by Anne Perry
The third day was better. Lovat-Smith made his first tactical error. He called Mrs. Barrymore to the stand to testify to Prudence’s spotless moral character. Presumably he had intended her to heighten the emotional pitch of sympathy for Prudence. Mrs. Barrymore was the bereaved mother, it was a natural thing to do, and in his position Rathbone would most certainly have done the same. He admitted as much to himself.
Nevertheless it proved a mistake.
Lovat-Smith approached her with deference and sympathy, but still all the cocky assurance in his stance that Rathbone had seen the previous day. He was winning, and he knew it. It was the sweeter for being against Oliver Rathbone.
“Mrs. Barrymore,” he began with a slight inclination of his head, “I regret having to ask you to do this, painful as it must be for you, but I am sure you are as keen as the rest of us that justice should be done, for all our sakes.”
She looked tired, her fair skin puffy around the eyes, but she was perfectly composed, dressed in total black, which became her fair coloring and delicate features.
“Of course,” she agreed. “I shall do my best to answer you honestly.”
“I am sure you will,” Lovat-Smith said. Then, sensing the judge’s impatience, he began. “Naturally you have known Prudence all her life, probably no one else knew her as well as you did. Was she a romantic, dreaming sort of girl, often falling in love?”
“Not at all,” she said with wide-open eyes. “In fact, the very opposite. Her sister, Faith, would read novels and imagine herself the heroine. She would daydream of handsome young men, as most girls do. But Prudence was quite different. She seemed only concerned with study and learning more all the time. Not really healthy for a young girl.” She looked puzzled, as if the anomaly still confused her.
“But surely she must have had girlhood romances?” Lovat-Smith pressed. “Hero worship, if you will, of young men from time to time?” But the knowledge of her answer was plain in his face, and in the assurance of his tone.
“No,” Mrs. Barrymore insisted. “She never did. Even the new young curate, who was so very charming and attracted all the young ladies in the congregation, seemed to awaken no interest in Prudence at all.” She shook her head a little, setting the black ribbons on her bonnet waving.
The jury members were listening to her intently, uncertain how much they believed her or what they felt, and the mixture of concentration and doubt was plain in their expressions.
Rathbone glanced quickly up at Sir Herbert. Oddly enough, he seemed uninterested, as if Prudence’s early life were of no concern to him. Did he not understand the importance of its emotional value to the jury’s grasp of her character? Did he not realize how much hinged upon what manner of woman she was—a disillusioned dreamer, an idealist, a noble and passionate woman wronged, a blackmailer?
“Was she an unemotional person?” Lovat-Smith asked, investing the question with an artificial surprise.
“Oh no, she felt things intensely,” Mrs. Barrymore assured him. “Most intensely—so much so I feared she would make herself ill.” She blinked several times and mastered herself only with great difficulty. “That seems so foolish now, doesn’t it? It seems as if it has brought about her very death! I’m sorry, I find it most difficult to control my feelings.” She shot a look of utter hatred at Sir Herbert across in the dock, and for the first time he looked distressed. He rose to his feet and leaned forward, but before he could do anything further one of the two jailers in the dock with him gripped his arms and pulled him back.
There was a gasp, a sigh around the court. One of the jurors said something which was inaudible. Judge Hardie opened his mouth, and then changed his mind and remained silent. Rathbone considered objecting and decided not to. It would only alienate the jury still further.
“Knowing her as you did, Mrs. Barrymore …” Lovat-Smith said it very gently, his voice almost a caress, and Rathbone felt the confidence in him as if it were a warm blanket over the skin. “Do you find it difficult to believe that in Sir Herbert Stanhope,” Lovat-Smith went on, “Prudence at last found a man whom she could both love and admire with all her ardent, idealistic nature, and to whom she could give her total devotion?”
“Not at all,” Mrs. Barrymore replied without hesitation. “He was exactly the sort of man to answer all her dreams. She would think him noble enough, dedicated enough and brilliant enough to be everything she could love with all her heart.” At last the tears would not be controlled anymore, and she covered her face with her hands and silently wept.
Lovat-Smith stepped forward and reached high up with his arm to offer her his handkerchief.
She took it blindly, fumbling to grasp it from his hand.
For once Lovat-Smith was lost for words. There seemed nothing to say that was not either trite or grossly inappropriate. He half nodded, a little awkwardly, knowing that she was not looking at him, and returned to his seat, waving his hand to indicate that Rathbone might now take his turn.
Rathbone rose and walked across to the center of the floor, acutely aware that every eye was on him. He could win or lose it all in the next few moments.
There was no sound except Mrs. Barrymore’s gentle weeping.
Rathbone waited. He did not interrupt her. It was too great a risk. It might be viewed as sympathy; on the other hand, it might seem like indecent haste.
He ached to look around at the jury, and at Sir Herbert, but it would have betrayed his uncertainty, and Lovat-Smith would have understood it as a hunting animal scents weakness. Their rivalry was old and close. They knew each other too well for even a whisper of a mistake to go unnoticed.
Finally Mrs. Barrymore blew her nose very delicately, a restrained and genteel action, and yet remarkably effective. When she looked up her eyes were red, but the rest of her face was quite composed.
“I am very sorry,” she said quietly. “I fear I am not as strong as I had imagined.” Her eyes strayed upward for a moment to look at Sir Herbert on the far side of the court, and the loathing in her face was as implacable as that of any man she might have imagined to have the power she said she lacked.
“There is no need to apologize, ma’am,” Rathbone assured her softly, but with that intense clarity of tone which he knew was audible even in the very back row of the public seats. “I am sure everyone here understands your grief and feels for you.” There was nothing he could do to ameliorate her hatred. Better to ignore it and hope the jury had not seen.
“Thank you.” She sniffed very slightly.
“Mrs. Barrymore,” he began with the shadow of a smile, “I have only a few questions for you, and I will try to make them as brief as possible. As Mr. Lovat-Smith has already pointed out, you naturally knew your daughter as only a mother can. You were familiar with her love of medicine and the care of the sick and injured.” He put his hands in his pockets and looked up at her. “Did you find it easy to believe that she actually performed operations herself?”
Anne Barrymore frowned, concentrating on what was obviously difficult for her.
“No, I am afraid I did not. It is something that has always puzzled me.”
“Do you think that it is possible she exaggerated her own role a trifle in order to be—shall we say, closer to her ideal? Of more service to Sir Herbert Stanhope?”
Her face brightened. “Yes—yes, that would explain it. It is not really a natural thing for a woman to do, is it? But love is something we can all understand so easily.”
“Of course it is,” Rathbone agreed, although he found it increasingly hard to accept as the sole motive for anyone’s actions, even a young woman. He questioned his own words as he said them. But this was not the time to be self-indulgent. All that mattered now was Sir Herbert, and showing the jury that he was as much a victim as Prudence Barrymore and that the affliction to him might yet prove as fatal. “And you do not find it difficult to believe that she wove all her hopes and dreams around Sir Herbert?”
She smiled sadly. “I am afraid it seems
she was foolish, poor child. So very foolish.” She shot a look of anger and frustration at Mr. Barrymore, sitting high in the public gallery, white-faced and unhappy. Then she turned back to Rathbone. “She had an excellent offer from a totally suitable young man at home, you know,” she went on earnestly. “We could none of us understand why she did not accept him.” Her brows drew down and she looked like a lost child herself. “A head full of absurd dreams. Quite impossible, and not to be desired anyway. It would never have made her happy.” Suddenly her eyes filled with tears again. “And now it is all too late. Young people can be so wasteful of opportunity.”
There was a deep murmur of sympathy around the room. Rathbone knew he was on the razor’s edge. She had admitted Prudence created a fantasy for herself, that she misread reality; but her grief was also transparently genuine, and no honest person in the courtroom was untouched by it. Most had families of their own, a mother they could in their own minds put in her place, or a child they could imagine losing, as she had. If he were too tentative he would miss his chance and perhaps Sir Herbert would pay with his life. If he were too rough he would alienate the jury, and again Sir Herbert would bear the cost.
He must speak. The rustle of impatience was beginning; he could hear it around him.
“We all offer you not only our sympathy but our understanding, ma’am,” he said clearly. “How many of us in our own youth have not let slip what would have been precious. Most of us do not pay so very dearly for our dreams or our misconceptions.” He walked a few paces and turned, facing her from the other direction. “May I ask you one thing more? Do you find yourself able to believe that Prudence, in the ardor of her nature and her admiration of noble ideals and the healer’s art, may have fallen in love with Sir Herbert Stanhope, and being a natural woman, have desired of him more than he was free to give her?”
He had his back to Sir Herbert, and was glad of it. He preferred not to see his client’s face as he speculated on such emotions. If he had, his own thoughts might have intruded, his own anger and guilt.
“And that, as with so many of us,” he continued, “the wish may have been father to the thought that in truth he returned her feelings, when in fact he felt for her only the respect and the regard due to a dedicated and courageous colleague with a skill far above that of her peers?”
“Yes,” she said very quietly, blinking hard. “You have put it precisely. Foolish girl. If only she would have taken what was offered her and settled down like anyone else, she could have been so happy! I always said so—but she wouldn’t listen. My husband”—she gulped—“encouraged her. I’m sure he meant no harm, but he didn’t understand!” This time she did not look at the gallery.
“Thank you, Mrs. Barrymore,” Rathbone said quickly, wishing to leave the matter before she spoiled the effect. “I have nothing further to ask you.”
Lovat-Smith half rose to his feet, then changed his mind and sat down again. She was confused and grief-stricken, but she was also rooted in her convictions. He would not compound his error.
After his quarrel with Rathbone on the steps of the courthouse two days previous, Monk had gone home in a furious temper. It was not in the least alleviated by the fact that he knew perfectly well that Rathbone was bound by his trust to Sir Herbert, regardless of his opinion of Prudence Barrymore. He was not free to divide his loyalties, and neither evidence nor emotion permitted him to swerve.
Still he hated him for what he had suggested of Prudence, generally because he had seen the faces of the jury nodding, frowning, beginning to see her differently: less of a disciple of the lady with the lamp, tending the sick and desperate in dangerous foreign lands, and more as a fallible young woman whose dreams overcame her good sense.
But more particularly, and at the root of his anger, was the fact that it had woken the first stirrings of doubt in himself. The picture of her he had painted in his mind was now already just so very slightly tarnished, and try as he might, he could not clear it to the power and simplicity it had had before. It did not matter whether she had loved Sir Herbert Stanhope or not, was she deluded enough to have misread him so entirely? And worse than that, had she really performed the medical feats she had claimed? Was she really one of those sad but so understandable creatures who paint on the gray world the colors of their dreams and then escape into parallel worlds of their own making, warping everything to fit?
He could understand that with a sudden sickening clarity. How much of himself did he see only through the twisted view of his own lack of memory? Was his ignorance of his past his own way of escaping what he could not bear? How much did he really want to remember?
To begin with he had searched with a passion. Then as he had learned more, and found so much that was harsh, ungenerous, and self-seeking, he had pursued it less and less. The whole incident of Hermione had been painful and humiliating. And he suspected also that much of Runcorn’s bitterness lay at his door. The man was weak, that was his one flaw, but Monk had traded on it over the years. A better man might not have used it in that way. No wonder Runcorn savored his final triumph.
And even as he thought it, Monk understood enough of himself to know he would not let it rest. Half of him hoped Sir Herbert was not guilty and he could undercut Runcorn yet again.
In the morning he went back to the hospital and questioned the nurses and dressers once more about seeing a strange young man in the corridors the morning of Prudence’s death. There was no doubt it had been Geoffrey Taunton. He had admitted as much himself. But perhaps someone had seen him later than he had said. Maybe someone had overheard an angry exchange, angry enough to end in violence. Perhaps someone had even seen Nanette Cuthbertson, or a woman they had not recognized who could have been her. She certainly had motive enough.
It took him the best part of the day. His temper was short and he could hear the rough edges to his voice, the menace and the sarcasm in his questions, even as he disliked them. But his rage against Rathbone, his impatience to find a thread, something to pursue, overrode his judgment and his better intentions.
By four o’clock all he had learned was that Geoffrey Taunton had been there, precisely as he already knew, and that he had been seen leaving in a red-faced and somewhat flustered state while Prudence was still very much alive. Whether he had then doubled back and found her again, to resume the quarrel, was unresolved. Certainly it was possible, but nothing suggested that it was so. In fact, nothing suggested he was of a nature or personality given to violence at all. Prudence’s treatment of him would try the patience of almost any man.
About Nanette Cuthbertson he learned nothing conclusive at all. If she had worn a plain dress, such as nurses or domestics wear, she could have passed in and out again with no one giving her a second glance.
By late afternoon he had exhausted every avenue, and was disgusted with the case and with his own conduct of it. He had thoroughly frightened or offended at least a dozen people, and furthered his own interests hardly at all.
He left the hospital and went outside into the rapidly cooling streets amid the clatter and hiss of carriages, the sound of vendors’ cries as costers’ carts traveled by, peddlers called their wares, and men and women hurried to reach their destinations before the heavy skies opened up in a summer thunderstorm.
He stopped and bought a newspaper from a boy who was shouting: “Latest on trial o’ Sir ’Erbert! Read all about it! Only a penny! Read the news ’ere!” But when Monk opened the page it was little enough: merely more questions and doubts about Prudence, which infuriated him.
There was one more place he could try. Nanette Cuthbertson had stayed overnight with friends only a few hundred yards away. It was possible they might know something, however trivial.
He was received very coolly by the butler; indeed, had he been able to refuse entirely without appearing to deny justice, Monk gathered he would have done so. The master of the house, one Roger Waldemar, was brief to the point of rudeness. His wife, however, was decidedly more civil, an
d Monk caught a gleam of admiration in her glance.
“My daughter and Miss Cuthbertson have been friends for many years.” She looked at Monk with a smile in her eyes although her face was grave.
They were alone in her sitting room, all rose and gray, opening onto a tiny walled garden, private, ideal for contemplation—or dalliance. Monk quashed his speculations as to what might have taken place there and returned his attention to his task.
“Indeed, you might say they had been from childhood,” Mrs. Waldemar was saying. “But Miss Cuthbertson was with us at the ball all evening. Quite lovely she looked, and so full of spirits. She had a real fire in her eyes, if you know what I mean, Mr. Monk? Some women have a certain”—she shrugged suggestively—“vividness to them that others have not, regardless of circumstance.”
Monk looked at her with an answering smile. “Of course I know, Mrs. Waldemar. It is something a man does not overlook, or forget.” He allowed his glance to rest on her a fraction longer than necessary. He liked the taste of power, and one day he would push his own to find its limits, to know exactly how much he could do. He was certain it was far more than this very mild, implied flirtation.
She lowered her eyes, her fingers picking at the fabric of the sofa on which she sat. “And I believe she went out for a walk very early,” she said clearly. “She was not at breakfast. However, I would not wish you to read anything unfortunate into that. I am sure she simply took a little exercise, perhaps to clear her head. I daresay she wished to think.” She looked up at him through her lashes. “I should have in her position. And one must be alone and uninterrupted for such a thing.”
“In her position?” Monk inquired, regarding her steadily.
She looked grave. She had very fine eyes, but she was not the type of woman that appealed to him. She was too willing, too obviously unsatisfied.
“I—I am not sure if this is discreet; it can hardly be relevant….”
