She blinked back sudden tears. ‘How can I prove that I stayed because I couldn’t leave the children alone there? Maybe there’ll be a juror who would have? They’ll all be men, won’t they!’ Jurors were always men.

  ‘Many will be married, and with children,’ he replied, hating himself for doing this, although with every evasion he would feel the greater and greater need. It was almost something he could taste, like the sharpness of the lemons in the drink. ‘They’ll know that their wives would never leave children to be bled to death like that, frightened, alone and unloved or comforted. We may have to rely quite heavily on character witnesses.’

  ‘For me?’ she said, forcing a slight smile of self-mockery. ‘I run a clinic for prostitutes,’ she reminded him. ‘You might be better off not raising that one.’

  ‘An army nurse now looking after the fallen in a different war,’ he said drily.

  Her smile widened in spite of herself. ‘What about the children? That can’t be acceptable. You only have to see them to know how small and vulnerable they are. And Maggie could testify. She’d fight anyone if they threatened her brothers. No lawyer will look good if he bullies a six-year-old little girl who’s been bled half to death for an experiment!’

  ‘We can’t prove that,’ Rathbone said grimly. ‘But it doesn’t matter, because the judge won’t allow the testimony of a child that age. The defence will fight tooth and nail to keep all of them off the stand.’

  ‘But they were there!’ she protested. ‘That’s a fact.’

  ‘Rand will simply say he paid the family for their participation in a medical experiment. Even if it didn’t work, could Rand have been close to success? Is it possible that he believed it could? Please . . . be very careful how you answer.’

  Hester sat still for so long he thought she was not going to speak. Then she straightened up and faced him. ‘Yes, I think he was very close indeed. And if I am asked on the stand what I thought of his medicine, I would have to say that if he succeeded, it would be one of the greatest steps forward in saving lives that I have ever heard of. It wouldn’t just be people with white blood disease, it would be women bleeding to death in childbirth, anyone injured and dying from the shock of blood loss, soldiers, sailors, people in accidents of any sort – in the street, industrial – anything! It would stretch into the future beyond imagination. Think of having an operation, and not fearing the bleeding, knowing that what you lost would be replaced! There is no counting the people who would not die . . . if that could be made to work.’

  He looked at her, searching her face, and he saw the wonder in her eyes.

  ‘Will you say that on the stand?’ he asked, realising that their case was vanishing in front of him.

  ‘If I’m asked, I have to. Do we need to punish him more than we need to save all those people in the future? Anyway, it’s the truth. If he succeeds, or anyone does, it would be like a miracle.’

  ‘And whose children do we bleed?’ he asked.

  The colour bleached out of her face, leaving her haggard. ‘We don’t,’ she said hoarsely. ‘We find another way. That’s the problem he didn’t solve. Why was those children’s blood all right, while other people’s works sometimes and other times it doesn’t? And if the blood is wrong, it’s a hard and miserable way to die.’

  ‘So his success is partial?’

  ‘Yes. It’s a step along the path, that’s all. But I think it’s the best step anyone has made so far. We can’t say if it would have worked if he’d been able to continue.’ A sudden, dark shadow filled her eyes. ‘And of course if he is found not guilty, then who can even guess how many other people will try something similar?’

  Rathbone had not even thought of that. He felt as if the air had suddenly turned ten degrees colder.

  ‘Then we must be a great deal more certain of success if we prosecute,’ he said quietly. ‘A victory would also be validation.’ He hesitated a moment, hating to ask her, afraid of the answer. ‘If you are asked on the stand what you think of his work, what will you say?’

  She bit her lip. ‘That he was wrong to kidnap me, and deeply wrong to take the children and bleed them. But he could be on the brink of solving the problem of using willingly given human blood from one person to save the life of another. Especially if one could take a little from each of several people, adults, and given voluntarily.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Oliver, but that is the truth. I can’t lie about it. He’s a loathsome man, but that has nothing to do with the lives that his work could save.’

  ‘I understand. I put the law before individual people I care about, if they are wrong. I expect you to put medicine before them as well, in the same way. We must. And if we don’t, then everything else is also lost, sooner or later.’

  She nodded, too full of emotion to look for words that were unnecessary anyway.

  Rathbone drank the last of his lemonade and stood up to leave. His mind too was crowded with conflicting thoughts and emotions. He had told Ardal Juster that he would accept the case and work beside him on it. Now he was beginning to see that the complexity of it was deeper and far more tangled than he had imagined.

  Rathbone went that evening to visit Beata York. It was an impulsive idea and perhaps not very wise, but his longing to see her overrode his judgement. He realised just how much it had done so when he stood on the doorstep and had already pulled the bell rope. It was too late to leave. If he did, he would look like a naughty child who played practical jokes because he was too young to understand how silly it was, and what a nuisance to servants who had better things to do.

  The butler received him with not only courtesy but charm, as if he still felt guilty over Ingram York’s appalling behaviour, which was now some time ago.

  ‘Good evening, Sir Oliver,’ he said graciously. ‘If you will come into the morning room I will inform Lady York that you are here.’

  Still feeling self-conscious, Rathbone accepted, following the man across the now-familiar hall and into the morning room. It was still as austere as when York himself had lived here. That was before the awful night when he had completely lost his temper and attacked Rathbone with his cane, finally collapsing to the floor in some kind of seizure. Every time Rathbone came into this room since then, the horror had come back to him. It was not from fear of injury, it was shock and then desperate embarrassment at York’s sudden headlong fall from what had seemed to be merely eccentric into a state of complete insanity. He had disliked the man too much for pity, and yet in spite of himself, he felt something very close to it, if one can feel pity and revulsion at the same moment.

  The butler returned and conducted him into the withdrawing room where Beata awaited him.

  Rathbone felt a sudden lurch of emotion as he saw her again. It has been over three weeks, and some of the sharpness of memory had faded. There were small things about her that seemed new: a softness of the light on her hair, the way her eyebrows arched, the very direct way she looked at him, yet without challenge. He knew that would change if he said something she felt to be cruel, or unworthy. The loss of the warmth in her would be the most devastating thing he could imagine at this moment.

  ‘I thought you would be back when you heard about what had happened to Hester Monk,’ she said gently. ‘Isn’t it a sad commentary on our public interests when the trial of a doctor for medical horror is more worthy of news than the kidnap of a nurse and three small children?’ She looked past him at the butler, then back at Rathbone. ‘Have you eaten recently?’

  ‘Sufficiently,’ he replied. ‘It seems almost an irrelevance at the moment.’ She had indicated a chair on the opposite side of the fireplace from her own. He had a strange, sharp feeling that it had been Ingram York’s, before his collapse. In fact he could remember him sitting in it. How totally even a small time could change everything! It was not so long ago that he had first come here, honoured to be invited. And yet since then he had been a judge himself, and in that office lost even his right to practise law in court.

  She had asked the butler to bring cold ham and egg pie and a pot of tea, and he had barely heard her. He murmured his thanks.

  ‘Are you going to accept the case?’ she asked.

  ‘Only to assist,’ he answered. ‘Ardal Juster is prosecuting.’

  ‘I know the legalities,’ she chided him with a tiny smile. ‘Whatever he thinks, you will lead. He is not a fool. He will be out to win, and he knows very well the value of your experience, and your judgement.’

  ‘My judgement?’ he said incredulously. ‘If he has any wits at all, he’ll not listen to that!’ He allowed himself to smile at her. It had its own kind of absurdity, and he did not want her to hear bitterness in his voice. There was little less attractive than self-pity, and he cared fiercely what she thought of him, far more than it was safe to admit.

  She smiled back, this time ruefully, aware of her own weaknesses.

  ‘You were right in your moral judgement, my dear, just wrong in the law as to how you went about it. But there was no right way. Is there a right way in this? From the little I have read in the newspapers, it is far from a simple issue, but the press always exaggerate so! Competition is good for some businesses – it makes everyone do their best – but seeing who can shout the loudest only ends in deafening us all.’

  He felt the knots ease out of his muscles, as if there were warmth in the room that unlocked the old tensions.

  ‘I only read The Times . . .’ he began.

  ‘But of course,’ she agreed with a hint of laughter. ‘I cannot imagine you reading the penny dreadfuls.’

  ‘It might be where the story belongs,’ he said ruefully. ‘Hamilton Rand is a brilliant chemist, but he’s not a doctor. According to Hester, and she doesn’t exaggerate, Rand kidnapped her, and the three children whose blood he was taking, and held them in a cottage in the countryside in Kent. Going willingly was Bryson Radnor, a wealthy man suffering from white blood disease, and his adult daughter, Adrienne, who helped to look after him, and with the household chores.’

  Beata listened without interrupting him.

  ‘The difficulty lies in the fact that Radnor and his daughter were entirely willing. She is being charged along with Rand . . .’

  ‘And not Radnor himself?’ she said with surprise.

  ‘He is claiming to have been ill and barely conscious when he made the journey from the hospital to the cottage.’

  ‘Really? How gallant of him!’ There was stinging sarcasm in her voice.

  ‘It could be true, and the jury could well believe him.’

  ‘What does the daughter say?’

  ‘Nothing, so far. She seems very dependent upon him.’

  ‘Financially, socially, emotionally?’ she queried.

  ‘Probably all of those.’

  ‘Oh dear. Then it all rests upon what Hester says, apart from the three children.’

  ‘They are too young to testify. And their parents accepted money to provide food for the youngest child still at home.’ He said it with a degree of bitterness he did not even try to hide. ‘How much can you blame parents who convince themselves that an older child will be all right if they sell him or her to someone who will pay enough money to feed and save the babies left behind, crying with hunger?’

  She looked away, her eyes filling with tears.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ He wished profoundly he had thought before he gave words to something she should not have had to know. ‘Beata . . . I’m sorry . . .’

  She swivelled back to face him, her eyes blazing through the tears. ‘Don’t you dare protect me from the truths of life as if I were a child, Oliver! I don’t deserve that!’

  He was stunned. ‘I’m . . . sorry. Was I doing that?’ He was truly appalled at his own clumsiness.

  ‘Yes, you were. Please don’t do it again. I have seen my share of cruelty, injustice and grief. I do not need to be treated like some flower that will bruise if you touch it.’

  For the first time he considered what she must have felt when Ingram York said some of the things that he had. What private, intimate cruelties had she suffered that she could tell no one, ever? What shame did she feel on his behalf that she could not speak? What dreams of hers might he have crushed, like a slowly tightening screw?

  He knew how his own disillusion with Margaret had hurt him, though perhaps it was a good deal his own fault. He had chosen to believe she was different from how she really was. Awakening had cost him not only the future but the past, taking the meaning and the heart out of what he had thought it to be.

  What had Beata lost that she would be humiliated to give name to? He would never ask and, please heaven, never be clumsy enough to assume again. But another apology would only make the issue bigger than it already was.

  ‘Medical ethics are so complicated,’ he said. ‘Experimentation is fraught with the chances of failure, and pain or even death. Yet without it we learn nothing. No new cures are found and ignorance has destroyed progress. It depends so much on whose view you have. If someone I loved were ill, I would probably consider any price payable to save them. If I were ill myself, I don’t know. I might be too tired and in too much pain to want to struggle any more. If I were starving anyway, who knows what I would do? I might go willingly, but what idea would I have of the pain I would suffer? Even the changes, perhaps irreversible, that would happen to my body, or my mind.’

  ‘Are you going to say that in court?’ Now she was watching him with interest, no anger left, no thought of herself at all. ‘Are you going to point out that consent cannot be informed if it is from a person with no medical understanding of what the experiment means?’

  He did not bother to say again that it would be Ardal Juster that was speaking, not he. ‘Yes,’ he answered thoughtfully. ‘And I will sound as if I am standing in the path of all progress.’

  ‘Rand could have used someone else’s blood,’ she pointed out. ‘An adult more able to understand and willing to take the chance.’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Rathbone said ruefully. ‘There is something in the blood of these three children that works every time. He has already tried others, and failed.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  ‘There is not only the question of life, but of the quality of life,’ he continued. ‘Perhaps Radnor is more a victim of this than he realises. I have a lot of studying to do before I advise Juster what to do.’

  ‘Expert witnesses? Other doctors?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Don’t forget professional rivalry, Oliver. The defence will have experts, too. People perjure themselves for many reasons; some don’t even realise they are doing it. You are safer to stick to the emotional facts. Hester was taken against her will, and kept prisoner. Is there any way you can make the jury realise that if she had not been rescued, and Radnor had died, that Rand would have killed her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But I believe it . . . and that is a good deal of the way there.’

  ‘You have let your tea go cold. Let me send for a fresh pot, and eat your pie. Cook really is very good.’

  He relaxed back into the chair. ‘Thank you.’

  They spoke of other things, long into the evening. By the time he left he could think of little to do with the case, only how intensely he cared for Beata. How long would Ingram York cling on to his raging, damaged life, locked up in the asylum, half paralysed in a world of nightmares and silence? Surely it was also mercy to hope for his release?

  Rathbone spent the rest of the week speaking to other doctors who were experts on diseases of the blood, or death from the shock of injury, and the consequent loss of blood. At Hester’s suggestion he also spoke to midwives who had delivered healthy babies, only to lose a mother from bleeding that took too long to stop.

  The more he learned the more he understood the desperate need to find a solution to giving blood that a healthy person could easily spare, and which would restore life to someone who would otherwise die.

  He even asked himself what risks he would take, if the dying person were Beata. Could he watch her fade away, suffering, if the gift of someone else’s blood could save her?

  What was the great terror? Death? Annihilation? Being alone for ever? Being guilty of some irreversible sin? Or cowardice? The eternal blame of those you ignored, or of those your courage could have saved?

  On Friday evening he went to see Ardal Juster in his home. It was considerably later than good manners would have permitted calling, especially upon someone you did not know well. He still went.

  Juster was surprised, but he realised immediately that the matter was grave. As soon as they were in his comfortable, overcrowded study he closed the door and faced Rathbone.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t believe we should prosecute,’ Rathbone said gravely. ‘I think we may end up losing, and making Rand seem a hero . . .’

  ‘For God’s sake, man!’ Juster said incredulously. ‘He kidnapped a woman whom you know well, and care for. If Radnor had died, or even one of the children, he would have had to kill her. She would never have kept silent over it. I know that, you know it, and Rand as sure as hellfire knew it.’

  ‘But it didn’t happen, Juster,’ Rathbone pointed out. ‘She’s alive. You can’t prosecute someone for what you believe they would have done in circumstances that did not happen. You know that as well as I know it. The defence will say that the children’s parents took money . . .’

  ‘But they didn’t know what was going to happen to the children,’ Juster said hotly, his voice rising.

  ‘But what if Rand said he had told them in the beginning?’

  ‘He didn’t!’ But Juster’s voice wavered.

  ‘Of course he damned well didn’t,’ Rathbone agreed. ‘But can you prove that, if Rand swears he did?’

  Juster stared at him.

  ‘You can only charge him with kidnapping Hester, and hope that her testimony stands up to the defence, because they’ll attack her any way they can think of.’

  ‘Is that really why you’re withdrawing?’ Juster asked, but his voice was softer, without blame.

  ‘No . . . no, I don’t think so. In fact I’m not withdrawing. I would rather be there to sit beside you and give you whatever counsel I can when the time comes, which it will. If you go ahead . . .?’