Anne Perry - The Shifting Tide

Hester bit her lip to disguise her smile. Oliver Rathbone was one of the most brilliant-and successful-barristers in London. He had not long before been in love with Hester, but an uncertainty about a step as irrevocable as marriage, and to someone as unsuitable in her outspokenness as Hester, had made him hesitate to ask her. Not that she would have accepted him. She could never have loved anyone else as she did Monk-in spite of their continual quarrels, the erratic nature of his income and his future, let alone the dark shadow of amnesia across his past. To marry him was a risk; to marry anyone else would have been to accept safety and deny the fullness of life, the heights and the depths of emotion, and the happiness that went with them.

She believed that Rathbone could find that same joy with Margaret. And deep as her friendship with him still was, being a woman, she felt most sensitively for Margaret, and read her with an ease she would never have betrayed.

“But the moment they knew that it was for a clinic for street women here,” Margaret went on, “they balked at it.” She bit her lip. “They make me so angry! I stand there feeling like a fool because I’m full of hope that this time they’ll give something. I know it shows in my face, and I can’t help it. I’m trying to be polite, and inside I am veering wildly from pleading with them, thanking them overmuch as if I were a beggar and the money were for me, and fury if they refuse me.”

She did not add that she had been acutely conscious of Rathbone beside her, and what he would think of her manners, her decorum, her suitability to be his wife. But on the other hand, would he lose all respect for her, and she for herself, were she to do less than her best for a cause she believed in so passionately?

“And they say no ?” Hester said gently, although something of her own anger crept into her tone. Cowardice and hypocrisy were the two vices she hated the most, perhaps because they seemed to give rise to so many others, especially cruelty. They were woven into each other. She had learned how many men used the street women, and she refrained from judgment on that. She also knew that quite often their wives were perfectly aware of it, even if only by deduction. What she hated was the hypocrisy of then turning and condemning those same women. Perhaps the interdependence was what frightened them, or even the knowledge that what separated them was often an accident of circumstance rather than any moral superiority.

Where there really was a moral honor, a cleanness of spirit, she had found there was also most often a compassion as well. Margaret was an example of exactly such singleness of intent.

“And then I feel so ridiculously disappointed,” Margaret answered, looking across at Hester and smiling ruefully at herself. “And I’m disgusted to be so vulnerable.” She did not mention Rathbone’s name, but Hester knew what she was thinking. Margaret caught her eye and blushed. “Am I so obvious?” she said softly.

“Only to me,” Hester answered. “Because I’ve felt just the same.” She finished the last of her tea. “But we do need more money, so please don’t stop trying. You know me well enough to imagine what a disaster I would be in your place!”

Margaret laughed in spite of herself. Seeing her amusement, it flashed across Hester’s mind to wonder if Rathbone had ever told Margaret of some of the social catastrophes Hester had precipitated in her single days when she had been newly home from the Crimean battlefields and still full of indignation at incompetence. Even then, she had burned with belief in her power to move people to change, to reform. She had wanted to sweep away vested interest and follow discovery and truth. She had spared no one with her tongue, and achieved very few of her dreams.

“I suppose so,” Margaret conceded. “I hold my tongue far more than you do. I don’t think I like that in myself. I’m thinking just the same as you are; I’m just too used to not saying it.”

“It doesn’t achieve anything,” Hester admitted. “In the end it is self-indulgent. You feel wonderful for a few minutes; then you realize what you’ve lost.”

Margaret rubbed her hand over her brow. “I hate having to swallow my beliefs and be civil to people because I need their money!”

“The women need their money,” Hester corrected her. She leaned forward impulsively and put her hand on Margaret’s. “Don’t be as frank as I was-it horrified Oliver. The fact that most of what I said was true made it worse, not better. Give him time to come to it himself. Believe me, he is a lot more liberal than he used to be.” Memory lit sharply in her mind, and she found herself almost laughing. “A year ago he would have been paralyzed with horror at the idea of what we did to Squeaky to get this place, but I honestly think he rather enjoyed it!”

A smile lit Margaret’s face, making her eyes dance. “He did, didn’t he?” she remembered.

Bessie came in, as usual without knocking, to say that there was a young woman looking for help. “Like an ’a’penny rabbit, she is,” she said wearily. “All skin an’ bone. Never make a livin’ like that! In’t ’ad a square meal in weeks, shouldn’t wonder. White as a fish’s belly an’ wheezin’ like a train.”

Hester stood up. “I’ll come,” she said simply. She glanced back once at Margaret, and saw her go to the medicine cupboard and unlock it to check what they had, and what they might afford to buy.

She followed Bessie, and found the girl standing in the waiting room shivering, but too wretched to be frightened anymore. She looked much as Bessie had described. Hester estimated her to be about sixteen.

Hester asked her the usual questions and studied her as she answered. She was slightly feverish and had heavy congestion in her lungs, but her principal problems were exhaustion and hunger, and now also cold. Her thin dress and jacket were useless against the late October rain, not to mention the freezing fog which would shortly come up from the river. If only they had money to give her a hot bath and decent clothes! But the little there was, was already in jeopardy. Hester dearly wanted Margaret to marry Rathbone, but if she did then she might no longer be able to work at the clinic. At best her time would be restricted. As Lady Rathbone, she could hardly spend as many hours there as she did now. She would have social obligations, and of course pleasures she had certainly earned. Rathbone had more than sufficient financial means to give her all she could wish of position and comfort, not like Monk, who understood both hardship and work only too intimately.

And then why should she not have children? That would end her connection with the clinic altogether.

But it could not be fought against, nor would Hester have wanted to, even were it possible.

She told Bessie to put the kettle on again and use the warming pans to heat a bed for the girl. She could at least stay there and sleep until the bed was needed for a more serious case. A little hot water and honey would ease her chest, and a couple of slices of bread her hunger. It is hard to sleep well on an empty stomach.

“We in’t got much ’oney left,” Bessie said warningly, but she was already on her way to do it.

By the time Hester left in the late afternoon, the regular costermonger, Toddy, had called by to give her the bruised apples he could not sell and the heavier vegetables not worth his while to take all the way back home again. He had consulted her about his cough, his bunions, and the blister on his hand. She had looked at them all and assured him they were not serious. She recommended honey for his throat, and he went away happy.

Effie, as the new girl was named, was still sound asleep, but her breathing was less noisy and there was a look of deep peace on her white face. The other patients were well enough, and Margaret was renewed in her determination to hold her tongue at social events, no matter what it cost her temper or her indignation. Squeaky was still grumbling about the responsibility of balancing the books, but if there was a man in London who could do it, it was he.