“You don’t know what loyalty is,” Margaret went on, seeing her advantage and forcing it home. “I used to be sorry for you that you don’t have any children of your own, only that little urchin you’ve picked up from the dockside to fill your emptiness. When it comes down to it, you don’t understand what family is. You’re too selfish, too absorbed with the image of love to know what the reality is.” She took a gulp of air, then pushed past Hester and went out into the hallway again, leaving the door swinging on its hinges.

Was it true? Only part of it! Hester had had no idea of her father’s despair, no idea he had been cheated, lied to, and betrayed. She heard of his suicide only after it had happened. Letters to and from the Crimea took weeks, and often she was away from Scutari when the ships from England landed.

Could she have known? Should she have? Her brother James had kept it from her. Her younger brother had already been killed in action. Was there something else she should have done? Should she have stayed at home in the first place?

No! She had followed not only her heart but her beliefs, in joining the nurses in the hellhole of Scutari, and even on the blood-soaked battlefields. She had eased pain, saved lives. And she had loved her father more than Margaret could ever know.

And she loved Monk. She would have wanted children to please him, to give him everything love can ever give, but she did not ache for them for herself. Yes, she loved Scuff. Why should she deny that? But for who he was, not to ease an emptiness within herself. Monk alone was sufficient—companion, ally, lover, and friend.

Had she made mistakes, perhaps even profound ones? Yes, of course. But never through indifference.

She stood still, dizzy, the room blurring in her vision, and waited until she was sufficiently composed to return to the courtroom and observe the afternoon’s trial.

RATHBONE WAS FIGHTING FOR the defense as Hester had known he must do. He had no choice, legally or emotionally.

He called witnesses who, one by one, painted a picture of the trade Parfitt had run, and its patrons among the rich and dissolute, including, most pointedly, Rupert Cardew.

“Only the rich?” He pressed the witness, an oily, devious-looking man who stood very straight in the witness box, his hands by his sides.

“Course,” the man replied. “No point in blackmailin’ the poor!”

There was a faint snicker around the gallery, which died immediately.

“And the fashionable?” Rathbone continued. “The socially prominent?”

The witness regarded him witheringly. “In’t no need ter pay if yer got no position to lose. If yer nobody, yer tell ’im ter sod off an’ sell the pictures to whoever ’e wants.”