The Sealed Letter (30 page)

Hawkins clearly wasn't expecting that; he leans down to consult with the aged solicitor. Then he draws himself up to his full height. "I must observe that this whole proceeding smacks of pettifoggery and chicanery."

Harry registers with a prickle of pleasure that Helen's barrister is losing his temper. But will that make the man open the letter or not?

"If this document contained anything to support the petitioner's attack on Miss Faithfull's character," barks Hawkins, "surely my learned friend would have opened and read it aloud already."

"I wouldn't dream of taking such a step without my learned friend's consent," says Bovill. He holds Hawkins's gaze, raises one eyebrow.

There's a long moment in which no one speaks; the longest so far in this case, thinks Harry.

"I neither assent nor dissent to the opening of the seals," says Hawkins warily. "It's for my learned friend to attempt to enter the document in evidence, that is
if
and
only if
he can prove my client is directly connected with it."

Judge Wilde intervenes brusquely. "If the letter's contents are germane, by all means let the seals be broken."

Harry looks back at Helen, through the sea of heads. Of course it's her; he should have known her at first glance, for all the layers of black lace. She's frozen like marble. What's that play in which the statue of the wife comes to life?

"If my learned friend declines—I do not choose to take such a step at this time, my lord," Bovill tells the judge.

William puts the thing back in his jacket pocket. Harry's hands are shaking, between his knees, like some small captured animal.

"Then," says Hawkins, as quick as a snake, "I move to strike the whole tangential discussion from the record."

What difference would that make, Harry wonders? How can the jury unhear what they've heard?

Judge Wilde frowns in indecision, then says, "No, the transaction is part of the
regestae,
and no fact bearing upon the case should be concealed from the court."

Bovill gives Harry the smallest of smiles. "Gentlemen of the jury, in conclusion. We of the petitioner's counsel have shown how the latent germs of corruption that Helen Codrington displayed as a young bride gradually ripened into criminality of the most sordid kind. We need shock and weary you no longer, although a French novelist would no doubt delight in showing in endless, repulsive detail how immediately Mrs. Codrington fascinated, how inevitably she injured, all those drawn into her web—whether confidantes, paramours, or, above all, her long-deluded and now heartbroken husband."

Harry's learning to recognize his twisted image in a succession of cracked mirrors. When this whole thing is over, when the stacks of newspapers are wrappers for tea-leaves or turnip peelings, which Harry Codrington will linger? The hero of a tragedy, the butt of a farce? The battle-coarsened rapist, or Old Pantalone, the dotard who wears the horns he deserves?

It seemed such a simple decision, when he said it in Bird's chambers, during that first interview:
I want a divorce.
But it's himself Harry seems to be divorcing. Will he ever get back that firm sense of who he is, like a pebble in his palm?

When he turns his head sharply, to ease his aching neck, he notices Helen's elderly solicitor slipping out. Few stops to speak to his client; she adjusts her veil and follows him out. The door is closed softly behind them, and Bovill is still spelling out the nefarious details of Helen Jane Smith Codrington's career.
You're missing the grand climax,
Harry tells his wife in his head.

"I urge you," Bovill addresses the jury, "to acknowledge the terrible facts of this marriage, though they may contradict the polite, fashionable fiction of feminine innocence. I urge you to release, as from the coils of a serpent, one of the most honest, valiant servants our sovereign has ever had."

Bird turns to beam at Harry. But instead of any surge of pride, or even relief, Harry feels only a flatness.

In the brief recess, he stands in Westminster Hall, keeping one eye out for Helen, but there's no sign of her.

William takes him out for a turn around Parliament Square in the smoky October air. To the left of Westminster Bridge stretches the muddy chaos of London's most ambitious construction project. Having squeezed houses, streets and railway lines into every square inch of the city, the developers now mean to build on the Thames: fill a broad slice of water with mud and sewers and call it the Victoria Embankment. It would be hard to explain to a South Sea Islander. Harry thinks of himself as a progressive thinker, but in this case he can't help wishing they'd left the river alone.

"This city still stinks," observes William.

Harry nods. "Though the Board of Works are boasting they've found a salmon in the river."

"What, a single fish?"

"Mm, but alive. A sign of hope for the new age of sanitation, they're calling it."

William lets out a sardonic laugh. "You may as well have this back," he says, holding out the packet with the black seal.

Harry finds himself strangely reluctant, but pockets it. "I was sure, at one point, that Hawkins would insist on its being opened."

"No, it was just as Bovill predicted: no counsel will risk a document being read unless he knows exactly what it contains."

Exhaustion passes over Harry's head like a wave. "Was it worth the fuss, do you think?"

"Hard to tell, yet," says his brother, smoothing his glistening white beard. "It'll be in all the papers tomorrow, and just might flush this Faithfull woman from her nest in time to be examined."

Somehow, Harry doesn't believe it. Fido, in whatever corner of Europe she's hidden herself, on whatever ship steaming towards Philadelphia or Shanghai, seems as remote as a character from a fairy tale.

"At the very least," says William briskly, "it'll have splashed her with a bucketful of filth, and Helen too. The jury might have already decided not to credit a word either woman's ever said!"

Going back into the courtroom, Harry expects to find Hawkins already on his feet, outlining the case for the respondent. But both barristers are standing below the judge, deep in consultation. "What's afoot?" whispers Harry in Bird's ear.

The solicitor's puffy with irritation. "They've had the nerve to apply for an adjournment."

"An adjournment?"

"A delay of several weeks. On the spurious grounds that our original petition contained no reference to one of the acts of adultery having taken place in the lane behind the Watsons' house! Hawkins claimed he couldn't possibly rebut it without sending his agent back to Valetta."

"Surely one sordid location among so many is neither here nor there?"

"Not in the eyes of the law," says Bird through his teeth. "Opposing counsel claim the credibility of our witness hangs on it."

"Can't we withdraw that particular allegation, then?"

"It's out of our hands; we knew nothing about the whole confession story in the first place."

Harry silently curses Mrs. Watson.

Judge Wilde clears his throat and addresses the court. "As an adjournment would represent more distress, delay, and expense to both parties, I am going to suggest that the petitioner's advisers consider whether they might abandon the charges against the respondent with reference to Lieutenant Mildmay, and rely solely upon the charges against her and the co-respondent, Colonel Anderson."

This causes a stir in the audience.

"Should we?" Harry mutters to Bird. "I suppose we'd still have ample proof about the two of them, especially at the Grosvenor Hotel..."

"And throw away most of Mrs. Nichols's evidence, and all of Mrs. Watson's?" Bird's tone puts Harry in his place, as an ignorant layman. "By no means." He's shaking his head at Bovill, who nods and turns back to the judge.

"Well, then," says Judge Wilde. "There are times when the wheels of justice must grind slowly in order to grind thoroughly. I have no alternative but to adjourn this trial for two weeks, to resume on October twenty-third."

Harry's reeling. He'd hoped this nightmare might be over in another three days, or four. The fire put out. Sails set for a calmer harbour.

As the crowd disperses, Bird reaches up to put his hand on Harry's shoulder, a familiarity that makes him recoil a little. "Don't be downcast, Admiral. A delay will allow all our evidence to linger in the jury's minds, and no doubt our men can dig up some more dirt in Malta, too. Besides, that small commotion wasn't really about Mrs. Watson's lane."

"How do you mean?"

Bird taps his florid nose. "Just a pretext on their part, don't you know. Hawkins and Few must be desperate for time to track down their lost witness, especially since we produced our
sealed letter.
And now both sides will have agents combing the ports for news of Miss Faithfull, chances are we'll sniff her out."

Sabotage

(destruction of property to hinder a particular group;
action aimed at weakening an enemy through subversion,
obstruction, or disruption)

If our women, whom hitherto we have regarded in a certain sense sacred to the home life, come swaggering out into the streets like noisy brawlers in a rude crowd, they must forgo their privileges of respect and protection for that liberty which includes self-assertive competition, rough words, and rougher shouldering aside.

Montague Cookson, "The Sacred Sex,"
Saturday Review
(May 13, 1871)

Miss Bennett sits by a moribund fire. She should ring for the girl to bring in more coals—though it's only mid-October, the afternoon is bitter—but somehow she doesn't dare.

She's been here a week and a half. (She hadn't the momentum to get as far as France or Italy; she knew she could lose herself in the less fashionable quarters of Pimlico just as easily.) A week and a half of solitary meals on trays, afternoons watching the dying fire, her lungs creaking like unoiled hinges. She broods over the possibility that the girl will have noticed something. Only this morning she remembered that her handkerchiefs are monogrammed: why would a Miss Bennett's handkerchiefs say
E. F. ?
At any moment, the landlady might march in to demand an explanation. What decent woman takes lodgings under an assumed name?

Fido got it out of
Pride and Prejudice,
not that she resembles any of those bright girls with their futures sparkling before them. Well, maybe what's-her-name, the one who played the piano too long and bored the guests.

Her dreams have never been so lurid. Last night she was setting type, working so fast her hands blurred. She felt a tug; she looked down to see that she was wearing a voluminous white satin gown, and one of its flounces was caught up in the machinery of the Wharfedale press. Slowly, inexorably, Fido was being pulled from her desk, dragged nearer and nearer the hungry cylinders of the machine. Then she was in the bowels of the press, rolled quite flat, covered with red-inked words. The strange thing is, what was distressing her in the dream, what made her scream and keep screaming without a sound, was not pain, but the fact that she couldn't read the words.

After ten days in this rented room, she's finding it hard to get out of bed before nine. She speaks to no one, has no business, receives no post. In all her adult life, Fido's never been in such a state of isolation. She feels obscurely guilty about leaving her most responsible clicker, Wilfred Head, in sole charge of the press at such a busy time, not to mention dropping the new
Victoria Magazine
entirely into Emily Davies's hands—but a sort of helplessness has paralyzed her. Since a few days into what she's come to think of as her confinement, when she went out for air and happened to glimpse a placard advertising
Shocking Revelations on First Day of Codrington Trial,
she's read no papers, for fear of what she'll find there. Perhaps this is cowardice. Very likely. Fido has suspended all her principles on assuming the name Bennett.

If the trial began on the eighth ... surely it must be over and done with by now? But to find out, she'll have to buy a newspaper, and the thought makes her sick to her stomach.

Her limbs have tightened from lack of exercise. This must be what it feels like to be one of those elegant invalids, cooped up and cosseted all over Mayfair and Belgravia. Fido's afraid to so much as walk in a park because she might run into someone who recognizes her. This city of almost three million souls is smaller than one might think. Accidental meetings happen all the time. (On the last day of August, for instance, on Farringdon Street. Two tangled fates wandered apart for seven years, then converged without warning.)

Fido broods, too, on the original accident, a full decade ago: the day she glimpsed Helen Codrington for the first time, crying by the shore in Kent. Was there a choice, at that moment? Fido could always have walked by, she supposes; pretended not to notice the tears streaking that small, lovely face; said nothing, not even a "May I be of any assistance?" But no, it's simply not in Fido to be so cold, not even nowadays when the world of business has toughened her, and certainly not back then, as a girl of nineteen. So perhaps it's our nature that makes our fate. Inescapable.

And even to save herself from complications, would Fido really want to be the kind of person who walked on past a distraught stranger, fearing to involve herself, averting her face? A dull, utilitarian life that would be. A life without risk.

A tap at the door, and she jumps.

"Miss Bennett?"

"Come in."

"Telegram for you," says the girl, handing it to her.

Alone again, Fido strains to breathe, waits for her pulse to slow. The only person who has her address—for emergencies—is Bridget Mulcahy at the press.
Please come at once. B. M.

***

She takes a cab to Bloomsbury, and finds the press in a state of apocalypse. Great Coram Street is littered with hacking, sobbing typos. Miss Jennings, the deaf girl, is standing frozen on a curb, with streaming eyes. "What on earth has happened?" Fido asks another hand, who goes into a coughing fit at the sight of the proprietor. The girl beside her speaks up hoarsely. The word sounds like
dying.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Cayenne, I said. Cayenne powder, madam, all over the floor."

The poisonous stuff is not just on the floorboards, Fido finds when she makes her way inside—handkerchief pressed to her face—but in the machines too, scattered among the type itself. What a simple technique, but how effective. Her throat makes a harsh whoop. She catches sight of some red paint daubed on a wall:
Something Stinks,
it says.

"Have the police been called?" she asks a red-faced Mr. Head.

"Of course," he says shortly.

She coughs and wheezes, then finds her way to her office, where Bridget Mulcahy, face swathed in a scarf like some harem girl, is mopping the floor.

"Miss Faithfull," she cries out. A cold breeze whistles in the window.

Fido collapses into a chair, shivering under her greatcoat. "We are veterans of this kind of sabotage, Miss Mulcahy, aren't we?" She means her tone to be encouraging, but it comes out piteous.

"'Tisn't sabotage this is, but war." The woman's brogue has strengthened in the crisis. "Those misfortunate hands who tripped in here first thing this morning—their throats are scalded."

"I blame myself," Fido mutters.

"That's nonsense, madam."

"I ought to have been here. I am the target." She makes herself go on. "This attack is not simply directed against the cause of female employment, for once. That graffiti on the wall—"

"The men should have scrubbed it off by now," scolds Bridget Mulcahy.

Fido shakes her head. "You know as well as I do that it refers to my name having been dragged into this divorce."

Miss Mulcahy's face remains blank. "I already told the peelers, I believe Kettle may be involved."

"Our Mr. Kettle? Our clicker?" asks Fido, startled.

"He ever so fortuitously sent in his notice yesterday morning. And no window was smashed, which means the brutes must have had the key!"

Fido drops her face into her hands. After a long minute, she tries to gather her forces; she straightens up. Her lips taste of harsh spice. Is it possible—Kettle letting their enemies in? She suspected him of fiddling the accounts, but no worse. She's beginning to distrust her ability to take the measure of people.

No matter how she flees from the grasp of the Codrington case, it finds her and drags her down. What good has it done her to go to such lengths to defy the court's summons? Without ever entering the witness box, she's been judged and sentenced in every household in London. Her knuckles are between her teeth now: the metallic tang of blood.

***

By the time the press has been cleaned up, all the hands seen by a doctor, and other small but urgent matters of business settled, Fido hasn't the heart to go back to Pimlico and take up her pretence of being Miss Bennett. She sends a boy to collect her things from the lodgings instead, and walks home to Taviton Street.

It's only a few minutes from the press, but today it takes her a quarter of an hour. She stumbles along in a daze through the sharp October afternoon.

Letting herself into the house with her own key, she startles Johnson in the hall. Wide-eyed, long-faced, the maid stands staring as if at an apparition.

Fido can't summon the energy for any sort of explanation. Besides, what good is it to have servants if you have to explain yourself to them? "I'll be in my study," she says instead, hoarsely. "Yes, madam."

She coughs up a lot of yellow-brown stuff into a basin, and drinks two glasses of water. On her desk, a perfect stack: unread copies of the
Times.
She shudders at the sight. And then decides to get it over with, because this day could hardly get any worse.

The first report, which she finds in the edition of the ninth, gives her a vertiginous feeling as she reads about all these colourful characters: the reckless Mrs. Codrington, the sorrowful admiral, the audacious, interchangeable Mildmay and Anderson. And here comes the wife's friend, this enigmatic Miss Faithfull. (She's described as Helen's
companion,
as if she was some kind of toady working for bed and board during the three years she spent at Eccleston Square.) Fido cringes at the references to meetings between Helen and Anderson in her own house. How could she have been taken in by Helen's rigmarole about breaking with him gradually?
According to Mr. Bovill, the co-respondent's missing witness—Miss Emily Faithfull—played a shameful role in the intrigue, as go-between, accessory, in short, as pander-ess.
She tries, and fails, not to think of her parents and brothers and sisters reading this.

But it's when she finds, in the report of the tenth of October, that Few's affidavit about the attempted rape was not withdrawn, that she starts to tremble. The admiral's barrister mocks the very idea of his client's molesting a young woman
not reputed to be of conspicuous beauty.
Fido wipes her eyes—
vanity, vanity,
she scolds herself—and forces herself to read on.
What shadow Miss Faithfull's flight casts on the veracity of her tale, I will leave to the gentlemen of the jury to decide.

Her eyes scurry through the columns, hunting for her name. There's worse: Here comes a peculiarly distorted version of the summer of 1857, when she left Eccleston Square.
Miss Faithfull's poisonous role.. . his wife's passionate feelings for this person were causing her to shrink away from her husband. He entrusted to paper his thoughts on Miss Faithfull's role in the crisis, and his reasons for banishing her—which document was sealed up and placed by him in the hands of his brother.
There follows a lot of legal bickering about the status and relevance of this
sealed letter.

Fido rubs her aching forehead. She's never heard of this document. When Harry suggested she go home to Surrey ... she remembers the conversation as cordial, if awkward. Why would he have sat down to write a memorandum about it? Surely he'd remember what had been in his own mind, without having to commit it to paper?

A kind of proof, then. A proof of what? Slowly, cumbersomely, her mind grinds the husk off the seed.

Her eye moves up the column again.
His wife's passionate feelings for this person were causing her to shrink away from her husband.
Fido stares at that sentence, reads it again, and once more.

Oh, good God.

A proof of a suspicion, only. No one has named that suspicion, in court or in the newspaper. (Not the kind of thing anyone wants to spell out, even in these tell-all times.) A word to the wise. Those who don't understand it won't even notice what they're missing; those who do, will comprehend the whole business in a moment.
Sealed up.

Nauseated, she holds to the edge of the desk as if she's in a rowboat, being pulled into the eye of a storm.