A Sudden, Fearful Death

"I saw her two days ago," he answered readily. "She is in excellent health. She will be most pleased to know you asked after her." He felt slightly proprietorial. "She is largely nursing privately at present. I am afraid her outspokenness cost her her first hospital post." He found himself smiling, although at the time he had been both angry and critical. "She knew more of fever medicine than the doctor, and acted upon it. He never forgave her."

Florence smiled, a peaceful inward amusement, and he thought a certain pride. "I am not surprised," she admitted. "Hester never suffered fools easily, especially military ones, and there are a great many of those. She used to get so angry at the waste and told them how stupid they were and what they should have done." She shook her head. "I think had she been a man, Hester might have made a good soldier. She had all the zeal to fight and a good instinct for strategy, at least of a physical sort."

"A physical sort?" He did not understand. He had not noticed Hester being particularly good at planning ahead-in fact, rather the opposite.

She saw his confusion and the doubt in him.

"Oh, I don't mean of a type that would be any use to her," she explained. "Not as a woman, anyway. She could never bide her time and manipulate people. She had no patience for that. But she could understand a battlefield. And she had the courage."

He smiled in spite of himself. That was the Hester he knew.

But Florence was not looking at him. She was lost in memory, her mind in the so recent past.

"I am so sorry about Prudence," she said, more to herself than to Monk, and her face was suddenly unbearably sad and lonely. "She had such a passion to heal. I can remember her going out more than once with field surgeons. She was not especially strong, and she was terrified of crawling things, insects and the like, but she would sleep out in order to be there when the surgeons most needed her. She would be sick with the horror of some of the wounds, but only af- terwards. She never gave way at the time. How she would work. Nothing was too much. One of the surgeons told me she knew as much about amputating a limb as he did himself, and she was not afraid to do it, if she had to, if there was no one else there."

Monk did not interrupt. The quiet sunlit room in London disappeared and the slender woman in her drab dress was the only thing he saw, her intense and passionate voice all he heard.

"It was Rebecca who told me," she went on. "Rebecca Box. She was a huge woman, a soldier's wife, nearly six feet tall she was, and as strong as an ox." The smile of memory touched her lips. "She used to go out into the battlefield, ahead of the guns even, and pick up the wounded men far beyond where anyone else would go, right up to the enemy. Then she would put them across her back and carry them home."

She turned to Monk, searching his face. "You have no idea what women can do until you have seen someone like Rebecca. She told me how Prudence first took off a man's arm. It had been hacked to the bone by a saber. It was bleeding terribly, and there was no chance of saving it and no time to find a surgeon. Prudence was as white as the man himself, but her hand was steady and her nerve held. She took it off just as a surgeon would have. The man lived. Prudence was like that. I am so sorry she is gone." Still her gaze was fixed on Monk's as if she would assure herself he shared her feeling. "I shall write to her family and convey my sympathies."

Monk tried to imagine Prudence in the flare of an oil lamp, kneeling over the desperately bleeding man, her strong steady fingers holding the saw, her face set in concentration as she used the skill she had so often watched and had thus learned. He wished he had known her. It was painful that where there had been this brave and willful woman now there was a void, a darkness. A passionate voice was silenced and the loss was raw and unexplained.

It would not remain so. He would find out who had killed her, and why. He would have a kind of revenge.

"Thank you very much for sparing me your time, Miss Nightingale," he said a little more stiffly than he had meant. "You have told me something of her which no one else could."

"It is a very small thing," she said, dismissing its inadequacy. "I wish I had the remotest idea who could have wished her dead, but I have not. When there is so much tragedy and pain in the world that we cannot help, it seems incomprehensible that we should bring even more upon ourselves. Sometimes I despair of mankind. Does that sound blasphemous, Mr. Monk?"

"No ma'am, it sounds honest."

She smiled bleakly. "Shall you see Hester Latterly again?"

"Yes." hi spite of himself his interest was so sharp he spoke before he thought. "Did you know her well?"