The Twisted Root Page 0,50

Treadwell was killed. I don't think she even knew he was dead. When I told her that, she was so horrified she was almost incapable of speech. She all but fainted."

"So she knows something about it!" Hester said instantly.

That was an unwarranted leap of deduction, and yet he had made exactly the same one. He looked across at her and smiled bleakly.

"So you have learned no new facts," she said.

"There's the fact that Mrs. Whitbread was prepared to fight to defend her, and risk the police coming after her instead," he pointed out. "And the fact that almost certainly Robb will find her, sooner or later." He did not want to tell Hester about Robb's opinion of him. It was painful, a dark thing he preferred she did not know.

"So, what was she like?" she asked again.

He did not make any evasions or comments on the obscurity of feminine logic.

"I've never seen anyone more afraid," he said honestly. "Or more anguished. But I don't believe she will tell me - or anyone else - what happened or why she is running. Certainly, she won't tell Lucius Stourbridge."

"What are you going to do?" Her voice was little more than a whisper, and her eyes were full of pity.

He realized he had already made his decision.

"I will tell Stourbridge that I found her and she is alive and well, and that she says she had no part in TreadwelPs death, but I will not tell him where she is. I daresay she will not be there by the time I report to him anyway. I warned her that Robb was close behind me." He did not need to add the risk he took in so doing. Hester knew it.

"Poor woman," she said softly. "Poor woman."

IT was the sixth day of Monk's enquiry into Miriam Gardiner's flight. Hester had gone to sleep thinking about her. She wondered what tragedy had drawn her to such an act that she could not speak of it, even to the man she was to marry.

But it was not that which woke her, shaking and so tense her head throbbed with a stiff, sharp pain. She had an overwhelming sense of fear, of something terrible happening which she was helpless to prevent and inadequate to deal with. It was not a small thing, or personal to herself, but of all-consuming proportions.

Beside her, Monk was asleep, his face relaxed and completely at peace in the clear, early light. He was as oblivious of her as if they had been in separate rooms, different worlds.

It was not the first time she had woken with this feeling of helplessness and exhaustion, and yet she could not remember what she had been dreaming, either now or before.

She wanted to wake Monk, talk to him, hear him say it was all of no importance, unreal, belonging to the world of sleep. But that would be selfish. He expected more strength from her. He would be disappointed, and she could not bear that. She lay staring at the ceiling, feeling utterly alone, because it was how she had woken and she could not cast it away. There was something she longed to escape from, and she knew that was impossible. It was everywhere around her.

The light through the chink in the curtains was broadening across the floor. In another hour or so it would be time to get up and face the day. Fill her mind with that. It was always better to be busy. There were battles worth fighting; there always were. She would speak to Fermin Thorpe again. The man was impossible to reason with because he was afraid of change, afraid of losing control and so becoming less important.

It would probably mean more of the interminable letters, few of which ever received a useful answer. How could anyone write so many words which, when disentangled from their dependent clauses and qualifying additions, actually had no meaning?

Florence Nightingale was confined to her home - some said, even to her bed - and spent nearly all her time writing letters.

Of course, hers were highly effective. In the four years since the end of the war she had changed an enormous number of things, particularly to do with the architecture of hospitals. First, naturally, her attention had been upon military hospitals, but she had won that victory, in spite of a change of government and losing her principal ally. Now she was bending her formidable will towards civilian hospitals and, just as Hester was,