He took a shaky breath, and went on. “If Margaret doesn’t even acknowledge that, then she’s going to spend her whole life angry, and bitter because her father was unjustly hanged. That’s a kind of terrible madness. It will destroy her.”

Hester put out her hand and touched him very gently. “Give her time, Oliver. Some things we can’t face immediately. As long as he protests his innocence she can’t turn her back on him, whatever the evidence. Could you, if it were your father?”

“My father would …” He stopped. What he had been going to say only supported Hester’s point. His father would never do such a thing? No, he wouldn’t. But, then, perhaps Margaret believed just as passionately in her father, regardless of evidence. Hester was right; she would not be released from it until Ballinger admitted his guilt. Perhaps she couldn’t be, without betraying herself, and the guilt for that would destroy her also.

How terribly wide the damage spread.

Hester smiled. “I know. I love your father, and I don’t believe he would ever even think of anything like this. But, then, Margaret would feel the same. Sometimes we only know one side of a person we love so intensely.”

He could think of nothing to say.

“Parents especially are part of who we are,” she went on. She looked down, away from meeting his eyes. “I still can’t tell myself that my father failed because he took his own life. I wonder if I fight so hard over the things I believe in, to prove I’m not like that. I don’t give in.” She looked up again, and her eyes were full of tears. “I identify with the soldiers I nursed in the Crimea, and delude myself I’m like them, because I saw how they suffered and I loved their courage so much.”

Rathbone realized that he too was suffering a disillusion, not in Ballinger, because he had never cared for him, but in Margaret herself. Perhaps he had expected her to be more like Hester—more able to face the unbearable, more foolishly, passionately brave. And yet it was those very qualities in Hester that had frightened him, and had made her such an unsuitable wife for him. He had wanted Hester’s virtues, but without the danger. He loved Margaret, but not with the reckless fervor that counts no risk and no price too high.

Was he disillusioned in her, or in himself?

“She wants me to mount an appeal,” he said, remembering the scene vividly, although it had been a couple of days ago.

They had been standing in the withdrawing room, the dusk heavy outside, the gas lamps burning but the curtains still open onto the garden. She was dressed in dark gray, as if ready for mourning, and her face was colorless. She was so angry she trembled.