Sylvestra's face cleared as she understood. "Of course! I'm sorry for being so slow to understand. Yes, I have told him. I did not think it right to keep it from him. He will have to face it. I do not want him to believe I have lied to him.”

"I cannot imagine how difficult it must be for you," Hester acknowledged. "I am sorry I had to ask.”

Sylvestra was silent for a moment, as if she too were stunned even by the thought of what had happened to her in the space of a few days. Her husband was dead and her son was desperately ill, and locked in his own world of isolation, hearing and seeing, but unable to speak, unable to communicate with anyone the terror and the pain he must feel.

"I'll try to tell you something about him," Sylvestra replied to the request. "It… it is difficult to think of the kind of things which would help." She turned to lead the way out of the room and across the hall to the stairs. At the bottom she looked back at Hester. "I am afraid that because of the nature of the incident, we have the police returning to ask questions. I cannot believe they will trouble you, since naturally you can know nothing. When Rhys regains his speech, he will tell them, but of course they don't wish to wait." A bleakness came over her face. "I don't suppose they will ever find who did it anyway. It will be some pack of nameless ruffians, and the slums will protect their own." She started up the stairs, back very straight, head high, but there was no life in her step.

Following after her, Hester imagined that inside she was barely beginning to lose the numbness of shock, and only in her mind did she turn over and over the details as their reality emerged. She could remember feeling the same when she first heard of the suicide of her father, and then within weeks of her mother's death from loneliness and despair. She had kept on worrying at the details, and yet at the same time never really believed the man responsible for her family's ruin would be caught.

But that was all in the past now, and all that needed to be retained in her mind from it was her understanding of the changing moods of grief.

The Duff house was large and very modern in furnishings. Everything she had seen in the morning room and now in the hall dated from no further back than the accession of the Queen. There was none of the spare elegance of the Georgian period, or of William IV. There were pictures everywhere, ornate wallpaper, tapestries and woven rugs, flower arrangements and stuffed animals under glass. Fortunately both the hall and the upstairs landing were large enough not to give an air of oppression, but it was not a style Hester found comfortable.

Sylvestra opened the third door along, hesitated a moment, then invited Hester to accompany her inside. This room was completely different.

The long windows faced south and such daylight as there was fell on almost bare walls. The space was dominated by a large bed with carved posts and in it lay a young man with pale skin, his sensitive, moody face mottled with blue-black bruises, and in several places still scabbed with dried blood. His hair, as black as his mother's, was parted to one side, and fell forward over his brow. Because of the disfigurement of his injuries, and the pain he must feel, it was difficult to read his expression, but he stared at Hester with what looked like resentment.

It did not surprise her. She was an intruder in a very deep and private grief. She was a stranger, and yet he would be dependent upon her for his most personal needs. She would witness his pain, and be detached from it, able to come and go, to see and yet not to feel. He would not be the first patient to find that humiliating, an emotional and physical nakedness in front of someone who always had the privacy of clothing.

Sylvestra went over to the bed, but she did not sit.

"This is Miss Latterly, who is going to care for you, now you are home again. She will be with you all the time, or else in the room along the landing, where the bell will ring to summon her if you need her.

She will do everything she can to make you comfortable, and help you to get better.”

He turned his head to regard Hester with only mild curiosity, and still what she could not help feeling was dislike.

"How do you do, Mr. Duff," she said rather more coolly than she had originally intended. She had nursed very awkward patients before, but for all her realisation, it was still disturbing to be disliked by someone for whom she had an instinctive pity, and with whom she would spend the next weeks, or months, constantly, and in most intimate circumstances.

He blinked, but stared back at her in silence. It was going to be a difficult beginning, whatever might follow.

Sylvestra looked faintly embarrassed. She turned from Rhys to Hester.

"Perhaps I had better show you your room?”

"Thank you," Hesteraccepted. She would change into a plainer and more practical dress, and return alone to try to get to know Rhys Duff, and learn what there was she could do to help him.

Her first evening in the Duff house was unfamiliar and oddly lonely.

She had frequently been among people who were profoundly distressed by violence, bereavement, even by crime. She had lived with people under the pressure of investigation by strangers into the most private and vulnerable parts of their lives. She had known people whom dreadful circumstances had caused to be suspicious and frightened of each other.

But she had never before nursed a patient who was conscious and yet unable to speak. There was a silence in the whole house which gave her a sense of isolation. Sylvestra herself was a quiet woman, not given to conversing except when she had some definite message to impart, not talking simply for companionship, as most women do.

The servants were muted, as if in the presence of the dead, not chattering or gossiping among themselves as was habitual.

When Hester returned to Rhys's room she found him lying on his back staring up at the ceiling, his eyes wide and fixed, as if in great concentration upon something. She hesitated to interrupt him. She stood watching the firelight flickering, looked to make certain there were enough coals in the bucket for several hours, then studied the small bookcase on the nearer wall to see what he had chosen to read before the attack. She saw books on various other countries, Africa, India, the Far East, and at least a dozen on forms of travel, letters and memoirs of explorers, botanists and observers of the customs and habits of other cultures. There was one large and beautifully bound book on the art of Islam, another on the history of Byzantium. Another seemed to be on the Arab and Moorish conquests of North Africa and Spain before the rise of Ferdinand and Isabella had driven them south again. Beside it was a book on Arabic art, mathematics and inventions.

She must make some contact with him. If she had to force the issue, then she would. She walked forward where he must see her, even if only from the corner of his eye.

"You have an interesting collection of books," she said conversationally. "Have you ever travelled?”

He turned his head to stare at her.

"I know you cannot speak, but you can nod your head," she went on.

"Have you?”

He shook his head very slightly. It was communication, but the animosity was still in his eyes.

"Do you plan to, when you are better?”

Something closed inside his mind. She could see the change in him quite clearly, although it was so slight as to defy description.

"I've been to the Crimea," she said, disregarding his withdrawal. "I was there during the war. Of course I saw mostly battlefields and hospitals, but there were occasions when I saw something of the people, and the countryside. It is always extraordinary, almost indecent to me, how the flowers go on blooming and so many things seem exactly the same, even when the world is turning upside down with men killing and dying in their hundreds. You feel as if everything ought to stop, but of course it doesn't.”