nothing, still less would she here, and to a stranger. "It is an unbearable thing for a child to think."
"It is," Miss Buchan agreed, still staring out of the window.
"Even though, as I understand it, he was closer to his father."
Miss Buchan said nothing.
"It is very generous of you to speak well of Mrs. Carlyon to him," Hester went on, hoping desperately that she was saying the right thing."You must have had a special affection for the general - after all, you must have known him since his childhood." Please heaven her guess was right. Miss Buchan had been their governess, hadn't she?
"I had," Miss Buchan agreed quietly. "Just like Master Cassian, he was."
"Was he?" Hester sat down as if she intended to stay some time. Miss Buchan remained at the window. "You remember him very clearly? Was he fair, like Cassian?" A new thought came into her mind, unformed, indefinite. "Sometimes people seem to resemble each other even though their coloring or their features are not alike. It is a matter of gesture, mannerism, tone of voice ..."
"Yes," Miss Buchan agreed, turning towards Hester, a half smile on her lips. "Thaddeus had just the same way of looking at you, careful, as if he were measuring you in his mind."
"Was he fond of his father too?" Hester tried to picture Randolph as a young man, proud of his only son, spending time with him, telling him about his great campaigns, and the boy's face lighting up with the glamour and the danger and the heroism of it.
"Just the same," Miss Buchan said with a strange, sad expression in her face, and a flicker of anger coming and going so rapidly Hester only just caught it.
"And to his mother?" Hester asked, not knowing what to say next.
Miss Buchan looked at her, then away again and out of the window, her face puckered with pain.
"Miss Felicia was different from Miss Alexandra," she said with something like a sob in her voice. "Poor creature. May God forgive her."
"And yet you find it in your heart to be sorry for her?" Hester said gently, and with respect.
"Of course," Miss Buchan replied with a sad little smile. "You know what you are taught, what everyone tells you is so. You are all alone. Who is there to ask? You do what you think - you weigh what you value most. Unity: one face to the outside world. Too much to lose, you see. She lacked the courage ..."
Hester did not understand. She groped after threads of it, and the moment she had them the next piece made no sense. But how much dare she ask without risking Miss Buchan's rebuffing her and ceasing to talk at all? One word or gesture of seeming intrusion, a hint of curiosity, and she might withdraw altogether.
"It seems she had everything to lose, poor woman," she said tentatively.
"Not now," Miss Buchan replied with sudden bitterness. "It's all too late now. It's over - the harm is all done."
"You don't think the trial might make a difference?" Hester said with fading hope. "You sounded before as if you did."
Miss Buchan was silent for several minutes. Outside a gardener dropped a rake and the sound of the wood on the path came up through the open window.
"It might help Miss Alexandra," Miss Buchan said at last. "Please God it will, although I don't see how. But what will it do to the child? And God knows, it can't alter the past for anyone else. What's done is done."
Hester had a curious sensation, almost like a tingling in the brain. Suddenly shards of a pattern fell together, incomplete, vague, but with a tiny, hideous thread of sense.
"That is why she won't tell us," she said very slowly. "To protect the child?"
"Tell you?" Miss Buchan faced Hester, a pucker of confusion between her brows.
"Tell us the real reason why she killed the general."
"No - of course not," she said slowly. "How could she? But how did you know? No one told you."
"I guessed."
"She'll not admit it. God help her, she thinks that is all there is to it - just the one." Her eyes filled with tears of pity and helplessness, and she turned away again. "But I know there are others, of course there are. I knew it from his face, from the way he smiles, and tells lies, and cries at night." She spoke very quietly, her voice full of old pain. "He's frightened, and excited, and grown up, and