She looked at her own hand. It was perfectly steady, but her stomach felt anything but. What she had done took her memory straight back to the battlefield, when she’d had to do such things because there was no surgeon, and no time to waste. There was no risk to measure. If she did nothing, the man would die. All around was chaos, the living and the dying side by side. Some cried out; others lay silently. There was still smoke in the air, and the smell of horse sweat, gunpowder and blood. She did not want to remember it, any of it, and yet she felt like a traitor in deliberately choosing to forget.

  Someone was talking to her. It was Scuff.

  She turned to him.

  “Cup o’ tea?” he offered. “Or would you rather some wine? I can find some of the decent stuff that doesn’t smell of camphor.”

  “Tea, thank you.” He was inches taller than she was now, and still growing. She looked up at him very slightly and smiled. He could not even imagine what was in her mind. Please heaven, he never would.

  Fitz was still talking to the patient, calling him by name. There was a little color in Tibor’s face and he seemed to be out of the worst of his distress.

  Five minutes later the three of them were sitting at the table reserved for eating. It was warm near the stove, but they all seemed chilled and no one wished to move away.

  “I think he’ll rest better tonight,” Crow said to no one in particular.

  Hester sipped her tea. It was very hot indeed and far too strong and sweet, but she knew it was intended to be medicinal. Scuff knew she usually drank it far differently from this. It made her smile.

  “Have you something for Tibor to eat?” she asked.

  “Good broth,” Crow replied. “We quite often get paid in bones, and we always keep barley.”

  Fitz was silent. There was a strange, pensive look in his face, without the touch of humor she remembered as nearly always being there. Now it flashed only occasionally, and was gone almost as soon as it came. What had happened to him in the years of crossing Europe? Had he belonged anywhere, even for a while?

  “Hester?” It was Crow’s voice recalling her to the present, his face filled with concern.

  “I’m sorry. I was just…thinking Scuff had better stay here with you tonight, just to watch Tibor—”

  “I’ll stay,” Fitz cut in. Then he looked at Crow questioningly.

  “Thank you.” Crow accepted without hesitation.

  Hester saw the play of emotions across Scuff’s face: relief, disappointment, doubt as to the reason he was allowed to leave. Was he less useful?

  Crow understood. “We’ll need you tomorrow,” he told him. “Don’t know when that fever could begin again. He’s improving, but it’s a long way to go yet. And we’ll need more supplies. I’ll give you some money. We’ll need more cinchona bark, and a lot more camphor—we’re going through it rapidly. And more bones, with some meat on them, to make broth. And bread. We’ve little enough for ourselves to eat. Can you carry all that?”

  Scuff gave him a withering look. But his reply was civil enough.

  They were all weary. Hester bade them good night, and she and Scuff took their leave and walked together as far as the ferry across to their own side of the river.

  It was almost dark, and the air had a softness to it, even though it was damp with the breath of salt, and a dozen other things she barely noticed anymore: the fish, the tar, the estuary mud when the tide was low enough to expose the shingle.

  Neither of them spoke, but it was the silence of comfort, not of unease.

  They were standing at the dockside waiting for the ferry crossing toward them when Scuff spoke.

  “Was he a really good surgeon?” he said at last.

  “Yes.” He had been one of the best. “Not just his skill,” Hester went on. “But he never gave up. He told me once that he got over his fear of being shot or killed himself by concentrating on the wounded, and trying to think of new ways to help the shock of injury. That was what killed a lot of people…”

  Scuff understood. “You mean body shock, not surprise.”

  “Yes. He was always steady, even when we were fired on, which happened occasionally, not very often. He always sounded as if he wasn’t afraid, and he knew what was going to happen. A lot of people survived because of him.”

  Scuff thought for a few moments.

  The ferry was still far away, not making much headway against the current’s sideways pull.

  “I’m not sure I would like that kind of responsibility,” he said finally. “What if I’m wrong? Then nobody’ll believe me again.”

  “If they were badly wounded, you wouldn’t get the same people again. Just survive this moment, save this patient, or if you can’t, at least ease his pain. Above all, ease his fear. Don’t let him die alone, if you can help it.” Memory swamped her as she spoke those words.

  Images crowded her mind. She remembered a wooden cart piled high with bodies, horses straining to pull it up a stony road on a hill. Three times they had got stuck. One body had fallen off, and they had taken minutes to get him on again. The wind had cut like ice, and her feet kept slipping.

  They had reached the hospital at last, most of the wounded still alive. They had carried them in as gently as they could, to the overcrowded wards. Was it even worth the fight? The odor of human waste caused by cholera and typhoid was heavy in the air. In the end, disease had killed more than sword or gunfire.

  She did not want to remember it. Even the fellowship did not make up for the loss. They had laughed at ridiculous things together, not really funny, just absurd. They had cared for each other; it was the only sanity left to them.

  What had happened to all those women she had truly believed she would never forget? And yet she had forgotten. They were tied to a past she did not ever willingly recall. Living now meant burying that and locking the door on it, like a cellar one would never enter again. Place a piece of furniture across to hide it.

  Was that a betrayal? Or was going back to it a betrayal of the life and the gifts of the present?

  Scuff was standing beside her. She knew he was watching her face. He had his own memories of cold and hunger, and loneliness. She put out her hand and took his. She felt his fingers close over hers. His hands were bigger than hers now, but they weres still smooth-skinned, always clean: the hands of a doctor.

  —

  OVER THE NEXT TWO days Hester went to see Crow and Tibor several times. Crow spent most of his time there, and, more often than not, Fitz was there also. Tibor had one more episode that put him on the edge of death. The fever returned, and in his twisting and turning on the bed he must have torn something loose. He began to bleed badly again.

  Crow was taking a rare sleep, and as if by long instinct, Fitz tore off the bandage and dressings, now soaked in blood. Hester had ammonia and many cloths and bandages ready.

  Fitz put his hands into the wound, talking all the time, whether Tibor could hear him or not. Even Hester found the sound of his voice soothing as she struggled to keep the wound clear enough for him to see what he was doing. She felt with him, as if her fingers were exploring the open wound looking for the abscess that might be the cause of this infection.

  He looked up at her briefly, then bent his head again. He moved his hands very slightly, delicately. His face reflected total concentration.

  “Got it,” he said after what seemed an age but was actually perhaps two seconds. It was a large abscess discharging a considerable amount of purulent matter, mixed with a black substance.

  She watched, holding her breath. She saw Fitz’s fingers dig deeper, under the pectoral muscle. He glanced up and met Hester’s eyes, certainty in his.

  “I’ve got it. A fistula. Big one. If we clean it out, I think we’ll find the orifice of the artery that’s still bleeding. Scuff?”

  “Yes, sir!” Scuff was there at his elbow.

  “Thread me one of the curved needles. I’ll need it to reach in here and put a ligature on it. I’ll need a sponge to clean it out, then pledgets of soft linen. Sprinkle them with camphor and bark powder. You know how to do it. Have them ready. Then I want a new dressing, and a cordial draft, if he can take it. It’s going to be a long night…if he survives this.”

  Scuff disappeared to do as he was instructed.

  Hester watched and assisted as she could, but it looked as if it might well be useless. Tibor’s face was almost bloodless and he was scarcely breathing. She took his pulse, but it was fluttering and hard to find.

  Fitz finished the last bandage.

  “Stimulants,” he said to Scuff. “Want a little cordial ready if he should stir enough to take it.”

  Scuff obeyed. When he came back a few seconds later, Fitz applied the warm etherized cloths to Tibor’s body.

  Several times Hester drew in breath to say it was pointless, but she knew Fitz would decide that for himself.

  Scuff watched from a few feet away. She wondered how she would comfort him when Tibor finally died. He might feel like a child inside, confused and defeated by the failure, but he would not appreciate being treated like one.

  And what about Fitz? He had done all anyone could, and more than most would have tried, but that would be of no comfort to him. Would he see it as his own failure? Would it add to the devastation inside him?

  They kept working at the very gentle friction, adding a little warmth, for ten minutes with no apparent good.

  No one spoke.

  Hester glanced across at Scuff. His face was tense and pale. She knew he had to learn all these things, including that, even after doing everything you could, people might still die. You felt cold and guilty, but there was no time for self-indulgence. It would be at the cost of your attention to the next person, whose pain was also real and who needed you now.

  She turned to Tibor. Should she tell Fitz to stop?

  Tibor’s eyes opened and he took a deep breath. He was frightened, but he was very definitely awake.

  “Cordial,” Hester said to Scuff.

  He poured it carefully, grinning like a child at Christmas.

  Very gently Hester lifted Tibor up enough for him to sip the cordial, and a few moments later a faint color returned to his cheeks.

  Fitz nodded, his eyes calm, as if he had known all the time that it would work. Then the laughter was there, at himself. He took a glass of good claret from Scuff and knocked it back as if it were whisky. But when he put the glass down his hand was shaking, just a tremor, but enough for Hester to see it.

  CHAPTER

  5

  MONK WAS FAR TOO proud of Scuff to let him know just how much. He was aware of how hard it would be for him, both intellectually and emotionally, to succeed in such a challenging profession. Scuff had had the strictest of all early upbringings, surviving on his own from, as far as Monk could tell, about the age of six. The punishment for failure was death. Only God knew how many children died from the cold, or of hunger that robbed them of the strength to overcome even mild illnesses.

  But that was a far cry from the rigors of learning facts about the human body and how it reacted to disease, injury and medicine.

  Yet Monk was also, after the initial response, glad that Scuff had not wanted to follow him into the River Police. The questions there would be entirely different. It was hard enough to watch any of his men be attacked, hurt or, on rare occasions, killed. Could he do it in the case of the closest thing he had to a child? Would he have overcompensated and made it more difficult for Scuff than for any other new recruit?

  Monk was a brilliant detective; he could acknowledge that without immodesty. His skill in leading men, disciplining them, inspiring their loyalty, was a much more questionable matter. In his early days he had been unmanageable, until not even his many successes were enough to keep him from being dismissed. Looking back now, after having to lead men himself, he thought they had been very patient with him, more than he was prepared to be with anyone else.

  A young man with Monk’s brilliance and Hester’s instinct and courage would be superb. But Scuff was not theirs by birth. He would have to survive with his own gifts, and all the encouragement they could give him.

  He asked Scuff about the progress of the Hungarian patient whose arm had been amputated, but only out of his care for Scuff and Hester. His mind was more deeply absorbed in the growing difficulty of solving the murder of Imrus Fodor. Now, a little more than a week after his death, Monk had a welter of knowledge about the whole community. It meant he could exclude many people as suspects, which was better than nothing, but he still had little idea even of why Fodor had been killed, let alone by whom.

  Monk was at his desk at the River Police Station in Wapping. The air was cool and clear this early, the light slanting across the floor through the open doorway, reflected from the ripples as the high tide reached just beyond the dock edge.

  Hooper was in early too.

  “No one admits to knowing anything about a ritual with candles and blood,” Hooper said, as he knocked and stepped into Monk’s office. “Or broken fingers,” he added. “Other than the obvious. He touched something he shouldn’t have. Speared through the chest could mean anything. It missed the heart. Bad anatomy, or bad aim?” His smile had a bleak humor to it. There was something unreadable in Hooper, a well of deep thought Monk did not understand, but he trusted his own judgment of character. He also respected others’ privacy.

  Hooper was one of the very few people to whom Monk had confessed his own lack of any past he could recall, good or bad. He had been forced to when he feared there was a grudge held against him that would endanger his men. He did not want to lie to Hooper, but he also could not afford to.

  Monk had told him about the coach accident fourteen years earlier, in 1856, just after the Crimean War. It had wiped out all his memory of the past. He had rebuilt a career, a life, but the unknown still haunted him. Even then, he had been forced to admit all this to Hooper by circumstance. It had not been a willing confidence.

  Hooper had never mentioned it again.

  “I hate relying on Dobokai for so much,” Monk said with feeling. “But it would take me twice as long without him.”

  “Haven’t caught him in a lie,” Hooper said. “And I’ve tried. I’ve cross-checked everything I can.” He looked down at the papers in front of him, then up again at Monk. There was anxiety in his face, and distaste. “Do you think this violence is against the Hungarians, sir? Are they really threatening anybody? You might avoid them, not use their shops or cafés, not let them into your clubs or taverns. But this is…rage! Fury right out of control. You don’t just go and skewer somebody through the heart like that, break his fingers and dip candles in his blood, unless you hate him so much you’ve…lost your mind.”

  “I know,” Monk agreed. “I’ve been looking for something so…visceral…it started a hate like that. Whatever it is, nobody is speaking of it.”

  “A secret society?” Hooper suggested. “Something that began in Hungary, before they even came here?”

  “Possible,” Monk agreed. “But what started it again here, now? Are they all lying to us? Or is it something only a few of them know about? I’ve got the dates each of them arrived, or at least what they say.”

  “They don’t all come from the same part of Hungary,” Hooper pointed out. “Or they say they don’t.”

  “A much worse thought than some secret society troubles me.” Monk spoke very quietly. “What if the person who did this is one of us and the root of it is some hatred of strangers, immigrants?”

  “Why the Hungarians?” Hooper asked, frowning a little. “They’re pretty law-abiding. They don’t look all that unlike anyone else. There aren’t even that many of them, not like thousands! I can’t find them cornering any markets, and I’ve looked. They aren’t taking other people’s houses, or jobs. Well…not many. Bound to be a few. And why now?”

  “Always back to that,” Monk agreed. “Why now? What happened to make it erupt all of a sudden? We should look for anything that changed. Who died recently? Who lost a child, or a wife?”

  “Or a husband?”

  “No woman would have the strength to drive a bayonet into a man’s chest like that. The man was over six feet tall, and heavy. By the way, do we know where it came from yet?”

  “Yes, sir. There’s a bit of a museum over on Cable Street. Just a few things from a military collection. One of their bayonets is missing. Didn’t notice it at first because they’re not in any sort of order. Anyone could have taken it. Rifle’s missing the firing pin. Couldn’t shoot anyone with it, so they didn’t bother to report it. Full of apologies.” He gave a twisted smile. “I notice you didn’t say that a woman wouldn’t have had the will to use it.”

  “I’d rather face an angry man any day than a woman whose child I’d hurt,” Monk replied with feeling.

  Hooper looked at him. “Or anyone she loved,” he added very steadily, without blinking.

  Monk was reminded with a sudden sharpness how much Hooper knew about him, about the time he had nearly died in the river when somebody in a boat had mowed him down, almost drowning him and the ferryman. The bruising had lasted many days, and he was lucky not to have had bones broken. Anger and violence can come very quickly, far too easily.

  “If we can find what started this, we’ll have him,” he said. “Back to Dobokai. I hate asking that officious little—” He stopped, stood up and walked around his desk to the wide space on the floor. “I’m being unfair. I dislike him because I’m certain in my own mind that he’s using this case to climb to some sort of office among his own people. But they need someone to speak for them, and he would be good at it. He’s certainly the most fluent in both languages, and he always seems to be listening, asking people what they want.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Hooper asked. “I was going to look into the contradictions in all these statements. So far all I’ve found is mistakes that anyone might make, and the sort of lies people tell so as not to look foolish, or a bit greedy or too quick to criticize. Some are protecting their families, or hiding a bit of flirting, or drinking too much. I’d be more worried if they all matched exactly.”