Slaves of Obsession (14 page)

There was nothing for him to say. He could not argue, and even to agree seemed somehow impertinent, as if he were qualified to share in her pain. That would belittle it.

“Then we shall go as soon as arrangements can be made,” he replied. “My wife is already packing cases.”

“I am very grateful, Mr. Monk.” She smiled at him faintly. “I have the money here, and the name of the steamship company. I am afraid it is in Liverpool. That is where they sail most frequently for New York … every Wednesday, to be precise. It will require haste to catch the next ship, since this is Sunday. But it can be done, and I beg you not to delay. In the hope that you would accept, I telegraphed the steamship company yesterday reserving a cabin for you.” She bit her lip. “I can have it canceled.”

“We shall go tomorrow morning,” he promised.

“Thank you. I also have money for your use while in America. I do not know how long it will take you to accomplish your task, but there should be sufficient for a month. It is all I can supply at such short notice. My husband’s affairs are naturally not disposed of yet. I have sold some jewelry of my own.”

“A month should be more than enough,” he said quickly. “I hope we shall find her long before that. And either she will be eager to come home, if she was not aware of Breeland’s acts or if he is holding her against her will, or, if she is not, then we shall have to take her as soon as possible, in case Breeland finds a way to make it more difficult for us. Whatever the circumstances, these will be adequate funds.”

“Good.” She passed a large bundle of money across the desk. There was no hesitation in her, as if it had not crossed her mind that he would be anything but honest.

“I should sign a receipt for this, Mrs. Alberton,” he prompted.

“Oh! Oh, yes, of course.” She reached for a piece of notepaper and picked up a pen. She dipped it in the inkwell and wrote, then passed the paper to him to sign.

He did so, then gave it back.

She blotted it and put it away in the top drawer of the desk without glancing at it. He could have written anything.

There was a knock on the door, and a moment later it opened.

“Yes?” she said with a frown.

“Mr. Trace is here, ma’am,” the butler said anxiously. “He is eager to speak to Mr. Monk.”

Her brow smoothed out. The mention of Trace’s name seemed not to displease her. “Ask him to come in,” she requested, then turned to Monk. “I trust you are agreeable?”

“Of course.” He was curious that Trace should still be in touch with the Alberton household, since the guns were now gone and he must be aware of it.

Trace came in a moment later, noticing Monk, but only just. His attention was entirely upon Judith. The distress in his face was too palpable to be feigned. He did not ask her how she was, or express sympathy, but it was naked to read in his face with its dark eyes and curious, sensitive asymmetry. Monk was startled by it. When Trace spoke, his words were ordinary, no more than the formalities anyone might have offered.

“Good morning, Mrs. Alberton. I am very sorry to intrude on you, especially now. But I am most concerned not to miss Mr. Monk. Mr. Casbolt told me of your intention to employ him to go after Breeland, and I intend to go also.” This time he looked at Monk for a moment, as if to ascertain that he had accepted the task. He was apparently satisfied.

Judith was startled. “Do you? It was not so much after Breeland, but to bring back my daughter that I wish Mr. Monk to go. But of course if he could bring him back also that would be most desirable.”

“I will help any way I can,” Trace said intently, his voice
charged with emotion. “Breeland deserves to hang, but of course that is far less important than saving Miss Alberton from him, or from further grief.” He stood, slender and very straight, a little self-conscious of his hands, as if he were not quite sure what to do with them. He sought her company, and yet he was not comfortable in it.

It was at that moment, watching the tension in him, the earnestness in his face, hearing the edge to his voice, that Monk realized Philo Trace was in love with Judith. Possibly his offer had very little to do with the guns.

Monk was not sure if he wanted him along or not. He would rather have had complete autonomy. He was used to working alone, or with someone who was junior to him and whom he knew.

On the other hand, Trace was American and might still have friends in Washington. Certainly he would know the land, and would be familiar with transport by both train and ship. More important still, he would know the manners and customs of the people and be able to facilitate events where Monk might find it impossible.

He studied the man as he stood in the sunlit room, his face turned to Judith, waiting for her decision, not Monk’s. He looked more of a poet than a soldier, but there was a self-discipline in him under the charm, and the grace of his slender body suggested a very considerable strength.

“Thank you,” Judith accepted. “For my part I should be very grateful, but you must counsel with Mr. Monk whether you join with him or not. I have given him the freedom to do as he thinks best, and I think that is the only circumstance in which he could undertake such a task.”

Trace looked at Monk, the question in his eyes. “I fully intend to go, sir,” he said gravely. “Whether I go with you or just behind you is a matter for your choice. But you will need me, that I swear. You think we speak the same language and so you will be able to make yourself understood. That is only partly true.” A shadow of humor crossed his face, sad and self-mocking. “I have discovered that to my cost over here. We use the same words, but we don’t always mean the
same things by them. You don’t know America, the state we are in at the present. You can’t understand the issues.…”

A sudden uncontrollable pain pulled at his lips. “No one does, least of all ourselves. We see our way of life dying. We don’t understand. Change frightens us, and because we are frightened we are angry, and we make bad judgments. A civil war is a terrible thing.”

Sitting here in this quiet, sunlit withdrawing room, bright and furnished with the proceeds of munitions, Monk was acutely aware that he had never seen war at all. At least, not as far as he remembered. He knew poverty, violence, a little of disease, a great deal about crime, but war as a madness that consumed nations, leaving nothing untouched, was unknown to him.

He made the decision instantly. “Thank you, Mr. Trace. With the provision that it is agreed I make my own judgments, and that I am free to take your advice or to leave it, I should welcome your company and such assistance as you are willing to give.”

Trace relaxed, a little of the weariness easing from his face. “Good,” he said succinctly. “Then we shall leave tomorrow morning. In case I do not see you at the station or on the train, we shall meet at the steamship company offices in Water Street in Liverpool. The next sailing is on the first tide Wednesday morning. I promise I shall not let you down, sir.”

Monk and Hester set out for the Euston Square station in the morning. It was a strange feeling, and for Hester it brought back memories of leaving seven years before to go to the Crimea, also not knowing what she was facing, what the land would be like, the climate, the taste and smell of the air. Then it had also been with a mission filling her mind. She had been so much younger in a dozen ways, not just her face and her body, but immeasurably so in experience and understanding of people and of how events and circumstances can change one. She had been certain of far more, convinced she understood herself.

Now she knew enough to have some grasp of the magnitude of what she did not know and of how easy it was to make mistakes, particularly when you were convinced you had it right.

She had no idea what waited for them in Washington. She did not know if they had any chance of succeeding in bringing Merrit Alberton back to England. The only things she was certain of were that they could not refuse to try and, most important of all, this time she was going with Monk, not alone. She was no longer young enough to be sure about much. She had learned by experience her own fallibility. But sitting in the train as it belched steam and lurched forward out of the vast arching canopy of the station, she knew she had a sense of companionship that was different from every other journey. She and Monk might quarrel over all sorts of things, great and trifling, and frequently did. Their tastes and views differed, but she knew as deeply as she knew anything at all that he would never willfully hurt her and that his loyalty was absolute. As the steam from the engine drifted past the window and they emerged into daylight, she found she was smiling.

“What is it?” he asked, looking across at her. They were passing gray rooftops, narrow streets with back alleys facing each other, grimy and cramped.

She did not want to sound sentimental. It would certainly not be good for him to tell him the truth. She must say something sensible and convincing. He could read her far too well to believe any hasty evasion.

“I think it is a good thing Mr. Trace is coming also. I am sure he will be here, even though we haven’t seen him. Do you think we should tell him about the watch?”

“No,” he said immediately. “I would rather wait until we hear from Merrit what her account is of that night.”

She frowned. “Do you believe Breeland could have taken it from her and dropped it deliberately? That would be a very cold and terrible thing to do.”

“It would be effective,” he answered, his face registering
his contempt. “It would be an excellent warning that he will stop at nothing, if we pursue him.”

“Except that he did not know we were aware he had given it to her,” she argued. “The police would see only his name on it. Judith would not tell them, especially if she knew it had been found.”

“No, but she would know,” he answered, his lips thinning bitterly. “That is all he needs. He didn’t count on her courage to send someone privately, or on her resolve to face the truth, whatever it is.”

They were coming to the outskirts of the city now, great open stretches of field spread out in the morning light. Trees rested like billowing clouds of green over the grass. It was going to be a long day, and two nights in a strange bed before they embarked on the Atlantic crossing and landed again on an unknown shore. She wondered fleetingly how she had had the courage, or the lunacy, to do it before, and alone.

They arrived late in Liverpool and it was as they were following the porter along the platform towards the way out that they saw Philo Trace. He came striding over to them, his face lighting up with relief. He greeted them warmly, and they went together to find a hansom, directing it to a modest hotel not very far from the waterfront where they could spend the time before sailing.

Judith Alberton had telegraphed the shipping office as she had said, and their berths were reserved for them. It was a ship largely crowded with emigrants hoping to make a new life for themselves in America. Many were looking to travel west beyond the war into the open plains, or even to the great Rocky Mountains. There they could find refuge for their religious beliefs, or wide lands where they could hack from the wilderness farms and homesteads they could not aspire to in England.

The ship was scheduled to pick up more passengers from Queenstown in Ireland, half-starved men and women fleeing the poverty that followed the potato famine, willing to go anywhere, to work at anything to make a life for their families.

It was a strange sensation to be at sea again. The smell of the closed air of a cabin brought back to Hester the troopships to the Crimea more sharply than the pitch and roll of the deck, the sounds of the sea, of erratic waves, and the wind. She heard the cries of seamen one to another, the creaking of timber. The squawking of chickens and the squeal of pigs troubled her because she knew they were kept to be eaten as they drew farther and farther away from land and provisions became stale and short. The wind was against them off the coast of Ireland. It would be a long crossing.

They were in a first-class cabin with tiny bunks, a single small basin, a chamber pot to be emptied out of the porthole, a small desk and a chair. Clothes were to be hung on a hook behind the door. Monk said nothing, but watching his face, hearing the tension in his voice, she knew he found it almost unbearably oppressive. She was not surprised when he went up on the deck as often as he could, even when the weather was rough and the seas drove hard in their faces, and cold, in spite of it being early July.

Thank heaven they had not had to travel steerage, where men, women and children had no more than a few square feet each and could not take a pace without bumping into someone else. If a person were sick or distressed there was no privacy. Fellowship, good temper and compassion were necessities of survival.

The crossing took just a day under two weeks, and they landed in New York on Monday, July 15.

Hester was fascinated. New York was unlike any city she had previously seen: raw, teeming with life, a multitude of tongues spoken, laughter, shouting, and already the hand of war shadowing it, a brittleness in the air. There were recruitment posters on the walls and soldiers in a wild array of uniforms in the streets.

There seemed to be copies of every kind of military dress from Europe and the Near East, even French Zouaves looking like Turks with enormous baggy trousers, bright sashes around their waists and turbans or scarlet fezes with huge tassels hanging to the shoulder.

The star-spangled banner flew from every hotel and church they passed, and was echoed in miniature on the trappings of the omnibus horses and in rosettes on private carriages.

Business seemed poor, and the snatches of talk she overheard were of prizefights, food prices, local gossip and scandal, politics and secession. She was startled to hear suggestions that even New York itself might secede from the Union, or New Jersey.

She, Monk and Philo Trace took the first available train south to Washington. It was crowded with soldiers in both blue and gray, the same chaos of uniform prevailing here. How they were meant to know one another on the battlefield Hester could not imagine, and the thought troubled her, but she did not speak it aloud.