Chapter Text
I formd them free, and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves: I else must change
Thir nature, and revoke the high Decree
Unchangeable, Eternal, which ordain'd
Thir freedom, they themselves ordain'd thir fall.
The first sort by thir own suggestion fell,
Self-tempted, self-deprav'd: Man falls deceiv'd
By the other first: Man therefore shall find grace,
The other none: in Mercy and Justice both,
Through Heav'n and Earth, so shall my glorie excel,
But Mercy first and last shall brightest shine.
--Paradise Lost, Book 3, John Milton
***
John Thornton would always remember his conversation with Richard Hale, the day after the funeral. It had been such a relief to find another whose sincere questions had also led him away from the orthodoxy of established thought, who had likewise wandered on the by-ways of doubt and curiosity and questing grace. In that half-space, a step away from death, they had both been easier with each other, more open about the secret spaces of their souls than, perhaps, Thornton had ever been before, nor would again. In those little ways, to find an intelligent man who could agree with his logic, there was a comfort that could not easily be forgot.
“I should like to make my farewells to Miss Hale,” he told her father as they walked down the stairs, laughing in good humour.
“She will be in her room, I expect,” Hale said, “I’ll go to fetch her—oh, I left a book I should like you to read on my desk in the study. Would you mind—?”
Thornton waved his hand genially and put his hand to the door. The room was in shadow, and he took several steps before identifying the darkly clad mass sprawled on the floor: Miss Hale, as white as death.
A cry ripped from him: “Margaret!” and “Dear God, will someone help me?!” and he knelt quickly searching for breath, life, warmth— He raised the young woman up from the floor and she lolled in his arms, her head resting in his shoulder in an obscene imitation of affection. As her family entered the room, the young woman roused a little, her white slender fingers gripping his coat, her forehead resting against his chest. He lifted her a little more, so that she could rest against her own father instead, have her own maid chafe her hands, be himself exiled to the outer reaches of the room. “I will fetch a doctor,” he announced.
“No!” Margaret protested. She shook her head muzzily. “I am tired—I am only tired, that is all.”
“These last days have been very fatiguing,” Richard Hale affirmed to his daughter, cradling her tightly. “I blame myself.” Looking up: “I am sorry, Thornton, but…”
And so John Thornton stood on the pavement, blinking in the light after the darkness of that pokey little house, when a slow-moving omnibus pulled up to the kerb and a policeman got out. He stood patiently while the man explained his business: a reprobate who had finally died after some kind of fall and a lot of drinking, who had filled Thornton’s own ears with wild tales of police and electric telegraphs before finally lapsing into coma. Leonards had died, never more to wait on the Thorntons’ cook, to be thanked, but it appeared from Watson’s careful patient circuit of the witnesses that there was rather more doubt in the case than had initially appeared.
“You spoke to Miss Hale?” Thornton asked with a frown at the house behind him, the house with a front door locked against its custom. “When?”
Watson consulted his watch. “About two hours ago, sir.”
“I see…” Doubt ran furiously through his brain. Resolve gripped him. “Do nothing for today.”
“The young lady will expect me to call, from what I said.”
“There are some facts I wish to be certain of,” Thornton told him with, he hoped, a reassuring smile. “And from being in the house, I know for a fact they are not entertaining visitors at this time. I’ll give you your answer tomorrow. At, say, ten?”
And with that, Watson must be content.
***
He stood, undecided, on the busy pavement in Crampton. The young woman had clung to him yesterday not knowing who, what, he was. Thornton knew, as he had known during his sleepless night, that he could end this. The police inspector owed his position to Thornton, and was bullyable; more, Watson would be pleased to get out of having to challenge a lady’s word in an open court and would be malleable about it. He shoved his hands into his pockets and his fingers brushed on the spikes of a hard metal comb, and the little glass bottle he had brought with him. No, he had known when he left Marlborough St what he would do, must do. He steeled himself and knocked on the door at a time when, he knew, Hale would be out with a student in a distant suburb.
Today, Miss Hale did not quibble about a private audience, but led him to the little upstairs parlour, explaining profusely about her embarrassment over yesterday's weakness.
He let her fill the air with polite emptynesses before he pulled the silver comb from his pocket and set it on the little table near her with a click. “My apologies. I… picked it up off the floor yesterday without thinking.”
“There is no need to enquire about my health, Mr Thornton, I am quite recovered. I was merely fatigued yesterday.”
The dark blotches under her eyes belied her words, the severe bun her hair had been dragged into belied them more. Thornton would give her credit, she was a fighter.
He rose from his chair and paced a little, feeling eyes following him about the room. At last: “Miss Hale. I am sure you know, as the daughter of your father, that there are times when a man—or woman—has conflicting duties. As a friend of your father’s, it is my duty to care for the well-being of his family.” He glanced at her a moment, she was still, wary. He went on. “As a man who aspires to the title of gentleman, it is my duty to not inquire too closely into the attachments of a woman who does not live in my own household.”
“Mr Thornton! You are—”
“Impertinent. Yes.”
Thornton tried to school himself to gentleness, to lighten the forbidding face that Fanny had always complained he affected to scare her. “I know,” he said softly, “as I am sure your father knows, that it is possible to enter into an obligation for the best, most honourable of reasons, only to find later that one is in some strait or difficulty—”
“You dare—?” Margaret half rose from her chair, rage filled.
“No. As a gentleman it is not my place. But,” he rested his hands on his chair back, patted it, “but,” too loudly, “I am also a magistrate, and as magistrate it is my duty to inquire into the deaths of those who pass before their time. This man, Leonards, was a waste of the breath that God gave him—yes, I have seen him—but he was a living man for all of that, and I will not turn my face from the possibility of his manslaughter. Or his murder.”
All of a sudden, a marionette with her strings cut, Margaret lolled back in her chair, her face ghostly white.
Thorndon knelt quickly, one hand scrupulously on the back of her chair, and produced from his pocket the little bottle of smelling salts he had abstracted from Fanny’s purse, because he was a dog who had grown to maturity in the cutthroat world of the free market and he had known what he would do to be sure. The bare inch of space between them was as charged and pregnant as a lightning storm: Miss Hale jerked her head up suddenly, and whispered: “no, not murder. Never that. It was an accident! This man—Leonards, you call him—he was trying to stop my— the man I was with from boarding the train, he was grabbing... F—he pushed him away and Leonards fell, but it was barely a fall, three feet. I know he got up again, I went to see. I did.”
Thorndon sprang away from her; the lightning had struck, the woman’s face contorted beyond measure; oh yes, she knew that he had chosen this.
“You are no gentleman,” she snarled savagely. “You are the devil!”
“Agreed,” Thornton said shortly. He searched the room for something to do and, finding a writing desk on the table, helped himself to a leaf of paper, and pen and ink, dashed off two quick lines. He raised his hands to his eyes briefly and turned to her again. “I thank you for your cooperation, Miss Hale. This matter can end here.”
Outside, he collared a boy whom he knew ran errands and sent him off to deliver his note to Watson. From the high perch of an omnibus, the driver was shouting to him “are you getting on or not?” and blindly he paid his sixpence and climbed inside to one of the bench seats, to be carried off—who knew or cared where?