Defend and Betray (20 page)

“It doesn't make sense,” he said guardedly. He looked across at Hester, wondering what she thought, and was pleased to see the same doubt reflected in her face. Better than that, the attention in her eyes betrayed that she was still acutely involved in the matter. In no way had she resigned interest merely because the answer eluded them but left the guilt undeniable.

“And you have no idea what the real motive was?” he said to Monk, searching his face to see if he concealed yet another surprise, some final piece held back for a last self-satisfying dramatic effect. But there was nothing. Monk's face was perfectly candid.

“I've tried to think,” he said frankly. “But there is nothing to suggest he used her badly in any way, nor has anyone else suggested anything.” He also glanced at Hester.

Rathbone looked at her. “Hester? If you were in her place, can you think of anything which would make you kill such a man?”

“Several things,” she admitted with a twisted smile, then bit her lip as she realized what they might think of her for such feelings.

Rathbone grinned in sudden amusement. “For example?” he asked.

“The first thing that comes to mind is if I loved someone else.”

“And the second?”

“If he loved someone else.” Her eyebrows rose. “Frankly I should be delighted to let him go. He sounds so—so restricting. But if I could not bear the social shame of it, what my friends would say, ox my enemies, the laughter behind my back, and above all the pity~and the other woman's victory ...”

“But he was not having an affair with Louisa,” Monk pointed out. “Oh—you mean another woman entirely? Someone we have not even thought of? But why that night?”

Hester shrugged. “Why not? Perhaps he taunted her. Perhaps that was the night he told her about it. We shall probably never know what they said to one another.”

“What else?”

The butler returned discreetly and enquired if there was anything more required. After asking his guests, Rathbone thanked him and bade him good-night.

Hester sighed. “Money?” she answered as the door closed. “Perhaps she overspent, or gambled, and he refused to pay her debts. Maybe she was frightened her creditors would shame her publicly. The only thing...” She frowned, looking first at one, then the other of them. Somewhere outside a dog barked. Beyond the windows it was almost dark. “The thing is, why did she say she had done it out of jealousy of Louisa? Jealousy is an ugly thing, and in no way an excuse—is it?” She turned to Rathbone again. “Will the law take any account of that? “

“None at all,” he answered grimly. “They will hang her, if they find her guilty, and on this evidence they will have no choice.”

“Then what can we do?” Hester's face was full of anxiety. Her eyes held Rathbone's and there was a sharp pity in them. He wondered at it. She alone of them had never met Alexandra Carlyon. His own dragging void of pity he could understand; he had seen the woman. She was a real living being like himself. He had been touched by her hopelessness and her fear. Her death would be the extinguishing of someone he knew. For Monk it must be the same, and for all his sometime ruthlessness, Rathbone had no doubt Monk was just as capable of compassion as he was himself.

But for Hester she was still a creature of the imagination, a name and a set of circumstances, no more.

“What are we going to do?” Hester repeated urgently.

“I don't know,” he replied. “If she doesn't tell us the truth, I don't know what there is that I can do.”

“Then ask her,” Hester retorted. “Go to her and tell her what you know, and ask her what the truth is. It may be better. It may offer some ...” Her voice tailed off. “Some mitigation,” she finished lamely.

“None of your suggestions were any mitigation at all,” Monk pointed out. “She would hang just as surely as if it had been what she claims.”

“What do you want to do, give up?” Hester snapped.

“What I want is immaterial,” Monk replied. “I cannot afford the luxury of meddling in other people's affairs for entertainment.”

“I'll go and see her again,” Rathbone declared. “At least I will ask her.”

* * * * *

Alexandra looked up as he came into the cell. For an instant her face lit with hope, men knowledge prevailed and fear took its place.

“Mr. Rathbone?” She swallowed with difficulty, as though there were some constriction in her throat. “What is it?”

The door clanged shut behind him and they both heard the lock fall and then the silence. He longed to be able to comfort her, at least to be gentle, but there was no time, no place for evasion.

“I should not have doubted you, Mrs. Carlyon,” he answered, looking straight at her remarkable blue eyes. “I thought perhaps you had confessed in order to shield your daughter. But Monk has proved beyond any question at all that it was, as you say, you who killed your husband. However, it was not because he was having an affair with Louisa Furnival. He was not—and you knew he was not.”

She stared at him, white-faced. He felt as if he had struck her, but she did not flinch. She was an extraordinary woman, and the feeling renewed in him that he must know the truth behind the surface facts. Why in heaven's name had she resorted to such hopeless and foredoomed violence? Could she ever have imagined she would get away with it?

“Why did you kill him, Mrs. Carlyon?” he said urgently, leaning towards her. It was raining outside and the cell was dim, the air clammy.

She did not look away, but closed her eyes to avoid seeing him.

“I have told you! I was jealous of Louisa!”

“That is not true!”

“Yes it is.” Still her eyes were closed.

“They will hang you,” he said deliberately. He saw her wince, but she still kept her face towards his, eyes tight shut. “Unless we can find some circumstance that will at least in part explain what you did, they will hang you, Mrs. Carlyon! For heaven's sake, tell me why you did it.” His voice was low, grating and insistent. How could he get through the shield of denial? What could he say to reach her mind with reality? He wanted to touch her, take her by those slender arms and shake sense into her. But it would be such a breach of all possible etiquette, it would shatter the mood and become more important, for the moment, than the issue that would save or lose her life.

“Why did you kill him?” he repeated desperately.

“Whatever you say, you cannot make it worse than it is already.”

“I killed him because he was having an affair with Louisa,” she repeated flatly. “At least I thought he was.”

And he could get nothing further from her. She refused to add anything, or take anything from what she had said.

Reluctantly, temporarily defeated, he took his leave. She remained sitting on the cot, immobile, ashen-faced.

Outside in the street the rain was a steady downpour, the gutter filling, people hurrying by with collars up. He passed a newsboy shouting the latest headlines. It was something to do with a financial scandal and the boy caressed the words with relish, seeing the faces of passersby as they turned. “Scandal, scandal in the City! Financier absconds with fortune. Secret love nest! Scandal in the City!”

Rathbone quickened his pace to get away from it. They had temporarily forgotten Alexandra and the murder of General Carlyon, but as soon as the trial began it would be all over every front page and every newsboy would be crying out each day's revelations and turning them over with delight, poring over the details, imagining, condemning.

And they would condemn. He had no delusion that there would be any pity for her. Society would protect itself from threat and disruption. They would close ranks, and even the few who might feel some twinge of pity for her would not dare to admit it. Any woman who was in the same situation, or imagined herself so, would have even less compassion. If she herself had to endure it, why should Alexandra be able to escape? And no man whose eyes or thoughts had ever wandered, or who considered they might in the future, would countenance the notion that a wife could take such terrible revenge for a brief and relatively harmless indulgence of his very natural appetites. Carlyon's offense of flirtation, not even proved to be adultery, would be utterly lost in her immeasurably deeper offense of murder.

Was there anything at all Rathbone could do to help her? She had robbed him of every possible weapon he might have used. The only thing still left to him was time. But time to do what?

He passed an acquaintance, but was too absorbed' in thought to recognize him until he was twenty yards farther along the pavement. By then it was too late to retrieve his steps and apologize for having ignored his greeting.

The rain was easing into merely a spring squall. Bright shafts of sunlight shone fitfully on the wet pavement.

If he went into court with all he had at present he would lose. There would be no doubt of it. He could imagine it vividly, the feeling of helplessness as the prosecution demolished his case effortlessly, the derision of the spectators, the quiet and detached concern of the judge that there should be some semblance of a defense, the crowds in the gallery, eager for details and ultimately for the drama of conviction, the black cap and the sentence of death. Worse than those, he could picture the jury, earnest men, overawed by the situation, disturbed by the story and the inevitability of its end, and Alexandra herself, with the same white hopelessness he had seen in her face in the cell.

And afterwards his colleagues would ask him why on earth he had given such a poor account of himself. What ailed him to have taken so foregone a case? Had he lost his skills? His reputation would suffer. Even his junior would laugh and ask questions behind his back.

He hailed a cab and rode the rest of the way to Vere Street in a dark mood, almost resolved to decline the case and tell Alexandra Carlyon that if she would not tell him the truth then he was sorry but he could not help her.

At his offices he alighted, paid the driver and went in to be greeted by his clerk, who informed him that Miss Latterly was awaiting him.

Good. That would give him the opportunity to tell her now that he had seen Alexandra, and failed to elicit from her a single thing more than the idiotic insistence of the story they all knew to be untrue. Perhaps Peverell Erskine could persuade her to speak, but if even he could not, then the case was at an end as far as he was concerned.

Hester stood up as soon as he was inside, her face curious, full of questions.

He felt a flicker of doubt. His certainty wavered. Before he saw her he had been resolved to decline the case. Now her eagerness confounded him.

“Did you see her?” She made no apology for having come. The matter was too important to her, and she judged to him also, for her to pretend indifference or make excuses.

“Yes, I have just come from the prison . . .”he began.

“Oh.” She read from his expression, the weariness in him, that he had failed. “She would not tell you.” For a moment she was taken aback; disappointment filled her. Then she took a deep breath and lifted her head a little. A momentary compassion for him was replaced by anxiety again. “Then the reason must be very deep—something she would rather die than reveal.” She shuddered and her face pulled into an expression of pain. “It had to be something very terrible—and I cannot help believing it must concern some other person.”

“Then please sit down,” he asked, moving to the large chair behind the desk himself.

She obeyed, taking the upright chair opposite him. When she was unconscious of herself she was curiously graceful. He brought his mind back to the case.

“Or be so ugly that it would only make her situation worse,” he went on reasonably, then wished he had not. “I ta sorry,” he said quickly.”But Hester—we must be honest.”

She did not even seem to notice his use of her Christian name. Indeed it seemed very natural to her.

“As it is there is nothing I can do for her. I have to tell Erskine that. I would be defrauding him if I allowed him to think I could say anything more than the merest novice barrister could.”

If she suspected fear for his reputation, the dread of losing, it did not show in her face, and he felt a twinge of shame that the thoughts had been there in his own mind.

“We have to find it!” she said uncertainly, convincing herself as well as him. “There is still time, isn't there?”

“Till the trial? Yes, some weeks. But what good will it do, and where do we begin?”

“I don'tknow, but Monk will.” Her eyes never wavered from his face. She saw the shadow in his expression at mention of Monk's name, and wished she had been less clumsy. “We cannot give up now,” she went on. There was no time for self-indulgence. “Whatever it is, surely we must find out if she is protecting someone else. Oh I know she did it—the proof is beyond argument. But why? Why was she prepared to kill him, and then to confess to it, and if necessary race the gallows? It has to be something—something beyond bearing. Something so terrible that prison, trial and the rope are better!”

“Not necessarily, my dear,” he said gently. “Sometimes people commit even the most terrible crimes for the most trivial of reasons. Men have killed for a few shillings, or in a rage over a petty insult...”

“Not Alexandra Carlyon,” she insisted, leaning across the desk towards him. “You have met her! Did she? Do you believe she sacrificed all she had—her husband, her family, her home, her position, even her life—over something trivial?” She shook her head impatiently. “And what woman cares about an insult? Men fight duels of honor—women don't! We are perfectly used to being insulted; the best defense is to pretend you haven't noticed—then you need not reply. Anyway, with a mother-in-law like Felicia Carlyon, I imagine Alexandra had sufficient practice at being insulted to be mistress of anything. She is not a fool, is she?”

“No.”

“Or a drunkard?”

“No.”

“Then we must find out why she did it! If you are thinking of the worst, what has she to lose? What better way to spend her money than to try to save her life?”

“I doubt I can ...” he began. Then not only Hester's face but memory of Alexandra herself, the remarkable eyes, the strong, intelligent features and sensuous mouth, the possibility of humor came back to him. He wanted to know; it would hurt him as long as he did not.