“Yes sir, only natural,” the stationmaster agreed. “’Course it is. Would to anyone, especially a young lady o’ sensibility.”
Griselda rose to her feet suddenly. “Let me see her!” she demanded, pushing her way forward.
“Now really, my dear,” Murdoch protested, grasping her shoulders. “That would do no good at all and you must rest. Think of your condition….”
“But I must!” She fought free of him and confronted Hester, her face so pale the dusting of freckles across her cheeks stood out like dirty marks. Her eyes were wild and staring. “What did she say to you?” she demanded. “She must have told you something! Something about her purpose in coming here—something about me! Didn’t she?”
“Only that she was coming to reassure you that you had no cause for anxiety,” Hester said gently. “She was quite definite about that. You need have no anxiety at all.”
“But why?” Griselda said furiously, her hands held up as if she would grasp Hester and shake her if she had dared. “Are you sure? She might not have meant it! She could have been simply—I don’t know—being kind.”
“I don’t think so,” Hester replied quite frankly. “From what I saw of Mrs. Farraline, she did not speak idly in order to set someone’s mind at rest; if what she had said was not completely true, she need not have mentioned it at all. Of course it is extremely difficult for you at such a dreadful time, but I should try to believe that you really do have no cause for concern.”
“Would you?” Griselda said eagerly. “Do you think so, Miss …”
“Latterly. Yes I do.”
“Come, my dear,” Connal said soothingly. “This is really not important now. We have arrangements to make. And
you must write to your family in Edinburgh. There is a great deal to take care of.”
Griselda turned to him as if he had been speaking a foreign language.
“What?”
“Don’t worry yourself. I shall attend to it all. I shall write this morning, a full letter with all that we know. If I post it today, it will go on the night train, and they will receive it in Edinburgh tomorrow morning. I will assume then that it was very quiet and she almost certainly felt nothing.” He shook his head a little. “Now, my dear, this has been a terrible day for you. I shall take you home where Mama can care for you.” His voice held a sudden relief at having thought of the ideal way of releasing himself from a situation beyond his ability. “You really must consider your … health, my dear. You should rest. There is nothing you can do here, I assure you.”
“That’s right, ma’am,” the stationmaster said quickly. “You go with your husband. ’E is absolutely right, ma’am.”
Griselda hesitated, shot another anguished look at Hester, then succumbed to a superior force.
Hester watched her go with relief, and a sharp, sad memory of Mary saying how unnecessarily Griselda worried. She could almost hear Mary’s voice in her head, and the very humor in it. Perhaps she should have said more to comfort her. She had seemed more devastated by the lack of reassurance over her child than by her mother’s death. But perhaps that was the easier of the two emotions to face. Where some people retreated into anger, and she had seen that often enough, Griselda was grasping on to fear. Being with child, especially a first, could cause all kinds of strange turmoils in the mind, feelings that would not normally be so close to the surface.
But Griselda was gone, and there was nothing she could add now. Perhaps in time Murdoch would think of the right things to say or do.
It was nearly another hour of questions and repeated futile
answers before Hester was permitted to leave the station. She had recounted to every appropriate authority the exact instructions she had been given in Edinburgh, how Mary had seemed during the evening, that she had made no complaint whatever of illness, on the contrary, she had seemed in unusually good spirits. No, Hester had heard nothing unusual in the night, the sound of the wheels on the track had obliterated almost everything else anyway. Yes, without question she had given Mrs. Farraline her medicine, one vial as instructed. The other vial had already been empty.
No, she did not know the cause of Mrs. Farraline’s death. She assumed it was the heart complaint from which she suffered. No, she had not been told the history of the illness. She was not nursing her, simply accompanying her and making sure she did not forget her medicine or take a double dose. Could she have done so? No, she had not opened the case herself, it was exactly where Hester had put it. Besides which, Mary was not absentminded, nor approaching senility.
At last, feeling numb with sadness, Hester was permitted to leave, and made her way to the street, where she hailed a hansom cab and gave the driver Callandra Daviot’s address. She did not even consider whether it was a courteous thing to turn up in the middle of the morning, unannounced and in a state of distress. Her desire to be warm and safe, and to hear a familiar voice, was so intense it drove out normal thoughts of decorum. Not that Callandra was someone who cared much for such things, but eccentricity was not the same as lack of consideration.
It was a gray day, with gusts of rain on the wind, but she was unaware of her surroundings. Grimy streets and soot-stained walls and wet pavements gave way to more gracious squares, falling leaves and splashes of autumn color, but they did not intrude into her consciousness.
“ ‘Ere y’are, miss,” the driver said at last, peering down at her through the peephole.
“What?” she said abruptly.
“We’re ’ere, miss. Ye goin’ ter get out, or d’yer wanner stay sitting in ’ere? I’ll ’ave ter charge yer. I got me livin’ ter make.”
“No, of course I don’t want to stay in here,” she said crossly, scrambling to open the door with one hand and grasp her bag with the other. She alighted awkwardly and, setting her bag on the pavement, paid him and bade him a good day. As the horse moved off, and the rain increased in strength, making broad puddles where the stones were uneven, she picked up the bag again and climbed the steps to the front door. Please heaven Callandra was at home, and not out engaged in one of her many interests. She had refused to think of that before, because she did not want to face the possibility, but now it seemed so likely she even hesitated on the step, and stood undecided in the rain, her feet wet, her skirts becoming sodden where they brushed the stones.
There was nothing to lose now. She pulled the bell knob and waited.
The door opened but it was a moment before the butler recognized her, then his expression changed.
“Good morning, Miss Latterly.” He made as if to say something further, then thought better of it.
“Good morning. Is Lady Callandra at home?”
“Yes ma’am. If you care to come in, I shall inform her you are here.” He moved aside to allow her to pass, his eyebrows slightly raised at her bedraggled appearance. He took her bag from her and set it down gingerly, then excused himself, leaving her dripping onto the polished floor.
It was Callandra herself who appeared, her curious, long-nosed face full of concern. As always, her hair was escaping its pins as if to take flight, and her green gown was more comfortable than elegant. The wide skirts had become her when she was younger and slimmer, now they no longer disguised a certain generosity of hip, but made her seem shorter than she was. However, her carriage, as always,
was excellent, and her humor and intelligence more than made up for any lack of beauty.
“My dear, you look awful!” she said with anxiety. “Whatever has happened? I thought you had gone to Edinburgh. Was it canceled?” For the moment she ignored the sodden skirt and the generally crumpled gown, the hair as untidy as her own. “You look quite ill.”
Hester smiled in sheer relief at seeing her. It filled her with a sense of warmth far deeper than anything physical, like a homecoming after a lonely journey.
“I did go to Edinburgh. I came home on the overnight train. My patient died.”
“Oh my dear, I’m so sorry,” Callandra said quickly. “Before you got there? How wretched. Still—oh—” She searched Hester’s face. “That’s not what you mean, is it? She died in your charge?”
“Yes.”
“They had no business to dispatch you with someone so ill,” she said decisively. “Poor creature, to have died away from home, and on a train, of all things. You must feel dreadful. You certainly look it.” She took Hester’s arm. “Come in and sit down. That skirt is soaking wet. Nothing of mine will fit you, you’d step right through them. You’ll have to make do with one of the maid’s dresses. They are quite good enough until that dries out. Or you’ll catch your—” She stopped and pulled a sorrowful face.
“Death,” Hester supplied for her with a ghost of a smile. “Thank you.”
“Daisy,” Callandra called loudly. “Daisy, come here if you please!”
Obediently a slender dark girl with wide eyes came out of the dining room door, a duster in her hand, her lace cap a trifle crooked on her head.
“Yes, your ladyship?”
“You are about Miss Latterly’s height. Would you be good enough to lend her a dress until hers is dried out. I have no idea what she has been doing in it, but it is shedding
a pool of water in here, and must be as cold as Christmas to wear. Oh, and you’d better find some boots and stockings for her too. Then on your way ask Cook to send some hot chocolate into the green room.”
“Yes, your ladyship.” She bobbed in something like a half curtsy, and with a glance at Hester to make sure she had understood the instruction, led her away to fulfill the errand.
Ten minutes later Hester was dressed in a gray stuff gown which fitted her excellently apart from being a couple of inches short at the ankle, showing her borrowed stockings and boots, and sitting beside the fire opposite Callandra.
The room was one of her favorites, decorated entirely in dark green and white, with white doors and window embrasures, directing one’s eye toward the light. The furniture was warm, dark rosewood, upholstered in cream brocade, and there was a bowl of white chrysanthemums on the table. She put her hands around the cup of hot chocolate and sipped it gratefully. It was ridiculous to be so cold; it was not even winter, and certainly far from frosty outside. And yet she was shivering.
“Shock,” Callandra said sympathetically. “Drink it. It will make you feel better.”
Hester sipped again, and felt the hot liquid down her throat.
“She was so well the evening before,” she said vehemently. “We sat up and talked about all sorts of things. She would have talked longer, only her daughter instructed me she should not stay up later than quarter past eleven at the outside.”
“If she was well until the very last evening of her life, she was most fortunate,” Callandra said, looking at Hester over the top of the cup. “Most people have at least some period of illness, usually weeks. Of course it is a shock, but in a little while it will seem more of a blessing.”
“I expect it will,” Hester said slowly. Her brain knew
that what Callandra said was perfectly true, but her emotions were sharp with guilt and regret. “I liked her very much,” she said aloud.
“Then be glad for her that she did not suffer.”
“I felt so—inefficient, so uncaring,” Hester protested. “I didn’t help her in the slightest. I didn’t even wake up. For any use or comfort I was to her, I could have stayed at home.”
“If she died in her sleep, my dear girl, there was no use or comfort you could have been,” Callandra pointed out.
“I suppose so….”
“I imagine you had to inform someone? Family?”
“Yes. Her daughter and son-in-law had come to meet her. She was very distressed.”
“Of course. And sometimes sudden grief can make people very angry, and quite unreasonable. Was she unpleasant to you?”
“No—not at all. She was really very fair.” Hester smiled bitterly. “She didn’t blame me at all, and she could well have done. She seemed more distressed that she could not learn what her mother was going to tell her than anything else. The poor soul is with child, and it is her first. She was anxious about her health, and Mrs. Farraline had gone to reassure her. She was almost distracted that she would never know what it was that Mrs. Farraline was going to say.”
“A most unfortunate situation altogether,” Callandra said sympathetically. “But no one is at fault, unless it is Mrs. Farraline for having undertaken such a journey when she was in such delicate health herself. A long letter would have been much better advised. Still, we can all be clever after the event.”
“I don’t think that I have ever liked a patient more thoroughly or more immediately,” Hester said, swallowing hard. “She was very direct, very honest. She told me about dancing the night away before the Battle of Waterloo. Everyone who was anyone in Europe was there that night, she said. It was all gaiety, laughter and beauty, with a desperate,
wild kind of life, knowing what the morrow might bring.” For a moment the dim lamplight of the carriage, and Mary’s quick, intelligent face, seemed more real man the green room and the fire of the present.
“And then their partings in the morning,” she went on. “The men in their scarlet and braid, the horses smelling the excitement and the whiff of battle, harnesses jingling, hooves never still.” She finished the last of the chocolate but kept holding the empty cup. “There was a portrait of her husband in the hall. He had a remarkable face, full of emotion, and yet so much of it half hidden, only guessed at. Do you know what I mean?” She looked at Callandra questioningly. “There was passion in his mouth, but uncertainty in his eyes, as if you would always have to guess at what he was really thinking.”
“A complex man,” Callandra agreed. “And a clever artist to catch all that in a face, by the sound of it.”
“He formed the family printing company.”
“Indeed.”
“He died eight years ago.”
Callandra listened for another half hour while Hester told her about the Farralines, about the little she had seen of Edinburgh, and what she would do about obtaining another position. Then she rose and suggested that Hester tidy her hair, which was still lacking several pins and far from dressed, and they should consider luncheon.
“Yes—yes of course,” Hester said quickly, only just realizing how much of Callandra’s time she had taken. “I’m sorry…. I … should have …”