isn't true, she'll never trust me again. She has no one else to turn to. Mr. Sheldon is no use-" She stopped abruptly. She had betrayed a family confidence, even if it was one Hester could have worked out for herself, and probably had. It was not what others knew that mattered, it was the breach of trust.
Hester saw the compassion in Martha's face. It was more than duty or the pity anyone might have felt; it was the kind of love which cannot escape once obligation has been fulfilled, or walk away when conscience is satisfied. Martha had known and cared for Perdita since Perdita was a child. Perhaps she was the only one who had, closely, daily, seeing the weaknesses as well as the strengths, the temptations and disappointments, the failures; the only one who knew what effort or what price lay behind the outward joys.
"I don't know," Hester confessed. "But I am trying to think."
"She loved him so much," Martha went on. "You should have seen him before he went away. He was so full of life, so happy. He believed in everything... al least he seemed as if he did." She pushed a strand of hair off her brow. "You can't ever get back that innocence, can you." It was a statement not a question, and it appeared as if she was thinking of other things as well, tragedies that had nothing to do with this.
Hester knew exactly what she meant. She had seen the raw soldiers arrive from the troopships, and then seen their faces again after one of the battles where men were slaughtered by the hundreds, cut down uselessly, human beings sheared off like corn before the harvest. You could not ever get that hope, that unknowing, back.
"No," she agreed. "She asked me last night if she should read about the Mutiny, about Cawnpore and Lucknow. I didn't know what to say."
Martha stared at her, her eyes dark, her cheeks hollow, as if she had borne all Perdita's suffering; but there was still a kind of softness in her in spite of the angles and the sharp cheekbones.
"She mustn't!" she said urgently. "She couldn't bear it. You don't understand, Miss Latterly, she's never experienced anything... violent... in her life." She lifted her hands helplessly, waving the cloth. "She's never seen anyone... dead. In families like the Lofftens they don't ever mention death. People don't die, they 'pass over,' or sometimes they 'take the great journey.' But it is always peaceful, as if they have fallen asleep. She will have to learn this... very slowly."
Hester reached for the jar of dried lavender flowers. "I don't think there is time to be very slow," she replied, realizing how little she knew of Perdita Sheldon or of the tenor of her marriage, the strength of her love for her husband. Hester could hardly ask Martha if Perdita was really only in love with the idea of love, of a handsome husband and a dream of happiness which simply moved, untrammeled by pain or reality, into an endless future. Asking Martha would be almost like making such an inquiry of her own mother.
And yet if she did not she might be losing the only chance anyone had to help Perdita-and Gabriel. He was maimed; he was disfigured. He had seen horror he would never forget and had lost too many of the flower of his friends not to be reminded-with every hot day, every military tune, every buzzing of flies-of what he had seen.
"Perhaps she should start with a history of India?" Hester suggested. "Begin forty or fifty years ago. Then the Mutiny would make more sense. By the time she reached it, she would understand at least a little of why it happened." She smiled, remembering schoolbook Latin. "Peccavi," she said wryly. "That is what Clive said when he had conquered the province of Sind. He sent it in the dispatch home."
Martha blinked.
"Peccavi," Hester repeated. "It is Latin... It means 'I have sinned.' "
"Oh. I see." Martha smiled back, some of the tension easing out of her face. "Of course. It is so long since I taught... and then it was mostly French, and a little Italian for music. I'm sorry." She blushed, and began to buff the tortoiseshell gently. "Things have changed... but that has nothing to do with Miss Perdita now. Do you think Indian history would help? I suppose... she does have to know? You don't think he-Lieutenant Sheldon-would be better if he