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he had thought so-opinionated
and unwise in her expression of it, hasty to judge and quick-tempered, but even
he, who had found her so irritating, had never doubted her courage or her iron
will.
    Of course he had
seen the passion, the laughter, and the vulnerability in her since then. Was he
imagining in Mary Havilland something she had never possessed? Whatever the
cost to Mrs. Argyll, he wanted to know.
    "I
understand that your father met his death recently," he said gravely.
"And that Miss Havilland found it very difficult to come to terms
with."
    She looked at
him wearily. "She never did," she answered. "She couldn't accept
that he took his own life. She wouldn't accept it, in spite of all the
evidence. I'm afraid she became . . . obsessed." She blinked. "Mary
was very ... strong-willed, to put it at its kindest. She was close to Papa,
and she couldn't believe that something could be so wrong and he would not
confide in her. I'm afraid perhaps they were not as ... as close as she
imagined."
    "Could she
have been distressed over the breaking of her betrothal to Mr. Argyll?"
Monk asked, trying to grasp on to some reason why a healthy young woman should
do something so desperate as plunge over the bridge. And had she meant to take
Argyll with her, or was he trying, even at the risk of his own life, to save
her? Did he still love her so much? Or was it out of guilt because he had
abandoned her, possibly for someone else? They really did need the surgeon to
ascertain if she had been with child. That might explain a great deal. It was a
hideous thought, but if he would not marry her, perhaps she had felt suicide
the only answer, and had determined to take him with her. He was, in a sense, the
cause of her sin. But that would be true only if she were with child and
certain of it.
    "No,"
Mrs. Argyll said flatly. "She was the one who broke it. If anything, it
was Toby who was distressed. She . . . she became very strange, Mr. Monk. She
seemed to take against us all. She became fixed upon the idea of a dreadful
disaster that was going to happen in the new sewer tunnels that my husband's
company is constructing." She looked very tired, as if revisiting an old and
much-battled pain. "My father had a morbid fear of enclosed spaces, and he
was rather reactionary. He was afraid of the new machines that made the work
far faster. I imagine you are aware of the urgency of building a new system for
the city?"
    "Yes, Mrs.
Argyll, I think we all are," he answered. He did not like the picture that
was emerging, and yet he could not deny it. It was only his own emotion that
drove him to fight it, a completely irrational link in his mind between Mary
Havilland and Hester. It was not even anything so definite as a thought, just
words used to describe her by a landlady who barely knew her, and the
protective grief over the suicide of a father.
    "My father
allowed it to become an obsession with him," she went on. "He spent
his time gathering information, campaigning to have the company alter its
methods. My husband did everything to help him see reason and appreciate that
deaths in construction are unavoidable from time to time. Men can be careless.
Landslips happen; the London clay is dangerous by its nature. The Argyll
Company has fewer incidents than most others. That is a fact he could have
checked with ease, and he did. He could point to no mishaps at all on this job,
in fact, but it did not calm his fears."
    "Reason
does not calm irrational fears," Argyll said quietly, his voice hoarse
with his own emotion, unable to reach towards hers. Perhaps he feared that if
he did, they might both lose what control they had. "Don't harrow yourself
up anymore," he went on. "There was nothing you could have done then,
or now. His terrors finally overtook him. Who knows what another man sees in
the dark hours of the night?"
    "He took
his life at night?" Monk asked.
    It was Argyll
who answered, his