Cry for Passion (33 page)

Intrigue illuminated the faces of the three men who sat on the Queen’s Bench.

James briefly paused before continuing: “Mrs. Clarring—due to reasons outside the purview of this court—no longer abides in the house of Mr. Jonathon Clarring, her husband.

“Yesterday, on the sixth of June . . . when returning from a shopping excursion with her mother . . . Mrs. Clarring was forcibly abducted. The man who abducted her, my lords, was her husband.”

The curiosity lighting the three men’s faces switched off.

They weren’t interested in the physical and emotional trauma of a man’s wife: They were interested in the law.

“Mrs. Clarring,” James said, deliberately impressing upon the three judges Rose Clarring’s vulnerability, “is a petite woman. She stands five feet tall. When her mother dropped off Mrs. Clarring in front of her home—Mrs. Clarring’s home, my lords, not that of her husband—it was raining. She carried an umbrella in one hand, and a vase—a gift from her mother, purchased at Whiteley’s that very day—in the other.

“Mrs. Clarring did not notice that a cab was parked at the curb. She did not see that a man stepped out from the cab and followed her.”

James addressed the middle judge—a sixty-three-year-old husband, father and grandfather—appealing to the gray-bearded man instead of the bewigged adjudicator. “That man, my lord, was her husband.

“He called out to her when she reached the foot of her stoop.

“We do not know what went through her thoughts when she heard his voice, because she is not here to tell us. We do know, however, that she turned around to confront him.

“But he was not alone, my lords.”

Jack’s gaze penned the judge to the far right, a fifty-three-year-old bewhiskered husband and father who had a recently married daughter. “While Jonathon Clarring disembarked from his cab, a cab across the street discharged two men.

“Jonathon Clarring deliberately acted as a decoy to prevent Mrs. Clarring from entering the safety of her home. While he distracted and engaged his wife, the two men—one on either side—grabbed her upper arms.”

Sweat crawled underneath James’s wig; it forged an itching, burning path.

He imagined how he would feel were Rose Clarring Frances Hart, imprisoned against her will with no legal hope for liberation.

Impulsively he lifted up his left forearm; slick black silk parted around his elbow and pooled on top of the counselor’s table. Simultaneously, cool air plunged inside his black wool court coat.

“If I may direct your attention, my lords.”

The three judges instinctively glanced downward, curious men as well as appointed adjudicators.

“Mrs. Clarring’s upper arms are no bigger around than my wrist. My fingers, great sirs, would completely wrap around her arms”—James circled his wrist above the thick black turnback cuff that identified him as a Queen’s Counselor—“just as they now do my wrist.

“When extreme pressure is applied to the upper arms, it paralyzes the lower arms.”

Lowering his hands, James snagged the gaze of the judge on the left. He was the youngest, a forty-five-year-old husband and father with five daughters: one a debutante, two in school, two in the nursery, all of whom would one day marry and be subject to the dictates of their husbands.

“These two men,” James stressed, “gripped Mrs. Clarring so tightly that she lost the use of her arms. She dropped her umbrella and the vase with which her mother had gifted her.

“She had no means of protection: not from the pounding rain. Not from the brutes who accosted her. While her husband watched, these two men bodily lifted her by the arms and carried her across the street, where they forced her into the waiting cab.

“Jonathon Clarring stole Rose Clarring’s liberty.” James laid flat his hands on cool oak. “I urge this court to approve a writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum.”

The faint drum of rain filled the silence.

The fifty-three-year-old bewhiskered judge was the first to speak. “Do you understand what you are asking of this court, Mr. Whitcox?”

“I am asking you to issue Mr. Jonathon Clarring a summons to bring Mrs. Rose Clarring to this courtroom,” James said evenly.

“You are asking this court to come between a man and his wife,” the bewhiskered judge sharply returned.

“The Magna Carta does not exclude protection from unlawful detention because a woman is a man’s wife,” James calmly rebounded. “Jonathon Clarring forcefully and with forethought captured and abducted Rose Clarring. Had his actions been legal, a policeman would have escorted her to her husband’s home, and Mr. Clarring would not have needed to hire men to forcibly take her into his custody.

“But he did not have a court order that would allow him to take her into his custody. Mr. Clarring did not take legal action. Instead he waited outside her home until she was alone and had no one to help her. She was three steps away from her front door. He deliberately detained her so that the two thugs he had hired could and did with brute force seize her. His actions are not sanctioned by English law.”

“Do we have witnesses to corroborate this so-called abduction, Mr. Whitcox”—the middle judge spoke, a man who hoarded his powers, both judicial and marital—“or is your theatrics based purely upon speculation?”

“The abduction was witnessed by Mrs. Clarring’s housekeeper.” James curtailed a spurt of anger: They did not want emotion, these men who held Rose Clarring’s fate in their hands, but emotion was her only defense. “I have her affidavit, my lord.”

“May we see it?” the middle judge asked sardonically.

“Certainly,” James said. “I also have here an affidavit from the mother.”

A court usher passed on the proffered documents.

The middle judge cursorily read the top letter. “The housekeeper—Mrs. Dobkins—claims Mrs. Clarring didn’t struggle.”

“It’s difficult to struggle, my lord,” James said dryly, “when one’s arms are immobilized by men who are twice as large as oneself.”

“The housekeeper made no reference to calls for assistance.” The middle judge passed the two affidavits to his right; he did not read the letter from the mother. “Did Mrs. Clarring not call for Mrs. Dobkins to come to her aid?”

“The housekeeper witnessed the abduction from an upstairs window,” James replied. “It was raining: She heard no sounds.”

“You said he called out to her, Mr. Whitcox, ‘to distract and engage her,” the youngest judge quoted. “Are you now saying the housekeeper did not hear him call out?”

“Why else, my lord, would Mrs. Clarring have turned round, if her husband had not called out to her?” James reasoned.

“Perhaps she was expecting him,” the middle judge said.

“So we don’t really know that Mrs. Clarring was taken against her will,” the bewhiskered judge to the right remarked, looking for a way to resolve his moral responsibility as a husband and father with his role as male adjudicator.

“The affidavit from the mother clearly states that Mrs. Clarring—during the shopping expedition—said she would not go back to her husband,” James said.

“Mrs. Clarring is a woman, Mr. Whitcox,” the middle judge pointedly remarked. “Women are known to change their minds.”

“If Mrs. Clarring is with her husband by choice, we will agree that is where she should be,” James said. “We ask the court to grant a writ of habeas corpus in order to determine whether or not she has been unlawfully detained.”

“You said Mrs. Clarring does not live in her husband’s abode.” The youngest judge studied the letters. “Is she legally separated from him?”

“No, my lord.”

“Then she belongs in her husband’s custody,” the middle judge adjured.

“The law grants Mr. Clarring the right to sue his wife for restitution of his conjugal rights,” James responded. “The law does not give him the right to forcefully seize and detain her.”

“Are there warrants on Mr. Clarring?” the fifty-three-year-old judge to the right asked, still searching for a way to resolve moral responsibility and judicial authority. “Has he in the past been charged with cruelty?”

“Mr. Clarring has no warrants, my lord, but that does not mean Mrs. Clarring’s life is not in grave peril.” James remembered Frances’s words only seven hours earlier, his sex nestled between the lips of her sex, her forehead branding his lips. “Only a desperate man would take the drastic steps that Mr. Clarring has taken.”

“At what time did this so-called abduction occur, Mr. Whitcox?” the youngest judge asked, imagining where his wife and daughters had been the previous day while another woman was snatched away only three steps from her door.

“Mr. Clarring seized Mrs. Clarring at four in the evening,” James replied.

Rose Clarring had been taken while Jack Lodoun sat in the House of Commons.

Memory sliced through James.

His wife had been killed while he read a brief in the House of Commons, unaware she and the absentia Jack Lodoun were lovers.

“What proof do we have that she is in the custody of her husband?” the bewhiskered judge asked.

“She was seen through an upstairs window.”

“Did no one knock on the door to verify whether she is being ‘forcefully’ detained?” the middle judge asked sarcastically.

James stoically met the senior High Court judge’s gaze. “No one has been allowed admittance, my lord.”

He had attempted to gain entrance prior to appearing in court: No one had answered the door, although he could tell there was activity inside.

“Did you see her?” the bewhiskered judge asked.

“No,” James said truthfully.

“Who has seen her?” the middle judge barked.

“Her mother,” James lied, unable to mention the man who was Rose Clarring’s lover.

“What do you want us to do, Mr. Whitcox?” asked the youngest judge who had five daughters.

James had done all he could do.

“I ask only that you give Mrs. Clarring due process,” he said. “And that you expeditiously grant her liberty—as directed by the Magna Carta—to determine where she wishes to dwell.”

Chapter 38

“Jane!” The familiar voice marched up the stairs and knifed through her chest. “You have a visitor!”

Her heartbeat ridiculously quickened, anticipation mocking the pain that cleaved her.

Quickly stuffing folded chemises into a dresser drawer, she cursorily glanced in the mirror—no hair escaped the severe bun in which it was drawn up—before hurrying down worn stairs.

The visitor wasn’t the man Jane Fredericks had hoped to see.

Two women—one dying of syphilis with graying brown hair, the other vibrant with good health and dyed red hair—sat on a faded, yellow brocade sofa.

“Mrs. Hart,” Jane said, voice brittle.

“Hello, Miss Fredericks.” The forty-nine-year-old woman with the absurdly youthful hair and fashionable green frock glanced up from the suede gloves she was peeling off. “I’m afraid I’ve made a mess of Mrs. Fredericks’s floors.”

“Nonsense.” It hurt Jane to see her forty-six-year-old mother smile as if she were not day by day slipping away. “Jane, dear, sit down and entertain your guest while I make a pot of tea.”

Jane wanted to grab her and say the hired woman would do it, but the hired woman did not work on Tuesdays.

Her mother’s absence weighted the air.

Jane perched on a floral-patterned armchair opposite the faded yellow sofa.

Rain hammered the mullioned windows and crawled down the glass in squirming rivulets.

Jane imagined what it must be like, lying underneath mud with only worms for company.

“You didn’t tell Mrs. Fredericks about the trial,” dropped into the stilted silence.

“She doesn’t read the papers,” Jane said, reluctantly gazing at Frances Hart. “I saw no reason to distress her.”

“Your mother is a lovely woman.”

“My mother is dying,” Jane said flatly.

“Your mother is very much alive now.” The compassion in Frances Hart’s voice flayed Jane’s skin. “Don’t bury her before she’s dead, Miss Fredericks.”

“I should be gay, then.” Jane blinked back tears, spine straight, anger churning her stomach. “And be happy that she’ll soon be dead, like you’re happy now that your husband is dead.”

Jane had intended to wound the older woman who dressed like a trollop. So why did her words hurt Jane?

The pale eyes darkened. “You’re very young, Miss Fredericks.”

The barrister—Jack Lodoun—had similarly remarked on her age. She was the youngest member of the Men and Women’s Club, he had noted. And Frances Hart the eldest.

“I’m twenty-seven,” Jane said.

“I will tell you what a very wise woman once told me,” Frances Hart unexpectedly offered.

But Jane didn’t want to hear words of wisdom from this woman who was alive and healthy, living in sin with a man to whom she was not married, while her mother was dying because of the bonds of matrimony. So she kept her mouth closed.

“She said,” Frances Hart said, “‘Death is no reason to stop living.’ ”

Death.

Living.

“How can a woman live with a man who is murdering her?” burst out of Jane’s throat.

She stiffened her spine—too late to take back the words—daring the older woman to jeer at her lack of control.

No condemnation shone inside the pale green eyes, neither at the knowledge Jane’s father had infected her mother with a dreadful disease, nor at Jane’s outburst.

“If your father had contracted influenza, and passed it on to your mother,” Frances Hart reasoned, “would you still blame him?”

“Of course not,” Jane said scornfully.

“Did your father deliberately give your mother syphilis?”

“It doesn’t matter if he did it deliberately.” Bitterness welled up inside Jane. “He would not have contracted it had he been faithful to my mother.”

Frances Hart glanced down at her damp gloves. A crystalline raindrop glittered on the green ribbon banding her straw hat: It shone like a diamond, pure and free of human corruption. “I came for your assistance, Miss Fredericks.”

Jane had nothing to offer this woman.

“I do not think I shall be able to help you, Mrs. Hart.”

The older woman raised her head, pale green gaze catching Jane’s gaze. “I do not seek aid for myself.”