‘In matters of the heart-’ Allingham started to murmur.
‘It was a whim, like everything else in my life up to that time,’ she said, and her voice became less insistent, dreamier. ‘Howard was there, and I wanted him. I gave it no more thought than if I had seen a bonnet in a shop window. Oh, I don’t mean that my head was not full of him. I doted on him. To me he was charming, handsome, urbane and his prospects were boundless. Yet what I wanted in truth was gratification. I was thinking of myself.’ She sighed. ‘The difference in our ages, his possessive ways, his devotion to photography above all things, I dimly recognised, but I did not consider these as reasons to hesitate. I wanted him as my husband and that was the end of it. The end.’ Her eyes moistened. ‘Nothing would deter me.’
She looked down at her hands again. Nobody spoke.
‘Simon, you of all people must have noticed that Howard and I … that the element one takes for granted in matrimony, the coming together of man and wife-’
Allingham appealed to her, ‘Spare yourself, Miriam. There is no need to … ’
The wardresses sat in silence, pretending to hear nothing, least of all what was unsaid.
The prisoner continued speaking. ‘There had to be disenchantment. Really we entered into marriage without knowing each other.’ She smiled faintly. ‘To Howard I was something between a child and a piece of porcelain. I needed to be guarded, humoured, cherished and photographed. He liked me best when I was silent and completely still.’ She looked away, in her own thoughts. ‘It was difficult for me to accept after our courtship had been so full of variety and companionship. I had imagined the parties would go on as if nothing had changed. Instead I was confined indefinitely in Park Lodge. I might as well have been
‘Miriam-’
‘Please listen to me, Simon,’ she said quickly. ‘There is not much more. I believe even now I would be ready to face a life with Howard if he had been as honest with me as he was kind.’
‘What do you mean?’
She hesitated. ‘That he concealed from me the truth about Judith Honeycutt.’
Allingham’s features creased into a look of bewilderment. ‘But, my dear, you knew about Judith.’
She looked at him with a gaze that seemed to penetrate his words and show them to be hollow.
‘There was the inquest,’ he said, trying to fill the space. ‘You knew about the tragedy. We all did. God knows, it was catastrophic for Howard. If he had stayed in Hampstead, it would have ruined him. I don’t mean to be callous about poor Judith, rest her soul, but she did not pause to think-’
She cut through his words with a bare statement. ‘Simon, I know how Judith died.’
He blinked and put his hand to his face. ‘Miriam, what are you saying?’
She said with deliberation, ‘He told me himself. He confessed it to me as he lay beside me in our marriage- bed’-she spoke the word with bitterness-‘at a moment when he felt constrained to reassure me that he was capable of loving a woman. What consolation I was to derive from it, I cannot imagine, because he confided to me, his wife, that he and Judith … that he was responsible for her condition at the time of her death. Whether it was true I doubt, knowing Judith as I did, but that is of no account. Howard believed it. When she told him, it threw him into a state of panic. You know how exercised he becomes about the smallest things. Imagine this! She threatened a scandal unless he married her. To Howard, the suggestion was unthinkable. Whatever had happened between them was a furtive, foolish thing, no basis for matrimony. In his mental anguish he decided there was only one escape: to do away with her.’
Allingham said, ‘Miriam, for God’s sake. This can’t be true!’
Her colour was high. She began speaking more rapidly, unsubdued by his protest. ‘You can be frank with me. You were a true friend to Howard. You saved him, told him what to say at the inquest-’
‘No, no!’ Allingham agitatedly said. ‘Nothing of the kind.’
‘Simon, he told me the truth himself. Too late. By then I had married him. Can you imagine how I felt being the wife of a … ’ She smothered the word with an inrush of breath. ‘If there had ever been any prospect of our marriage succeeding, it ended that night he told me this.’
Allingham was white. In a voice just audible, he said, ‘Miriam, I knew nothing of this. Nothing.’
‘I wanted you to know.’
As words stopped between them, the sound of his breathing filled the cell. The prisoner appeared calmer, her hands resting loosely on her lap while she waited for him to absorb what she had said.
In a lower key she resumed. ‘Perhaps you can understand what it does to a woman to be told such a thing. The last vestiges of those girlish dreams of mine vanished in a second. My husband was a stranger to me. He has been ever since. You are not blind, Simon. You must have seen for yourself.’
‘Yes,’ he answered in a whisper. ‘I could not fail to notice.’
‘You had seen me go wilfully into marriage with Howard. You knew it was madness, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘You foresaw the frustrations I would visit on myself. Tell me I detected from you the suggestion that I should think again. I mean those times you glanced at me in your special way or brushed your hand against mine.’
The young man flushed with embarrassment.
‘I like to think you were trying to tell me in your own way about your secret sentiments. Simon, I would not speak like this if I could avoid it. Perhaps I am deceiving myself again, but I thought-I like to believe-’
He responded. ‘You are right. If I could have spoken to you … I knew it would make no difference.’
‘Yes.’ A tear slid from her eye. She let it move slowly down her cheek.
They said nothing for what seemed a long interval.
The prisoner ended it. ‘Simon, if there were a chance to begin again, as we were in the Hampstead days, before I married Howard, do you think it possible that you and I-knowing all you did about the kind of person I am-’
‘I can think of nothing I would rather wish for,’ he gently interposed.
She smiled, and sniffed to keep back tears, bowing her head.
‘It is better to forget such thoughts,’ he said.
Her eyes came up slowly to meet his and fix them with a look of extraordinary intensity. ‘There is a way.’
He appeared not to understand.
She said, ‘If they find Howard, they will arrest him.’
‘They would be obliged to pardon you before any magistrate would issue a warrant,’ he said.
‘Howard will be brought to trial, as I was, unless he can convince them he is innocent and they drop the charge.’
Allingham still wore a frown. ‘That is true, but-’
She hesitated, watching him. ‘If it … happened … that he was unable to convince them-’
‘Miriam, what are you saying?’
‘That I should be free in the real meaning of the word.’
He shook his head. ‘Not that way.’ His hand went to the nape of his neck and clutched it. ‘No, I could never bring myself-’
‘Simon, he is guilty. Judith died in agony. Whatever view the law might take of the present case … ’
Articulating each word as if it caused pain, he said, ‘I could not do that to Howard.’
‘Not for my sake?’ she asked, her voice rising challengingly.
‘He is your husband.’
‘In name only.’ She closed her eyes and said, ‘Simon, you are a man!’
He sat staring at her.
Bell, no less than he, was stunned. Emotional scenes were usual in the condemned cell. Until today, the prisoner had been unexampled in her self-control. Cold-blooded, she had seemed. Whatever was going on between these two-and it was not easy to divine-the meaning of what the prisoner had just said could not be plainer. Or bolder.
‘Simon,’ she said, ‘I would not ask you to say anything that was not true. Only to keep silent if the moment
