"Comfort to us, my wife and I. Taken it hard, poor woman; only son, you know. Five daughters. And now this."
"I understand Menard Grey was also a close friend of your son's," Monk said, as much to fill the silence as that it might have mattered.
Dawlish stared at the coals. "Prefer not to speak of it," he replied with difficulty, his voice husky. "Thought a lot of him-but he led Edward into bad ways-no doubt about it. It was Joscelin who paid his debts-so he did not die with dishonor."
He swallowed convulsively. "We became fond of Joscelin, even on the few weekends he stayed with us." He lifted the poker out of its rest and jabbed at the fire fiercely. "I hope to heaven you catch the madman who did it."
"We'll do everything we can, sir." Monk wanted to say all sorts of other things to express the pity he felt for so much loss. Thousands of men and horses had died, frozen, starved, or been massacred or wasted by disease on the bitter hillsides of a country they neither knew nor loved. If he had ever known the purpose of the war in the Crimea he had forgotten it now. It could hardly have been a war of defense. Crimea was a thousand miles from England. Presumably from the newspapers it was something to do with the political ramifications of Turkey and its disintegrating empire. It hardly seemed a reason for the wretched, pitiful deaths of so many, and the grief they left behind.
Dawlish was staring at him, waiting for him to say something, expecting a platitude.
"I am sorry your son had to die in such a way." Monk held out his hand automatically. "And so young. But at least Joscelin Grey was able to assure you it was with courage and dignity, and that his suffering was brief."
Dawlish took his hand before he had time to think.
"Thank you." There was a faint flush on his skin and he was obviously moved. He did not even realize until after Monk had gone that he had shaken hands with a policeman as frankly as if he had been a gentleman.
***
That evening Monk found himself for the first time caring about Grey personally. He sat in his own quiet room with nothing but the faint noises from the street in the distance below. In the small kindnesses to the Dawlishes, in paying a dead man's debts, Grey had developed a solidity for more than in the grief of his mother or the pleasant but rather insubstantial memories of his neighbors. He had become a man with a past of something more than a resentment that his talent was wasted while the lesser gifts of his elder brother were overrewarded, more than the rejected suitor of a weak young woman who preferred the ease of doing as she was told and the comfort of status to the relative struggle of following her own desires. Or perhaps she had not really wanted anything enough to fight for it?
Shelburne was comfortable, physically everything was provided; one did not have to work, morally there were no decisions-if something was unpleasant one did not have to look at it. If there were beggars in the street, mutilated or diseased, one could pass to the other side. There was the government to make the social decisions, and the church to make the moral ones.
Of course society demanded a certain, very rigid code of conduct, of taste, and a very small circle of friends and suitable ways to pass one's time, but for those who had been brought up from childhood to observe it, it was little extra effort.
Small wonder if Joscelin Grey was angry with it, even contemptuous after he had seen the frozen bodies on the heights before Sebastopol, the carnage at Balaclava, the filth, the disease and the agony of Scutari.
In the street below a carriage clattered by and someone shouted and there was a roar of laughter.
Suddenly Monk found himself feeling this same strange, almost impersonal disgust Grey must have suffered coming back to England afterwards, to a family who were strangers insofar as their petty, artificial little world was concerned; who knew only the patriotic placebos they read in the newspapers, and had no wish to look behind them for uglier truths.
He had felt the same himself after visiting the "rookeries," the hell-like, rotting tenements crawling with vermin and disease, sometimes only a few dozen yards from the lighted streets where gentlemen rode