Excerpt of The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon

Monk stood on the embankment staring at the lights
reflected on the misty waters of the Thames as dusk
settled over the city. He had solved his latest case to
the satisfaction of his client, and twenty guineas were
sitting comfortably in his pocket. Behind him, coaches and
carriages moved through the spring evening and the sound
of laughter punctuated the clip of hooves and jingle of
harness.

It was too far from here to Fitzroy Street for Monk to
walk home, and a hansom was an unnecessary expense. The
omnibus would do very well. There was no hurry because
Hester would not be there. This was one of the nights when
she worked at the house in Coldbath Square which had been
set up with Callandra Daviot's money in order to give
medical help to women of the streets who had been injured
or become ill, mostly in the course of their trade.

He was proud of the work Hester did, but he missed her
company in the evenings. It startled him how deeply, since
his marriage, he had been accustomed to sharing his
thoughts with her, to her laughter, her ideas, or simply
to looking across the room and seeing her there. There was
a warmth in the house that was missing when she was gone.

How unlike his old self that was! In the past he would not
have shared the core inside him with anyone, nor allowed
someone to become important enough to him that her
presence could make or mar his life. He was surprised how
much he preferred the man he had become.

Thinking of medical help, and Callandra's assistance,
turned his mind to the last murder he had dealt with, and
to Kristian Beck, whose life had been torn apart by it.
Beck had discovered things about himself and his wife
which hadoverturned his beliefs, even the foundations of
his own identity. His entire heritage had not been what he
had assumed, nor his culture, his faith, or the core of
who he was.

Monk understood in a unique way Beck's shock and the
numbing confusion that had gripped him. A coaching
accident nearly seven years before had robbed him of his
own memory before that, and forced on him the need to re-
create his identity. He had deduced much about himself
from unarguable evidence, and while some things were
admirable, there were too many that displeased him and lay
shadowed across the yet unknown.

Even in his present happiness the vast spaces of ignorance
troubled him from time to time. Kristian's shattering
discoveries had woken new doubts in Monk, and a painful
awareness that he knew almost nothing of his roots or the
people and the beliefs that had cradled him.

He was Northumbrian, from a small seaboard town where his
sister, Beth, still lived. He had lost touch with her,
which was his own fault, partly out of fear of what she
would tell him of himself, partly because he simply felt
alienated from a past he could no longer recall. He felt
no bond with that life or its cares.

Beth could have told him about his parents and probably
his grandparents too. But he had not asked.

Should he try now, when it mattered more urgently, to
build a bridge back to her so he could learn? Or might he
find, like Kristian, that his heritage was nothing like
his present self and he was cut off from his own people?
He might find, as Kristian had, that their beliefs and
their morality cut against the grain of his own.

For Kristian, the past he believed and that had given him
identity had been wrenched out of his hands, shown to be a
fabrication created out of the will to survive, easy to
understand but not to admire, and bitterly hard to own.

If Monk were at last to know himself as most people do
automatically—the religious ties, the allegiances, the
family loves and hates—might he too discover a stranger
inside his skin, and one he could not like? He turned away
from the river and walked along the footpath toward the
nearest place where he could cross the street through the
traffic and catch the omnibus home.

Perhaps he would write to Beth again, but not yet. He
needed to know more. Kristian's experience weighed on him
and would not let him rest. But he was also afraid,
because the possibilities were too many, and too
disturbing, and what he had created was too dear to risk.