Weighed in the Balance

“Thank you for bringing me Victoria,” he said quickly. “I think I shall always love her. I wish I had anything on earth I could give her that compared with what she has given me.” He breathed out. “But I haven’t.” He hesitated. “If I could walk … If I could only stand!” His voice broke, and for long, aching moments he had to fight to retain his self-control.

Hester knew that Victoria had told him nothing of her own griefs. It was an acutely private thing, and yet Robert was suffering, and perhaps he would allow both their happiness to slip away from them because he believed they were so unequal and he was worth nothing to her.

Hester spoke very quietly. Perhaps this was a mistake, an irretrievable error, the breaking of a trust, but she told him.

“You can give her love. There is no gift as great—”

He swung his shoulders around, glaring at her with rage and frustration and pain in his eyes, and something agonizing which she thought was shame.

“Love!” he said bitterly. “With all my heart … but that’s hardly enough, is it? I can’t look after her. I can’t support or protect her. I can’t love her as a man loves a woman! ’With my body I thee worship!’ ” His voice cracked with unshed tears and loneliness and helplessness. “I can’t give her love; I can’t give her children!”

“Nor can she give such things to you,” Hester said softly, longing to touch his hand and knowing it was not the time. “She was raped as a girl, and as a result of that had a backstreet abortion. It was very badly done, and she has never healed. That is the cause of her affliction, her constant pain, and at some times of the month it is worse than at others. She cannot ever have marital relations, and she certainly could not bear a child.”

He was ashen white. He stared at her with horror so great his body shook, his hands clenched and unclenched in his lap, and she thought for a moment he was going to be sick.

“Raped?” he choked. His face filled with feelings of such violence and horror she hated herself for having told him. He despised Victoria. Like so many others, he felt she was unclean, not a victim but somehow a vessel which had invited and deserved its own spoiling. In telling him she had made a fearful misjudgment, irreparable.

She looked at Robert again.

His eyes were brimming with tears.

“She suffered that!” he whispered. “And all the time she was here, she was thinking of me … How … how could you have let me be so selfish?”

Now without thinking she grasped his hand and held it. “It wasn’t selfishness,” she said urgently. “You couldn’t know, and really I had no right to tell you. It is a very private thing. I … I couldn’t bear you thinking—” She stopped. That would certainly be better unspoken.

He smiled at her suddenly. “I know.”

She did not know whether he knew or not, and she was certainly not about to put it to the test.

“I shan’t tell her you told me,” he promised. “At least not yet. It would embarrass her, wouldn’t it.” That was a statement, not a question. “And I shall not tell my parents. It is not my secret to share, and I think they may not see it as it should be seen.”

She knew he was certainly right about that. Bernd did not consider Victoria Stanhope a suitable friend for his son in any permanent sense, let alone more than that. But relief overwhelmed her like a great and blessed warmth, a taste of sweetness.

“Isn’t she the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen?” Robert said earnestly, his eyes bright and gentle. “Thank you for bringing her to me, Hester. I shall be grateful to you forever for that.”

11

RATHBONE BEGAN HIS DEFENSE of Zorah Rostova with a kind of despair. At the beginning, his worst fear had been that he would not be able to save her from disgrace and possibly a considerable financial punishment. He had hoped to be able to mitigate it by showing that her intention had been mistaken but honorable.

Now he was struggling to save her from the rope.

The court was packed till the room seemed airless, the people so tightly crammed together one could hear the rub of fabric on fabric, the squeak of boots, the creak of whalebone as women breathed. He could smell damp wool from a thousand coats come in from the rain. The floor was slippery with drips and puddles. Every scrap of air seemed already to have been breathed before. The windows steamed up with the exhalation.

Pressmen sat elbow to elbow, hardly able to move sufficiently to write. Pencils were sharp, licked ready. Paper was damp in shaking hands.

The jury was somber. One man with white whiskers fidgeted constantly with his handkerchief. Another smiled fleetingly at Gisela and then looked quickly away again. None looked at Zorah.

The judge instructed Rathbone to begin.

Rathbone rose to his feet and called Stephan von Emden. The usher repeated the name, and his voice was swallowed by the thick, crowded room. There was no echo.

Everyone waited, necks craned. Their eyes followed him as he came in, crossed the floor and climbed the steps to the stand. Since he had been called for the defense, it was assumed he was in Zorah’s favor. The animosity could be felt in a wave of anger from the gallery.

He was sworn in.

Rathbone moved forward, feeling more vulnerable than he could ever remember in all the countless times he had done this. He had had bad cases before, clients about whom he felt dubious, clients in whom he believed but felt inadequate to defend. Never before had he been so aware of his own misjudgments and his own fallibility. He did not even feel confident he would not add to them today. The only thing he believed in totally was Hester’s loyalty to him, not that she thought he was right but that she would be there at his side to support him regardless,