A Christmas Hope Read Online Free PDF

you flatter me,” she said with a faint smile. “I’m afraid I have no idea where Mr. Tregarron is. But please feel free to look anywhere you wish, to be certain. Just don’t alarm my staff and make them imagine they are in any danger.”
    “No … of course not. Thank you, ma’am.”
    She went with both of them, showing them the entire house, from the servants’ quarters in the attic to the wine and the coal cellars beneath ground level. She caught Ada’s eye once, smiled at her, and moved on.
    When he was satisfied, Claudine thanked Sergeant Green and his constable for their courtesy and for assuring that the household was indeed quite clear of intruders of any sort, either a fugitive from justice or acasual burglar. She bade them good-bye and watched them leave with a sigh of relief.
    She sat down to a light luncheon with a feeling of peculiar exhaustion, as if she had spent the morning in some dangerous and highly energetic work. Dai Tregarron must have made good his escape, but she knew he was still in very considerable danger. Apart from Wallace—who she hoped would never know about the day’s adventure—Tregarron also had against him the Foxleys, the Halversgates, the Crostwicks, and the Giffords. All of them would feel equally aggrieved by his intrusion into their world, even though someone had presumably invited him to the party in the first place. Whatever it was that had actually happened to Winnie Briggs, none of them would wish to be tarred by it, and they had the collective power to make sure that they were not.
    What could Claudine do? Tregarron was free for the moment, but the police would catch him eventually. Maybe one of the young men from the party would tell the truth—or even poor Winnie, were she to regain consciousness and have any memory of the night! Of course Claudine assumed that the police would visit Winnieand ask her all the appropriate questions. However, if Winnie was the kind of woman everyone was assuming her to be, then the police were, on many levels, her natural enemy. Claudine, with her work in the clinic, would be a friend. If she wanted to know the truth, then the obvious thing was for her to speak with Winnie herself. Quite apart from that, ordinary humanity dictated that she go and see the girl, who, if conscious, was probably alone and feeling both frightened and in considerable pain. If she had friends they might well not know where she was. Or if they did, but were of her same circumstances, they might fear any kind of authority, enough to keep them from visiting her.
    She put money in her purse, in case any purchases were needed—food or clothes, perhaps some small luxury that would ease her distress—then set out for the hospital.

    As she arrived at the large gray building with its long corridors and its permanent smell of carbolic and sounds of echoing footsteps, she wondered who might have beenhere before her to question Winnie. Would Winnie even remember what had happened? Sometimes a hard blow to the head and a spell of unconsciousness destroyed the memory. Or, if Tregarron was telling the truth, what if Creighton Foxley or one of the other young men had already been here? Would they have persuaded her that it was not any of them who had hurt her? Might they have helped jog her memory with their own accounts and perhaps words of warning as to how difficult life could be for her if she chose to make an unwise testimony to the police?
    Or, of course, there was the more humane but equally effective path of a monetary inducement to recall a few events just a trifle differently. Even something like ten guineas would be a windfall to a girl on the street fighting for every penny. Why would she forfeit such a chance?
    And then there was the other possibility, the coldest and most realistic of all: that it really had been Dai Tregarron, blind drunk and fragile tempered, who had struck her, possibly not even knowing what he was doing at the time. To say that might not