Anne Perry - The Sins of the Wolf

“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 Callan-dra.

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.”

‘Tf 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 man 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 than 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 ques-tioningly. “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…”

Callandra stopped her with a look.

“Yes,” Hester said obediently. “Yes, I’ll go and find some more pins. And I daresay Daisy will wish for her dress back. It was very kind of her to lend me this.”

“Yours will hardly be dry yet,” Callandra pointed out. “There will be plenty of time after we have eaten.”

Without further argument Hester went upstairs to the spare bedroom where Daisy had put her bag, and opened it to find her comb and some additional pins. She poked her hand down the side hopefully and felt around. No comb. She tried the other side and her fingers touched it after a moment. The pins were harder. They should be in a little screw of paper, but after several minutes she still had not come across it.