The Sealed Letter (27 page)

Could she possibly believe her own rigmarole?
Helen wonders. Memory is unreliable, especially as one ages. Could it be that Emily Watson mistakes these grand scenes for how it was? No, the explanation must be simpler: a courtroom turns nobodies to tyrants for an hour, giving them a stage on which to spin their most inventive lies.

Mrs. Watson rushes on. "I made her promise to break off this unholy connection with Mildmay, and send back the rings and lockets he'd given her. Then the tea was ready and we went down," she finishes, anticlimactically.

Bovill seems at a loss as to what to ask his witness, for a moment. "Did you tell Reverend Watson about her confession?"

"Not at the time, because his doctor had instructed me to shield him from anything conducive to anxiety. Of course this made my trial all the heavier." She puts her handkerchief to her eye.

"Did she, to your knowledge, return Mildmay's gifts?"

"I thought she had," says Mrs. Watson grimly, "but she'd only locked them up in her bureau. Gradually, over the months that followed, little hints told me that she'd not broken off her intrigue with him at all!"

"And you quarrelled?"

Again, Mrs. Watson squirms at the word. "Not openly. Excessive loyalty is my weakness."

Helen wants to take her by the shoulders and shake her till something cracks.

"But I had withdrawn my heart from her, in private," Mrs. Watson assures Bovill. "We had one painful discussion, early the following year. I heard a rumour that she'd been calling Admiral Codrington's visits to my house
too frequent;
claiming there was an
undue intimacy
between us. Well, I broached the subject candidly; I reminded her that my friendship with the admiral had been formed with her full compliance and for her good. She accused me of having a
Jesuitical influence
over her children, of attempting to usurp her position as mother and as wife!"

Yes, Helen does remember that row; she allows herself a narrow smile.

"I asked her to deny the rumour in writing," says Mrs. Watson, "but she retorted that an honest woman didn't need a ticket of virtue! And when I made a delicate allusion to her own tarnished honour, she began to shriek in a frenzy: 'Send for my husband! You may as well tell him my secret and ruin me at once!' Then she flung herself on her knees and begged me to forgive her. I parted the hair on her brow and said, 'Oh Helen, darling, is this my return for all my love to you?'"

Helen is bewildered by this woman's gall; stray facts and purest fiction are mixed fluently in every sentence. What she's describing is their real, prickly friendship, but as if recalled in a delirium. Something occurs to Helen now:
I'm the most exciting thing that's ever happened to her.

Bovill has been taking rapid notes with a scratchy pen. Now he peers at them. "Did the respondent ever write this letter you asked for—the letter denying she'd meant to accuse you and her husband of undue intimacy?"

Complacent: "She did, and I showed it to several acquaintances, to clear my name in Valetta before I left."

"The following question is of vital importance, Mrs. Watson." He gives her a hard look. "Before you and your husband departed from Malta in July 1862, did you ever breathe a word to Admiral Codrington of his wife's secret?"

"I did not."

"Or afterwards, in correspondence? Not even a hint, to put him on his guard?"

Go on, make up some scene in which you played the wise sybil,
Helen urges her silently. Even a little hint could prove him guilty of condonation...

"Not one."

Unfortunately, she's not a fool.

The older woman's cheekbones are suddenly mottled with scarlet. "Some will blame me for this omission, though I know the admiral does not," she adds, with a grateful nod towards Harry. "I considered my silence a sacrifice on the altar of a dead friendship. My motive was womanly compassion."

As Bovill thanks his witness, and reminds her to stay in the box for cross-examination, Helen remembers something she's been trying to keep in the very back of her mind all day:
this woman has my children.

Her own barrister, Hawkins, has been in intense, whispered discussions with Few. He rises now, unfolding his slim length, and glides towards the witness.

Save me,
Helen tells him silently;
do your worst.

"Now, Mrs. Watson," begins Hawkins, "from the time when the respondent ceased to accompany the petitioner to hear your husband's sermons, his Sunday visits to your home were of necessity paid alone. I must ask whether, from first to last, he ever took any liberty with you, or did or said anything inconsistent with your position as a married lady?"

An intake of breath. "Never."

Bovill jumps up. "My Lord, does my learned friend dare to imply what I think he is implying?"

"Only what is in the countercharge," says Hawkins mildly, "that the petitioner neglected his wife's company for that of another man's wife."

"The wording is ambiguous," protests Bovill, "and calculated to cause obscure damage to an impeccable lady's reputation."

Helen smiles, behind the clammy lace.

"I'm happy to let this point drop, if it causes so much offence, and move on," says Hawkins. "Though I must confess I hardly know where to begin, in responding to this
impeccable lady's
almost ... unbelievable testimony."

Emily Watson bristles visibly.

"To take just one instance. This lane behind your house in Malta, madam—are there houses on this lane?" asks Hawkins. "There are."

"And people continually passing by?"

"I don't know about that."

"What puzzles me is, how could any two persons commit the act in question in such a lane undisturbed, around eight o'clock in the evening?"

A small shrug. "I gave it verbatim, as my friend—as was—confessed it." Hawkins turns towards the jury. "What my client is barred from telling you herself, gentlemen, is that Mrs. Watson's statement is utterly false." He's allowed his voice to heat up now. "This
impeccable lady
has told us of a private dialogue between herself and the respondent—a
confession,
so-called—knowing full well that the mouth of the respondent is sealed."

Judge Wilde, nodding, clears his throat with a roar. "This is one instance of the many evils that flow from forbidding the parties in a divorce case to testify—a flaw in British law which I hope one day to see reformed."

"An admirable aim, my Lord," says Hawkins, with a broad smile. Then his mouth turns hard again as he glances at his notes, and looks up at Mrs. Watson. "You claim that you had 'withdrawn your heart' from the respondent by the early months of 1862, because by then you thought her engaged in a lasting intrigue with Lieutenant Mildmay. Yet I have here a letter dated June the fifteenth, a full six months after the alleged confession. Is this your hand?"

Fumbling, she puts her glasses on to look at it. "I believe so."

"I will now read a passage to the court."

My dearest Helen,

I am sorry you should feel annoyed with me on account of my leaving hurriedly the other day. Since I am customarily admitted to your room at all times, your dressing seemed no reason for not seeing me. But enough of this; life is too short to spend in vain squabbles, and true friends are too rare to lose. Let this be but an April shower, the sun must now shine again.

Believe me always

lovingly yours,

Emily Watson

The witness sucks her lips.

"Would you not agree that this letter implies an ongoing intercourse of the most cordial kind?"

Her eyes flick between the judge and jury. "The outward skin of that intimacy survived," she says, stammering, "even when it was dead within."

"The rankest hypocrisy!"

"I was anxious not to distress the admiral by any open scandal—"

Hawkins narrows his eyes. "Logic will suggest to the gentlemen of the jury that either you were lying in this letter, with its warm declarations of sisterly love, or that you're lying now: that there
was
no breach, because you did
not
in 1862 believe the woman you addressed so dotingly to be adulterous, since the alleged
confession
never took place."

"Not so, not so." Mrs. Watson takes a drink of water, swallows as if it's ground glass.

Hawkins leaps on. "How is it, I wonder, that you can recall with such precision the date of the alleged confession?"

"I noted it down in my memorandum book."

His slim eyebrows shoot up. "With what intention?"

"None. I hardly know. On a sort of impulse—"

"An impulse, a plan, a plot, in fact, someday to destroy your
dearest Helen's
marriage?"

Bovill stumbles to his feet. "I object, my Lord, in the strongest—"

"I should be happy to rephrase that," concedes Hawkins. "Mrs. Watson, were you anticipating that you would one day give evidence against her in a divorce case?"

"No!"

"A divorce case, in fact, of which you are the origin, the prime mover. It was you, was it not, a clergyman's wife," Hawkins barks before she can answer, "who when the petitioner called on you last month, lost not a moment in encouraging his jealous imaginings. Far from attempting to pour Christian unction on the troubled waters of that marriage, you immediately hired a spy for the purposes of surveillance on his wife. Pretty sharp work, if I may say so!"

"The admiral was in great distress," Mrs. Watson protests.

"So you found him a solicitor for the purpose of obtaining a divorce—in direct defiance of the teachings of your husband's church, by the way. You egged him on to cast off a lady you'd always envied for her personal charms, her lovely children, her lofty position in Maltese society. A lady on whom you'd privately vowed to have vengeance, ever since she'd complained of your fawning over her husband."

"Come, come," begins Bovill, half-rising.

But Hawkins has already spun to address the jury. "It will be for you, gentlemen, to decide where there is any grain of truth in all this tarradiddle.

Whether this false friend turned open enemy can be trusted to report on private conversations with the respondent, who, as Mrs. Watson knows, is barred from defending herself. Whether perhaps some talk on the subject of Lieutenant Mildmay's unreciprocated infatuation with the respondent did pass between the two ladies, but Mrs. Watson has distorted and exaggerated it. Or whether in fact the tale of the stained dress and the confession, brought out today like a rabbit from a hat, is the most egregious
coup de théâtre.
"

Strangely enough, Helen's enjoying herself.

"I am not well," whimpers Mrs. Watson. "May I be granted a rest?"

"Hm. You were inexhaustible in answering my learned friend's questions," remarks Hawkins. "But I have just one more."

"Will you carry on?" Judge Wilde asks her.

"If I must."

"On September the twenty-fifth of this year, the day the admiral deserted his wife and home, did you take away their two daughters?"

"He was gracious enough to consign them to my care," Mrs. Watson says faintly. "Mine and my husband's."

"And have these girls—at the tender ages of eleven and twelve—been allowed to meet, correspond with, or even glimpse their mother since that date?"

"They have not."

She steps down, looking older.

Was that antidote enough to the woman's poison? Helen wonders. Hawkins is a superb performer, but the story of the so-called confession still seems to linger on the courtroom's stifling air. It will be a sad twist if what damns Helen is not the truth but these lies.

She's suddenly bone-tired. She barely listens as Bovill continues his narrative: the departure of the Watsons, the transfer of the respondent's affections from Mildmay to Anderson, then Admiral Codrington's receiving orders to return to England in the summer of 1864, and Colonel Anderson's
fortuitously coincidental
request for home leave. She only comes to attention when Bovill remarks, "Her old friend Miss Faithfull, as we will prove, aided and abetted the sordid affair."

Fido, Fido,
Helen thinks giddily,
you may run to the ends of the earth but you can't escape your share of punishment.

Bovill's holding up a volume that Helen recognizes as her leather-bound appointments book.

Hawkins stands up to protest: "That item was seized in the respondent's absence, and by force."

"Need I remind my learned friend that on the respondent's wedding day, she gave up her legal identity, including rights of property?"

He purses his lips. "Wives have always been allowed to hold certain personal possessions, of no great monetary value."

"My Lord," Bovill appeals, "the book was found within a cherry-wood writing desk, which, as part of the house's furnishings, can be considered the chattels of the petitioner."

Judge Wilde nods.
He just wants to hear what's in it,
Helen realizes. All these distinguished men, agog like boys outside a circus tent.

Bovill reads various short entries, giving them a grim emphasis.
"Scene with H, put a veto on my going out.
'H' can be none other than the petitioner, Admiral Henry Codrington," he remarks. "To
V. P.
This can be taken to refer to the Victoria Press, the place of business of Miss Faithfull on Great Coram Street.
To T. S., And. there, unsatisfactory.
Which clearly stands for: a visit to Miss Faithfull's residence at Taviton Street—Colonel Anderson there—and an unsatisfactory meeting."

Helen curses herself for making these briefjottings.

"Thus we see that the respondent's missing witness—Miss Emily Faithfull—has played a shameful role in the Anderson intrigue, as go-between, accessory, in short as panderess!"

The word thrills the crowd.

Hawkins stands up to make a token protest about initials proving nothing. Helen rests her veiled, hot face on her hand.

"Now we come to a vital clue on September the twenty-first," Bovill goes on.
"E. F. has letter from Scotland. Miserable night.
While the misery of the respondent's night might of course have been caused by some minor ailment," he concedes, turning sardonic, "I think it more likely that this refers to the news of Anderson's engagement, passed on by their guilty abettor, Miss Faithfull."