The Sealed Letter (24 page)

Your sister,

Emily

In flight Fido finds a kind of steely strength. She's packed in half an hour. She picks up her velvet choker, studded with all the small treasures of the Kent shore, holds it in her palm for a moment, wraps it in its linen strip, and puts it back in the bureau drawer. She leaves instructions with Johnson to tell the others to say, if anyone asks, that their mistress is gone abroad on private business. "Accept no documents in my name, on any consideration, remember."

"Yes, madam." The maid's sallow face is as blank as ever.

The servants read the newspapers too,
Fido remembers;
they must see right through me.

If she never receives the wretched summons, surely she can't be found guilty of having defied it? She wishes she knew more about the law. Not for the first time, she curses the sporadic, gappy nature of even the best female education. It occurs to her to consult a solicitor of her own—there's Mr. Markby, who represented the press in that ridiculous plagiarism case about the rules of bridge—but no, she can't bear to explain to him that she approved (without reading it) an affidavit about an incident during which she was asleep.

The maid follows her down the passage and asks, "But where are you going, really, madam?"

Is that concern in the low voice? Disapproval? Affection? Fido can't decide. "I'm truly sorry, Johnson. But if you don't know, no one can oblige you to tell." She takes the valise and lets herself out the front door. She looks down Taviton Street, and the city opens like a chasm.

Trial

(a test; a frustrating or catastrophic event;
an examination of a case by a competent tribunal)

Women should not make love their profession.

Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon),
Women and Work
(1857)

Do sit down," Helen tells Few on Friday evening, leading him into the dusty drawing-room. In the ten days since the staff—all but the taciturn Mrs. Nichols—were discharged, the house has taken on a derelict air. "A sherry?" Helen asks. The formulae of politeness are stiff in her mouth. The cockatoo shrieks.

"Nothing, thank you," says Few, taking a small chair. "My family will be expecting me."

That startles Helen; the solicitor seems too much of a dried-up bachelor to have a family. "To business, then," she says, as briskly as she can manage, sitting down. "Judge Wilde: what can you tell me about him?"

Few shrugs. "He breeds roses."

Helen wonders what bearing this trait may have on her case. An intolerance for anyone who poses a threat to the laws of lineage—or a sympathy for the frail flowers of womanhood? She notices that the three silver fish are floating motionless at the top of their bowl. Mrs. Nichols must have remembered to feed the noisy birds, but not the fish.

"Mrs. Codrington? I've come in person, to give you some bad news."

"My girls?" Her voice is strangled.

"No, no. Your friend, the inaptly named Miss Faithfull," he says dryly. "She's disappeared."

Helen stares.

"Yesterday, the very afternoon my clerk attempted to serve her with the subpoena—he found that she'd gone abroad."

"I don't believe it."

"That's all her servants will say—no forwarding address. And the same goes for her employees at the press; my clerk's talked to several of the girls, as well as the men who supervise them."

Helen sets her teeth.

Few releases an old man's sigh. "I need hardly point out that without her testimony as to the attempted rape ... her flight at the eleventh hour may strike the jury as giving the lie to the whole story."

Damn the woman.

"Now, the petitioner's case will take several days to present, which gives our side a little time. If you have the least notion where Miss Faithfull might be skulking, with a particular relative perhaps..."

She shakes her head.

"I thought you were very old friends."

"Well, I thought many things," hisses Helen. "I thought I knew her, and it appears I was mistaken."

"Hm," says Few. "Well. I must take my leave. I'll send over a full report on Monday evening on the first day's business..."

When she's shown him out she stands there, in the dim hall, unable to decide what to do next. Should she go to bed, in the faint hope of sleep? Ask Mrs. Nichols to send up something to eat? Sit in the dim drawing-room, contemplating the putrefying fish in their bowl?

She doesn't move. She looks out the glass panel in the front door, as if the answer she seeks might be out there on the silent pavements of Eccleston Square.

Fido, Fido, where are you?

Helen's imagination roams all over London. England. Europe. The railway's reached Nice this year. Squeezing her eyes shut, Helen pictures Fido wheezing as she walks along the Promenade des Anglais, under a hard Riviera sun.

How could you abandon me in my hour of need?
The woman's only lost her nerve, Helen's sure of that. But it amounts to the same thing: betrayal.
After all these years. After all we've lived through, all we've been to each other. She owes me!

It's much later, tossing around in bed, entangled in her hot nightgown, that Helen comes to a more painful conclusion.

Yes, she used Fido. She took advantage of her old friend's innocence and idealism from the start. Much as Anderson took advantage of Helen's boredom and vanity, it occurs to her now. It's the way of the world, she supposes: everyone uses everyone. The trick is to know how much a given person can bear. No doubt Fido would have stood by her side throughout this ghastly trial, if Helen hadn't pushed her a step too far by obliging her to testify about Harry's attack.
My fault, my own stupid fault!

Now Helen's lost everyone. Husband, daughters, lover, friend, like sand trickling through her fingers.

***

Helen finds a seat near the back. She's as calm as fifteen drops of laudanum can make her. Despite the protection of her veil, her heart judders with dread that she'll be spotted and pointed out. The court's crammed with visitors, as they're officially known, though Helen finds it a curious choice of word: as if they're paying some courtesy call.
Watchers
might be better,
carrion feeders.
It seems as if everyone in London who can muster a coat and hat has been allowed in; here comes one of the under-sheriffs, finding a place for a dodgy character in a battered topper. Some of the crowd standing at the back smell so mouldy, Helen suspects they just want to get out of the autumn rain. She's never come, herself, but a couple of her acquaintances queued up last year to hear the octogenarian Viscount Palmerston defend himself against a charge of adultery with the wife of a dissolute Irishman. How irritated they were when it was announced that the Irish marriage was not legally valid, so the case was dismissed! Helen thought it an amusing anecdote, at the time.

She tries to steady herself and make some sense of what her eyes are taking in through the irksome layer of black lace covering her head. There's the judge's high, empty seat. Newspapermen are on its left, squeezed into the first of the visitors' benches. To its right, what Helen recognizes from illustrations as the witness box—as if witnesses must be caged like lions or else they'll flee. And a larger panelled enclosure where miscellaneous men are already filing in and taking their seats: they must be the jury. Some have a pompous manner, some more hangdog, some a curious combination of the two. They'll sit there for long hours, for no pay, but at least there's a thrilling case in their hands.
Who are these strangers to judge whether Harry should have the right to cast me off?
Three gentlemen, perhaps four, she reckons; the others bourgeois. A military fellow who smirks through a thick moustache at a lady in the audience: he just might favour Helen's side.

No sign of Anderson in the audience, of course. Off on honeymoon, or hurrying back to his regiment in Malta, little Scotch bride in tow? Will Helen's last note have given him nightmares, she wonders? It's all that's left to her to hope. How she's come to despise her persuadable heart.

Now Helen sees her solicitor plodding up the aisle. "Mr. Few," she hisses as he passes her elbow.

He peers at her, then his expression turns to a frown.

"I found I couldn't stay away."

Few tuts. "It will only upset you, and if you're recognized it'll cause talk."

Talk?
Helen laughs under her breath. What else is this mob gathered for but to hear
talk
about the most private details of her history? "It's only your beetling brows that will make anyone give me a second glance," she tells him, almost flirtatiously. "Which is my barrister?"

"The tall gentleman at the table on the left," he says, pointing discreetly with a thumb towards the middle of the courtroom. "Hawkins is a very brilliant advocate."

The man looks suave in his wig and gloves; half Few's age, which is some comfort. The one with his head in some legal tome has a more dusty air about him, and his bands are crumpled. "Is the other..."

"Bovill, counsel for the petitioner," says Few shortly, before he moves on.

A few minutes later her husband stalks up the aisle, his huge silhouette passing within inches of Helen's skirt. She flinches, but he doesn't notice her.
Insensate frog!
He's looking much as he did last Wednesday outside his club, when with maddening mildness he peeled her arms away from him, holding her at a distance as one would a yowling kitten. (So all that grovelling was for nothing: Helen's jaws tighten at the memory.) Harry takes his place beside his barrister and they exchange a few words. Helen squeezes her eyes shut for a moment.

When Judge Wilde sweeps in—all jowls and bushy white eyebrows—the back doors are forced shut, and the under-sheriffs can be heard announcing "No room, no room within."

The petition's read aloud by a clerk with a nasal voice, and the audience starts to stir like a beehive. There's something intoxicating, Helen's surprised to find, about such words being released into the air. This court is the one place in England, it occurs to her—except perhaps a doctor's office—where one's encouraged to speak bluntly about the carnal.

"I wish to express my sympathy with you on what must be an uncongenial duty," Judge Wilde is saying to the jury. "The evidence which will be laid before you is extensive, and contains much that is peculiarly sordid." An anticipatory giggle from somewhere in the courtroom makes him frown. "But I trust that the members of the public permitted to observe these proceedings will refrain from loud or vulgar reactions."

When Bovill stands up to speak for her husband, Helen revises her estimate of the enemy; though the barrister's robes could do with pressing, his manner is intelligent and precise. "Some have found fault with the relative facility with which divorces can be obtained, nowadays," he begins quietly, "but when you have heard the evidence, gentlemen, you will feel no small satisfaction in releasing the petitioner, a battle-scarred servant of Her Majesty's, from the onerous chains that bind him to an immoral woman."

Helen licks her numb lips. Behind her veil, it's as if she has no face. She might have overdone her dose by a few drops.

"A wife who has been no real wife—who has neglected her household and maternal duties, thwarted and opposed her husband, and repeatedly dishonoured him with other men."

Perhaps it's the laudanum that's giving Helen this strange detachment: she listens to the harangue as if it concerns some other woman altogether. As Bovill starts recounting the admiral's distinguished early career and choice of a younger, foreign-bred bride, she can't shake off a sense of unreality; this isn't her being described, this isn't Harry, these are tiny puppets on a faraway stage. Does her husband feel the same way?

"Until some time after the birth of their two daughters, that illusory happiness was uninterrupted. If I may enter into the record a letter the respondent wrote the petitioner in April 1856, when he had received orders to proceed to the Crimea—" Bovill reads it as dryly as a laundry list.

Merely one line with everything that's dear to you, my own Harry, on this our seventh anniversary. How rare the woman is who can say she's never experienced anything but kindness from her spouse. God ever bless you and keep you! Addio alma di mia vita.

Helen

"The Italian can be translated as
Goodbye, love of my life"
Bovill says in an aside to the jury.

Helen has no memory of writing this, but it doesn't surprise her: is there a wife who can't drum up an affectionate note on occasion? Now she comes to think of it—yes, she must have scribbled it to smooth Harry's feathers after a petty squabble they'd had while he was packing his trunks. How strange, to see all this flotsam of their private life wash up again. She's beginning to grasp Bovill's strategy. It wasn't that the couple was incompatible from the start; no, no, it was the wife whose heart cooled while her gallant lord and master was off fighting the Russians.

Her ears prick up at Fido's name.

"The situation was exacerbated by the presence in the household of the respondent's companion, Miss Emily Faithfull, with whom Mrs. Codrington generally slept. That same Miss Faithfull who has claimed, in a bizarre and libellous affidavit appended to the respondent's countercharge, that in October 1856, the petitioner attempted her virtue. An allegation that I almost shrink from repeating," intones Bovill, "so foul it is—and so ludicrous. The very idea that a respectable gentleman would clamber into bed between his unconscious wife and her unconscious friend—a maiden of twenty-one, and, I feel obliged to add, not reputed to be of conspicuous beauty—"

This raises a few guffaws.

"—and there attempt a violation of the latter! I have just learned, and am eager to inform the court," he says with relish, "that Miss Faithfull has mysteriously absented herself and gone abroad before she could be served with a summons to testify. The gentlemen of the jury may draw the logical conclusion."

It suddenly occurs to Helen that Harry might have hired some thug to abduct Fido. She peers through the sea of heads to catch a glimpse of his. The bearded face is grim and familiar. But how could the hypothetical thug have persuaded every one of the woman's servants and employees to say she'd gone abroad?
This isn't a sensation novel,
she scolds herself.

"Things came to a head in the spring of 1857," Bovill goes on, "when Mrs. Codrington took the extraordinary step of positively declining
ever again
to enter the petitioner's bed. From that time forward, if the court will pardon my frankness, all conjugal intercourse was at an end." He pauses to underline the gravity.

The story's convincing, Helen grants the barrister that; it has a simple thrust to it, like a sermon. The truth is more bitty, harder to explain. She feels a sudden temptation to stand up and say,
There was no key in my door. Don't tell me he was burning for me, because I won't believe it.

"The respondent made a wild demand for a separation on grounds of incompatibility—though there are of course no such grounds in British law," Bovill adds. "The petitioner very correctly invited his wife's parents, and his own brother, General Codrington, to mediate. The conclusion was that the respondent agreed to resume at least the appearance of married life."

The house was in chaos, Helen remembers. Quarrels in corners, scenes in the hall, lukewarm soup ... One of the girls hurled a wooden block through a stained glass window.