Mittman, Stephanie

by The Courtship

  She bit her tongue. Had Ash not been there, she'd have asked Cabot if he believed the gardener actually had a neck, or that it could indeed be broken. But she was not about to goad him into a fight in front of his brother. In fact, she didn't want to do much beyond stare when Ashford was around, nor could she seem to.

  "I'll make sure no one gets hurt," Ashford said. His gaze was fixed on Cabot's hands, which fidgeted uncharacteristically in his lap. "Can I get you anything, Cab?"

  "No one is to climb anything," Cabot ordered, his face reddening. "Is that understood? In all likelihood it was a cricket, and not a bird at all."

  Kathryn, having made her way slowly across the dining room, patted the handle of Cabot's wheelchair and kissed her younger son Ash on the cheek. Waiting while Arthur pulled out the chair for her, she motioned for Davis to take the seat beside her.

  Cabot studied the slight boy, who shifted his weight self-consciously under her husband's scrutiny. Finally he pointed with his chin. "This him?"

  Well, no one had ever accused Cabot of being friendly. Charlotte forged ahead, regardless.

  "Davis, may I present my husband, Mr. Cabot Whittier. Cabot, this is Davis Flannigan, my newest client." The introduction was met by silence on both sides.

  Finally Cabot spoke. "Do you think this is the best time to take on a new case, Charlotte? I would think it abundantly clear our priority has to be my brother's situation right now, and our calendar was quite full before he landed himself in hot coffee in the harbor."

  Charlotte looked at the boy. He was tall for his baby face, and reed slim. The swelling on his eye had gone down just enough to reveal a matched set of sapphires nestled in purple-and-brown sockets. His lip was stiff and in the corner caked blood cracked when he grimaced.

  "The best time?" she repeated. Well, I could wait until the boy is dead. "I think it's the right time," she corrected.

  "Do you expect that his father will simply allow him to take up residence here with us?" he asked.

  Charlotte was about to answer when she caught sight of Van Gogh silently inching his way through the dining-room doors. She looked to Ash for help, but the man was still staring at Cabot's lap as if he was waiting for it to do something extraordinary.

  With the rabbit hugging the wall and rounding the bend, she had no choice but to jump to her feet. "I believe I left something upstairs," she said, hurrying toward the doorway, where she tried to gently steer the rabbit in the opposite direction with her feet. "If you'll excuse me for just a moment."

  She was through the doorway in a second, scooping Van Gogh into her arms as quickly. Behind her she could hear Kathryn offering some inane excuse for her behavior. "Imagine coming to the table in her slippers," she said. "I don't know where her head is some of the time."

  Her brother-in-law, nice as he was, was going to get her into a lot of trouble if he didn't keep his door more tightly closed. With one hand holding up her skirts, and the other securely tucking Van Gogh to her side, she hastened up the two flights of stairs to deposit the rabbit in Ash's room.

  Good glory, but he made a mess of his sheets when he slept. Not that it was any of her business, but his linens had more twists and turns than an interesting case. She reminded herself that her brother-in-law's thrashings about in bed were certainly none of her concern and forbade her active imagination from running its natural course. Instead she concentrated on Van Gogh's antics long enough to return the smile to her face. Swinging around to leave, her skirts brushed something off the nightstand by the bed. Cursing the stupid bustle she could never seem to account for, she stooped down and picked up a leather photo case. Probably a photograph of Ash-ford's latest girl. Cabot had guessed blond, so she opted for brunette, and opened the small booklet to see who was right.

  Staring back at her were two boys. The younger one, perhaps four or five years old, was sitting upon the shoulders of the older one, whose legs were spread slightly to juggle the young boy's weight. Both faces were vaguely familiar, and she felt her knees buckle as she lowered herself to the bed with the two smiling boys staring at her.

  Cabot—without the beard, the weight, and the years, was standing on two good legs, carrying his baby brother, Ash. Behind them, nearly out of the picture, a dark-haired woman was combing a young girl's hair while another waited her turn, apparently unaware that the film was catching them before they were ready.

  Kathryn! But the little girls? Were they summer guests, some distant cousins, neighbors? Charlotte looked more closely at the photograph. One girl's hand rested on Kathryn's hip while her eyes were focused on the boys. The other girl held up a ribbon toward Kathryn.

  "I didn't realize anyone was in here," Rosa said in her soft Mexican accent, the door opened only a crack. "Oh, it's you. I'm sorry about the bunny, señora, but nothing is the same with Mr. Whittier's hermano up here."

  Charlotte nodded her head in agreement. Nothing had been the same since they'd brought Ashford back from the courthouse into their home. She stood to put the photograph back on the night table. "How long have you been with the Whittiers?" she asked, her hand still clutching the leather case.

  "I come about a year before you, maybe less." She kept her eyes on the floor, watching for escapees.

  "What about Maria? Or the gardener, Mr. Newcomb? Have any of them been here longer?"

  "Mr. Newcomb was here a long, long time. Maybe twenty years. Since before."

  Before. That would be before Cabot's accident. Like every family, the Whittiers told time by some major occurrence. For Charlotte and her mother, before had meant before Charlotte's father abandoned them. For Charlotte and her grandmother, before meant before her mother had died and Glenda had had to return from Europe. For Rosa it was probably the year her family came north to the United States.

  For Davis it would either be the year his mother died, or the year he was taken from his father. Better that, she reminded herself, than for Mr. Flannigan to mark things by the year he killed his son.

  She looked at the photograph again and recalled the cameo Ash had brought his mother. Four children. And now there were only the two. The frame back where it belonged, she thanked Rosa for her efforts and headed back downstairs, lost in thought.

  From the doorway to her own bright and sunny office, she could hear Cabot and Ash's voices. She followed the sound through to Cabot's darker room.

  "Sorry to make you work on Saturday," Ash said, rising when she entered and sitting only after she did. "I'm sorry to have dumped the whole mess on you, but I didn't know where else to turn when the police showed up. It was all so crazy. Still, I suppose things must be tough enough around here." His voice dropped off and he worked at a hangnail on his thumb.

  "Here," Cabot said, handing her several envelopes. "More letters of wild approval for your efforts." His voice was heavy with sarcasm. She said nothing. The popularity of a position had never determined its correctness for Cabot, yet he expected her to buckle under because she'd gotten a few vitriolic letters.

  "Wild approval?" Cabot's brother asked. "May I see?" He held out his hand, and with a shrug she put the letters into it. He'd know sooner or later, living in the same house, that Charlotte wasn't winning any popularity awards for taking Virginia's Comstock case.

  Ash's face fell. "Baby Killer? The Antichrist? What in hell is this?" He put the papers under Cabot's nose.

  "Why don't you ask her?" Cabot said, putting on his best unruffled act. "It's her case and I can't exactly forbid her from taking it."

  Not that he hadn't tried. And she understood his position, truly she did, but she couldn't let it influence hers.

  "My client is being prosecuted for the dissemination of certain information which is vital to women," she said simply, hoping that would be enough.

  "Not all women," Cabot corrected. "Some of them are your most ardent enemies. This letter is from a God-fearing Christian, as she calls herself, and she doesn't find your information vital. In point of fact, Charlotte, you don't—"

&
nbsp; He stopped and looked at Ash.

  "I never knew information to hurt anyone," the younger man said, sifting through the letters with steam pouring from his ears. "And I never knew you to side with those who did," he said to his brother.

  "What would you know about whose side I've ever been on?" Cabot demanded. "What would you know about anything that's gone on in the last six or seven years? What am I talking about? When have you ever been aware of anything outside yourself?"

  "Cabot! What's gotten into you?" Charlotte asked, coming to her feet. "Don't you dare take your anger at me out on your brother."

  ***

  The room went stony silent. It had been years since anyone had defended him to his brother, years since his brother had shown any anger. Ash remembered his mother, bless her, coming to his defense when Ash had been what, sixteen? seventeen?

  He's jealous, his mother had told him when she'd gotten him alone. Life isn't as easy for Cabot as he makes it look.

  Oh, God, he'd been an idiot. Indiscreet and insensitive. Blind.

  "I don't really want to intrude," he said, standing and wavering. "Maybe you two want to talk...?"

  "You're putting yourself in danger, Charlotte," Cabot said, slamming his fist against the arm of his chair. "First the challenge to the Comstock Laws, and now this boy. You can't just take a child from his father and harbor him in your home."

  "I've already told Dr. Mollenoff that he can stay on the weekends until I can work something out with his father or the judge. He can work for us to earn his keep. I'm sure he'll want to do his share."

  "Well, he can't. Last time I looked, the deed on this house belonged to me, Charlotte, and if you think I'll allow you to risk my home in addition to you risking life and limb, taking in strays—"

  Ash coughed and Charlotte glared at him as if he'd actually thought that what Cabot had said was funny. Cabot glared at him, too, and demanded, "I do still have some say in whom I hire, don't I?"

  Charlotte nodded, crossing her arms over her chest. "Indeed you do. He'll work for me."

  Ash tried to remember anyone else standing up to Cabot the way Charlotte was doing. His brother had ruled Whittier Court since their father had passed on. Before that, Ash could remember very vaguely, as a little boy, the tirades his father would hurl at his older brother.

  The last one was a week or two before the accident. Ash remembered that one because Cabot had brought it up again after the doctors had told him he'd never walk. He'd told his father he still wasn't sorry, and that he was sure to never be.

  Well, you're the only one with a reason to be sorry, he could still hear his father yelling. And you've no one to blame but yourself. Keeping all this from your mother is going to kill me.

  Not six months later their father was dead.

  "Work for you?" Cabot asked, wiggling his finger in his ear as if he hadn't heard right. "And what is it a boy with one good arm is going to do for you?"

  "Teach me to throw a lasso," Charlotte spat back at him. "Hold my left hand. There are a million things he can do while he's mending."

  "It's a shame that talking isn't one of them," Cabot said, sighing deeply and resting his cheek on his hand. "I swear, Charlotte, a person gets a splinter and you're making up a cot for them in the guest room and sending a note to the butcher to double the week's order."

  "Cabot," Ash started, but Charlotte interrupted him.

  "That boy'll talk when he wants to," she said.

  "Not in this house, he won't," Cabot said. "If he's to be here, he'd better know I won't tolerate that stuttering and stammering."

  "What?" Charlotte, obviously baffled, looked from Ash to Cabot, who smacked his forehead and rolled his eyes at Ash as if to say See, what did I tell you about my wife? when in fact Cabot had never told him a blessed thing.

  "You didn't notice, did you?" Cabot asked.

  Her eyebrows lowered over those lovely hazel eyes of hers, clearly revealing she hadn't.

  "Charlotte, the boy can't spit out a single word. Dear one, he simply cannot talk. How you can be so blind to a person's faults, I just don't know."

  "Better to be blind to their faults than to their virtues," Ash said softly, enjoying the bewilderment on Charlotte's face as she tried to see that poor beaten child as anything less than perfect.

  "This from a man with more faults than virtues, of course," Cabot said, examining his fingernails as if the secrets of the universe were hidden there.

  "I want to help him," Charlotte said, ignoring the bitter words he and Cabot were exchanging.

  Cabot's sigh of resignation was more eloquent than anything he could have said. As a final touch he added, "You want to help everyone."

  She reached her hand out across the desk, palm up, as if she wanted Cabot to put his into it. "Is that so bad?"

  Cabot put his hands up as if he didn't think he knew the answer, which was as close to a joke as Cabot came, since everyone knew that he had all the answers. "You can't help everyone," he said matter-of-factly.

  "You're right, of course," she said, pulling her hand back into her lap. "I'll only help the ones that come to me."

  And then she got up, turned on her heel, and, without so much as a look over her shoulder, left the room. It was hard not to applaud at her exit.

  Ash heard her voice in the hall, along with his mother's and the boy's hesitant attempts, and turned toward his older brother.

  "You're one cold son of a bitch."

  "Circumstances make a man what he is," he said. "And as Haliburton said, circumstances alter cases."

  "Yeah, yeah. And Pope said that circumstance is not the thing. Somebody's said something wise about everything, but words don't change the facts."

  "No, they don't." Cabot rubbed his thighs with the heels of his hands. "Some things can never be changed."

  "Never is a long time," Ash said, wondering if Cabot never took his wife's hand when she offered it, never invited her into his room, never said her hair was pretty or her smile could light a man's way home in the dark.

  "Never is forever," Cabot agreed, balling his fist and hitting his thigh soundly so that the dull thud filled the room.

  ***

  "How are you feeling?" Charlotte asked Davis, whose bruises were receding to reveal a tight jaw and narrowed eyes. "Better?"

  He stared at her, sullen.

  Well, any child whose father beat him, and on a habitual basis, was bound to be downcast. She'd just have to try a little harder to win him over.

  "Have you seen a rabbit this morning?" she asked.

  The boy raised one eyebrow. "In the d-d-din..."

  "... the dining room," she finished for him. So he'd seen Van Gogh's attempt to steal breakfast and her quick outmaneuvering of the rabbit. And if she read his eyes right, he heartily disapproved of her handling of the matter. "Much as I wish we could, we really can't let a rabbit, however adorable, have the run of the house, now, can we?"

  The boy waited while she floundered around for an acceptable reason a grown woman would hide the existence of a small bunny.

  "Mr. Whittier prefers that our pets..." What did Cabot prefer? That she have no pets beyond the showy ones their neighbors could see, like Argus? What was it he had said when she'd brought Griffin along with her meager belongings following their wedding and the dear cat had jumped up into what it had mistaken for Cabot's waiting lap? That I have to abide the ease with which two-legged creatures scurry about me while I sit confined is difficult enough, Charlotte. To watch the four-legged, lesser forms of life perform feats I cannot even aspire to is degrading. And beneath you to suggest. The cat was banished to the outdoors. Where Argus, the ingrate, poked his right eye out. The poor cat had spent the rest of his life in a dark cellar waiting for Charlotte's visits, which never lasted long enough.

  "Mr. Whittier doesn't like animals," she admitted, "so I pretend we don't have any."

  The boy began to say something and then thought better of it. Instead he simply pointed to himself and raise
d an eyebrow as if to ask if they would pretend he wasn't there either.

  "Oh," Charlotte said, tucking her hands up into her armpits so that she wouldn't cup the boy's chin or something just as awful as that. "Mr. Whittier just likes to sound gruff. Lawyers have to be very tough, you know. They've got to keep their soft spots well hidden or someone might just discover their Achilles' heel and—"

  "So they tend to let calluses form until that soft spot is so well protected even they don't know it's there."

  Charlotte's hands fell to her sides at her brother-in-law's words. She took a deep breath and then another before responding. "You make that sound like something undesirable." He also made it sound rather unappealing. And just when she was beginning to like the man too. Perhaps Cabot was right about his brother—his kisses were always the Judas kind.

  "To each its place. I wouldn't like to do battle without a suit of armor, but at the end of the day we all need a soft pillow on which to lay our heads."

  "Soldiers sleep on the hard ground," Charlotte corrected, "not in some cushy bed surrounded by—" She caught herself before she mentioned lace, but Ash didn't seem to notice.

  "Their loss," he said with a shrug.

  "I suppose you feel that a woman doesn't have any place on that battlefield," she said. All the while she could feel Davis's eyes studying her, studying her brother-in-law, sizing them up and already declaring Ashford the victor.

  "I guess I never considered the question one way or the other."

  "Consider it," she all but demanded. Go ahead, say I don't belong in the courtroom. He clearly disapproved of her dress, her manners, her vocabulary. Why not her profession? He'd hardly be the first.

  "I think that if women were in charge," he said after an interminable silence, "there wouldn't be as many battles. And that the battlefield would be a more compassionate place."

  She thought there was actually a compliment buried in there somewhere, but she'd lost the thread of the argument—something Cabot had trained her never to do. Ashford brought her back to it.

  "But this is a house, Charlotte, not a battlefield. Home is where your soft spots are safe. Or ought to be." He turned his back on her, claiming victory with his finality, and addressed the boy. "I'm not all that good at guessing ages. Twelve?"