Page 84 of The Shifting Tide (William Monk 14)

Her eyes filled with tears, which amazed him.

“Please?” he said gently. “I love you far too much to give up asking. For me there is no second best, nothing else to fall back on.”

“I love you, too, Oliver,” she said in little more than a whisper. “But this is not the time to be thinking of ourselves. And we do not know if there will be a future after this.” There was reproach in her voice; it was infinitely gentle, but it was also impossible to mistake.

His heart plunged. She had seen his terror of disease, and while she might understand it, she could conquer her own fear. She expected as much from him. Had he lost her already, not to plague but to contempt, or even to its kinder and more devastating likeness, pity? And yet he had no power to govern the churning of his stomach, the feeling as if everything strong and in control inside him had suddenly turned to water.

He closed his eyes. “It is precisely because there may be no future after this that I had to tell you how I feel.” He heard his voice, hollow, shaky rather than passionate. “Tomorrow, or next week, may be too late. I could merely have said I love you, but I imagine you already know that-the important part is that I wish to marry you. I have never asked a woman that before.”

She turned away from him, smiling in spite of her tears. “Of course not, Oliver. If you had, she would have accepted you. But I can’t, not with things as they are. I hope you will forgive me, and take my place in the raising of funds. We will still need them desperately, probably even more so. But others apart from me can do that. No one else can be there, nor should they.” She turned back. “I am not asking because you love me, or because I love you, but because it is right.”

“Of course.” He did not have to give it an instant’s thought. He wanted to argue with her, say anything, do anything, to prevent her from going, but he knew if he did it would be rooted in selfishness and it would destroy both of them. He offered her his arm, and they went back to join the party and proceed in to dinner.

It was not late when he took her home because they both could think of nothing but the fact that she must be up early in the morning to reach the clinic before dawn.

He alighted from the hansom and offered his arm to hand her out. He hesitated for a moment, hoping to kiss her. She must have sensed it, because she pulled away.

“No,” she said quietly. “Good-bye is difficult enough. Please don’t say anything, just let me walk away. Apart from anything else, I do not wish to have to explain myself to my mother. Good night.” And she walked across the footpath as the front door of the house opened. She went in, leaving him as utterly alone as if he were the only man alive in a deserted city.

He slept badly and at half past four gave up the attempt altogether. He rose, shaved in tepid water, and dressed. Without bothering to eat breakfast, he took a hansom cab and gave the driver the address of his father’s house in Primrose Hill.

It was nearly six when he arrived, and still as dark as midnight. He spent almost five minutes on the front doorstep before Henry Rathbone’s manservant let him in.

“Good gracious, Mr. Oliver! Whatever’s wrong?” he said with horror. “Come in, sir. Let me get you a brandy. I’ll go an’ fetch the master.”

“Thank you,” Rathbone accepted. “That’s very good of you. Please tell him that I am quite unhurt, and so far as I know in perfectly good health.”

Henry Rathbone arrived some ten minutes later, accepting the offer of a cup of tea from his manservant. Then he sat down in the armchair opposite Oliver, who was nursing a brandy. He did not cross his legs as usual but leaned forward, giving Rathbone his whole attention. The room was cold, no one having risen yet, in the normal course of the day, to clean out the grate, set, and light a new fire.

“What is it?” he said simply. He was a taller man than his son, lean with a gentle, aquiline face and steady, very clear blue eyes. He had been a mathematician and sometime inventor in his earlier years, and the lucidity of his mind, and its gentle reasonableness, had often assisted in Oliver’s more desperate cases.

Oliver remembered Henry’s profound affection for Hester; it made what he had to say almost impossibly difficult. He hesitated, now that the moment had arrived, lost for words.

“I cannot help if I do not know what it is,” Henry reminded him reasonably. “You have come this far, before dawn, and you are obviously beside yourself with anxiety over something. You had better say what it is.”

Rathbone looked up. His mere presence made it both better and worse. It brought all his own emotions so much closer to the surface. “It is something that can be told to no one else at all. I should not tell you, but I am at my wits’ end,” he said.

“Yes, I see that,” Henry agreed. “Wait till we have the tea and can be uninterrupted.”

Oliver obeyed, marshaling the thoughts in his mind into some kind of rational order.

When the tea was brought and they were alone, he began. He told the story very simply and in a manner as devoid of emotion as he could manage. Rather than robbing it of feeling, this reserve added to it.

Henry said nothing whatever until Oliver stopped speaking and waited for a comment.

“How like Hester,” Henry said at last. “I am sure Margaret Ballinger is a fine woman, that much is quite clear, and perhaps Hester would not have made you happy, nor you her. But I have never known anyone else whom I liked quite so much.”

“What can I do?” Oliver asked.

“Defend the thief to the best of your ability,” Henry told him. “As long as you do not ever allow anyone to guess, as wildly as they may, that you are concealing a disease of any nature, let alone this one. You could create a panic which could end in mass destruction. Neither Hester nor Margaret would survive it, and it would not even necessarily contain the plague. Whatever you do, Oliver, you must let no one suspect. It would be very dreadful if the thief is hanged for a crime of which he is innocent, but for once injustice is not the greatest evil.”

“I know,” Oliver agreed quietly. “I do know!”

“And poor Monk is doing what he can to trace the members of the crew who were paid off?”

“Yes. The last I spoke to him, he had had no success at all.”

“They may already be dead,” Henry pointed out. “It is even possible they died at sea and he will find no trace of them because there is none to find.”

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