired an army to love her and the nation to revere her, and yet leave
her with such a core of inner loneliness.

"I have a friend"—he used
the word without thinking— "who nursed with you in the Crimea, a Miss
Hester Latterly ..."

Her face softened with instant
pleasure. "You know Hester? How is she? She had to return home early
because of the death of both of her parents. Have you seen her recently? Is
she well?"

"I saw her two days ago,"
he answered readily. "She is in excellent health. She will be most pleased
to know you asked after her." He felt slightly proprietorial. "She is
largely nursing privately at present. I am afraid her outspokenness cost her
her first hospital post." He found himself smiling, although at the time
he had been both angry and critical. "She knew more of fever medicine than
the doctor, and acted upon it. He never forgave her."

Florence smiled, a peaceful inward
amusement, and he thought a certain pride. "I am not surprised," she
admitted. "Hester never suffered fools easily, especially military ones,
and there are a great many of those. She used to get so angry at the waste and
told them how stupid they were and what they should have done." She shook
her head. "I think had she been a man, Hester might have made a good soldier.
She had all the zeal to fight and a good instinct for strategy, at least of a
physical sort."

"A physical sort?" He did
not understand. He had not noticed Hester being particularly good at planning
ahead—in fact, rather the opposite.

She saw his confusion and the doubt
in him.

"Oh, I don't mean of a type
that would be any use to her," she explained. "Not as a woman,
anyway. She could never bide her time and manipulate people. She had no patience
for that. But she could understand a battlefield. And she had the
courage."

He smiled in spite of himself. That
was the Hester he knew.

But Florence was not looking at
him. She was lost in memory, her mind in the so recent past.

"I am so sorry about
Prudence," she said, more to herself than to Monk, and her face was
suddenly unbearably sad and lonely. "She had such a passion to heal. I can
remember her going out more than once with field surgeons. She was not
especially strong, and she was terrified of crawling things, insects and the
like, but she would sleep out in order to be there when the surgeons most
needed her. She would be sick with the horror of some of the wounds, but only
af-- terwards. She never gave way at the time. How she would work. Nothing was
too much. One of the surgeons told me she knew as much about amputating a limb
as he did himself, and she was not afraid to do it, if she had to, if there
was no one else there."

Monk did not interrupt. The quiet
sunlit room in London disappeared and the slender woman in her drab dress was
the only thing he saw, her intense and passionate voice all he heard.

"It was Rebecca who told me,"
she went on. "Rebecca Box. She was a huge woman, a soldier's wife, nearly
six feet tall she was, and as strong as an ox." The smile of memory
touched her lips. "She used to go out into the battlefield, ahead of the
guns even, and pick up the wounded men far beyond where anyone else would go,
right up to the enemy. Then she would put them across her back and carry them
home."

She turned to Monk, searching his
face. "You have no idea what women can do until you have seen someone like
Rebecca. She told me how Prudence first took off a man's arm. It had been
hacked to the bone by a saber. It was bleeding terribly, and there was no
chance of saving it and no time to find a surgeon. Prudence was as white as the
man himself, but her hand was steady and her nerve held. She took it off just
as a surgeon would have. The man lived. Prudence was like that. I am so sorry
she is gone." Still her gaze was fixed on Monk's as if she would assure
herself he shared her feeling. "I shall write to her family and convey my
sympathies."

Monk tried to imagine Prudence in
the flare of an oil lamp, kneeling over the desperately bleeding man, her
strong steady fingers holding the saw, her face set in concentration as she
used the skill she had so often watched and had thus learned. He wished he had
known her. It was painful that where there had been this brave and willful
woman now there was a void, a darkness. A passionate voice was silenced and the
loss was raw and unexplained.

It would not remain so. He would
find out who had killed her, and why. He would have a kind of revenge.

"Thank you very much for
sparing me your time, Miss Nightingale," he said a little more stiffly
than he had meant. "You have told me something of her which no one else
could."

"It is a very small
thing," she said, dismissing its inadequacy. "I wish I had the
remotest idea who could have wished her dead, but I have not. When there is so
much tragedy and pain in the world that we cannot help, it seems
incomprehensible that we should bring even more upon ourselves. Sometimes I
despair of mankind. Does that sound blasphemous, Mr. Monk?"

"No ma'am, it sounds
honest."

She smiled bleakly. "Shall you
see Hester Latterly again?"

"Yes." hi spite of
himself his interest was so sharp he spoke before he thought. "Did you
know her well?"

"Indeed." The smile
returned to her mouth. "We spent many hours working together. It is
strange how much one knows of a person laboring in a common cause, even if one
said nothing of one's own life before coming to the Crimea, nothing of one's
family or youth, nothing of one's loves or dreams, still one learns of
another's nature. And perhaps that is the real core of passion, don't you
think?"