Lady Lucy’s face was still tense with concern.
‘I know about these problems,’ she said quietly. ‘About whole families living on the dole. About the Hunger Marches. About youths, walking along railway tracks for hundreds of miles to find some kind of work. And, if you ask my opinion, it is a disgrace to the country.’
Hester couldn’t help but sigh. She didn’t think about these problems in such grand terms; but, come to think of it, there was scarcely a better word.
‘But everything will change soon,’ Lady Lucy continued. ‘Believe me.’
‘It will?’ Hester’s voice must have sounded more sceptical than would be polite.
‘It will. And those responsible for it will answer.’
There was a new, steely conviction in her tone. And, looking at her lady’s smile, Hester felt something like a stir of pity for those responsible.
‘Well, we all hope for the best,’ was all she managed to say.
The sight of Lady Lucy’s frozen, naked hands was still unbearable. Hester reached out and touched her palm; the cold almost burned her.
‘My lady, your hands are icy. If you aren’t writing anything now, I think it’s better to put your gloves on …’
‘Yes, of course.’ Lady Lucy nodded, but didn’t move.
Her hand could have been made of marble.
‘You have such warm fingers,’ Lucy murmured, her voice clear in the snowy silence that surrounded them.
Hester barely dared to stir. It was akin to holding a fragile bird in her hand.
Indeed, she barely dared to breathe, as if too great a sound, too brash a movement, could upset some precarious balance and get the universe falling down on their heads.
But she couldn’t resist moving her fingertips just a little, tracing the outline of the scar, as if a careful enough touch could somehow smooth it over.
Several moments passed, laden with the unbearable sense of precarious wonder.
‘Forgive my curiosity …’ she whispered, ‘but …’
‘Where did I get this scar?’ Lady Lucy’s voice was lower and softer than ever. ‘You are forgiven. I can tell you, if you want. But you must promise me one thing first.’
‘Anything,’ Hester said before she could even think about the regular, sensible ‘Yes.’
‘Promise me that you will not call me wicked.’
Hester stared at her. ‘I’d never!’
‘Or wild.’
‘Of course!’
‘Or stubborn.’
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Yes, you would.’ Lady Lucy pressed her finger against Hester’s lips in a gesture of mock sincerity. ‘Consider these words to be under embargo.’
Hester resisted the temptation to lick her lips now, to taste the faint imprint of this exquisite, marble cold.
‘Yes,’ she managed to say.
‘Very well. It was a burn.’
That was clearly a mere preamble. Hester tried not to let her gaze linger on her lady’s fingertips or think of the wintry tenderness of their touch, before prompting: ‘What kind of burn?’
‘A silly one, really. I touched a fireplace grate. Accidentally, of course. I only wanted to retrieve the letters.’
Hester’s head was starting to swim. ‘The letters?’
‘Yes. My cousin’s letters.’
‘Did they end up in the fireplace by accident?’
‘Oh, no,’ Lady Lucy assured her. ‘It was very much deliberate. My mother threw them there. Those letters she could find, that is. But she managed to uncover most of them. The search was quite thorough.’
The meaning of these words didn’t sink in instantly; and when it did, Hester froze.
‘I was careless, of course,’ Lady Lucy continued, her voice now tinted with old scorn. ‘I shouldn’t have left that letter in the library. You see, Blake, I was under a naive impression that my dear mother would never stoop low enough to read other people’s correspondence. After all, wasn’t she raising me to be a paragon of good manners? But, as I’ve found out, she didn’t apply these same rules to herself – at least, when it came to those who couldn’t answer.’
Hester didn’t dare to say anything more, but Lucy needed no encouragement.
‘I’ve never told you about my cousin. What should I say? His name was Albert. He was older, than me – two years older, I think. He studied at Harrow back then, and we can safely say he was very unhappy about it. He hated the cold, hated the discipline, hated the sport. He wasn’t any good at it, either. Weak and pale, just like me; a lover of poetry, just like me.
‘Can you imagine – he tried to teach me Latin by correspondence! I wasn’t tutored in Latin myself, of course. Or in rhetoric. Or in anything much else. He tried to help me with all possible sincerity; he transcribed for me every interesting thing he heard at school.
‘Sometimes he stayed with us over the holidays, and then we used to sit together in the library for hours on end. It was always the same way: he was talking, I was listening, asking questions and writing down everything I could. I was so afraid; you wouldn’t believe it now! I was afraid to forget anything, to lose anything.’
Lady Lucy stopped for a second. Her cheeks were glowing, her breath ragged, her eyes half-closed. Hester caught herself staring, transfixed by this strangely indecent sight.
‘It-it was chaotic, I know it now,’ the young woman continued, evidently trying to speak slower. ‘Everything in one great pile – languages and rhetoric, history and natural sciences. I didn’t think about some system, or about what am I going to do with it. I-I just devoured it all, I think, like some child let into a cupboard with sweets. I was so hungry for sentences, for stories, for information. I never knew before just how hungry I’d been.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps, I am hungry still.’
‘There are worse sorts of hunger in the world.’ Hester smiled slightly with only one corner of her lips.
‘Such as?’
‘Oh.’ She didn’t expect an earnest question. ‘Hunger for wealth, for instance. For fame. For power.’
Hunger for fame. The outlines of one face flared up in her mind, then faded away in the mist.
This isn’t the time.
‘But knowledge is power in its own right, don’t you think so?’ Lucy asked. ‘And power shouldn’t be wielded without good knowledge. Our politicians are the best example of that, I think.’
‘So what happened to your cousin, my lady?’ Hester swerved hurriedly, afraid to let the conversation stray again into that strange, dangerous territory Lady Lucy was oddly attracted to.
‘Ah. My cousin. You’d think, no doubt, that it must have been an awful chore for him – tutoring his little cousin in the dark library instead of spending his holidays in sunshine and games. But, believe me, he enjoyed it. I know it for sure. We’d been exchanging books for years, you know. Well, mostly it was he who sent me anything interesting he got his hands on. Once he even stole a book from the school’s library because he thought I might like it, and I only learnt about it from the news about his detention.
‘He used to say that I was the only one who didn’t laugh at his poems. And how could I laugh? How could anyone laugh? They were wonderful. I used to send him some