confess my ignorance.”
“That is an excellent decision, all things considered,” Arabella snapped.
In spite of herself, Charlotte laughed, which was the last thing Arabella expected. Her argument was derailed.
Emily stepped in quickly. “Perhaps we should attend the trial and at least become somewhat informed about the affair?” she suggested.
“Half of London will be there,” Marie said, nodding her head.
“I daresay the other half will be at the other miserable trial,” Flora remarked with a shudder. “I think I prefer not to know anything about that one. I should have nightmares.”
“I’m sure you have no need,” Marie said comfortingly. “You are in no danger whatever.”
For a moment Charlotte was not certain what they were referring to.
“Another news item about which you know nothing?” Arabella inquired with a slight smirk, seeing Charlotte’s blank expression. “Why, Catherine Quixwood was having an affair with a younger man, and he assaulted and then murdered her. All dreadfully sordid. No doubt they will hang him.”
Charlotte felt her fury return like a tidal wave, all but taking her breath away. Any consideration of Emily’s party was swept aside.
“No, I had no idea,” she said with cloying sweetness. “But then, I do not interest myself very much in other people’s more … intimate lives. As you so correctly say, it is all dreadfully sordid.” She enunciated each word with distaste. “I merely know of Catherine Quixwood as a woman who had great charm. That was all I wished to know.”
Flora stifled a giggle. Charlotte realized with sudden perception that she also disliked Arabella, but could not afford to let it be known. Now she remembered the sense of freedom she had felt at being no longer involved in Society, the loss of its glamour far outweighed by the opposing gain of autonomy.
Emily rushed into the thick silence to rescue what she could of her party.
“I feel so sorry for poor Rawdon Quixwood,” she said, looking from one to the other of them, except Charlotte. “He must be suffering appallingly. I can’t even imagine it.”
“What a terrible thing,” Marie agreed. “Is there anything more painful than total, devastating disillusion? Poor man. He must be distracted with grief.”
“Disillusion?” Charlotte heard her voice become hard-edged with incredulity. “His wife was raped and beaten half to death, then in her unbearable pain she dosed herself too heavily with laudanum, and died of that. I should imagine
“My dear Mrs …. Pitt?” Arabella hesitated as if she were not certain as to exactly who Charlotte might be. “Decent women do not get raped. Perhaps you did not read in the newspapers that she let the man in herself? I ask you, what respectable woman dismisses the servants for the night, then lets a younger man into the house and entertains him alone, while her husband is out?”
Charlotte raised her eyebrows. “Oh, was he younger? You clearly read different articles of the newspapers than I do. Or perhaps different newspapers altogether.”
Arabella’s face flared red. It was an insult she could not ignore. Ladies with the slightest pretension to gentility did not read sensational papers. “It is common knowledge!” she snapped.
“Very common,” Charlotte said under her breath. Only Flora, sitting closest to her, heard it. She affected a fit of sneezing to stifle her laughter. Sabine handed her a glass of water.
“Standards are slipping all over the place,” Marie remarked, perhaps to fill the silence. “That poor Portuguese girl committed suicide as well. Heaven only knows why.”
Sabine looked at her in surprise. “Well, everyone says she fell in love with Neville Forsbrook, and when he didn’t want her, she completely lost her senses and threw herself out of the window. Far too highly strung, these younger girls. And to blame young Forsbrook is awful. His poor father; first he lost his wife, now this wretched scandal. Not that it’s in the remotest way his fault, of course.”
“Yes, his wife,” Flora said. “She died-”
“She died in an accident,” Emily interrupted.
“Nobody imagined she was having an affair,” Arabella added. “It was a tragic accident in a coach.”
“An ordinary hansom, I believe,” Sabine corrected her. “Late at night. The road was wet and something made the horse bolt. Poor cabby was killed as well. Dreadful.”
“Such a terrible thing to happen,” Charlotte said with as much sincerity as she could manage through her anger. She remembered Vespasia telling her of the tragedy. She hadn’t known Eleanor Forsbrook, but she would not have wished her any harm. Her son’s brutality would surely have caused her as much grief as it would any other woman. “Perhaps we should treasure our own safety with a little more gratitude.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Arabella said coldly.
Flora looked at her with a bright smile. “I do. You are perfectly right, Mrs. Pitt. We take our happiness and our safety far too much for granted. I am alive and well. It is a beautiful day and I am in a lovely garden, among friends. I shall enjoy it to its fullest.” She looked at Charlotte, meeting her eyes directly. “Thank you for a most timely reminder. I’m so glad you came this afternoon.”
There was another moment of startled silence, then Emily picked up a dish of tiny cakes and passed them round. She bit her lip to stop herself from smiling, and carefully looked away from Charlotte’s eyes.
Pitt stood in his office facing Rafael Castelbranco. He had dreaded this moment since he had heard the date set for Alban Hythe’s trial. The Portuguese ambassador was white-faced, except for the bruised shadows around his eyes and the hectic spots of color high on his cheeks. If Pitt had not known his story, he would have thought he was drunk.
“This man raped a married woman with whom he was having an affair. You arrested him and you are now bringing him to trial,” Castelbranco said, his voice wavering, catching in his throat as if he could barely force the words out. “If he is found guilty, you will hang him, and her family will have at least a sense of justice. Yet you
He made it sound absurd, outrageous, as if it were a deliberate action against him. He was trembling with the savagery of his emotions.
“Rafael,” Pitt said gently, “I do not know who raped Angeles. I had believed it was Neville Forsbrook, but the husband of Catherine Quixwood, the married woman who was raped, says that he was in the company of young Forsbrook at the time we believe Angeles was attacked. Also, although I do not doubt that it did happen, we have no proof. In Mrs. Quixwood’s case her beaten body was found on the floor of her own house. There was no place for doubt as to what happened, only as to who the man was.”
Castelbranco gulped. “It was Forsbrook. Angeles told her mother so.”
Pitt knew better than to argue. Castelbranco believed his daughter. He had to: every loyalty in him demanded it.
“If I could prove it, I would charge Forsbrook and bring him to trial,” Pitt said with absolute honesty. “But if I charge him and can’t bring it to trial, then public sympathy will be with him. If I can rake up enough evidence to try him, and fail to convict-which needs evidence beyond a reasonable doubt-then I will have made all the details public and given him the opportunity to say whatever he pleases about Angeles, blacken her reputation with whatever he wants to invent. No one can claim innocence or purity for every minute of his or her life-you and I both know that. And an accused man has the right to defend himself.”
Castelbranco stared at him in horror, swaying a little on his feet.
“Rafael,” Pitt continued, his voice even lower, “the jury will be composed entirely of men, as it is everywhere. Some of them may be fathers, some may not. Most of them will have seen women who were not their wives, whom they lusted after, particularly when they were young and unmarried. They will all, at times, have been tempted to behave badly, and I daresay most of them will have done so, to one degree or another. And most of them will have been accused of things they considered unfair, whether related to love affairs or not. Forsbrook would be there, sober and sad-faced, swearing to his innocence, very English, very gentlemanly. He will say that she was beautiful and he complimented her. She misunderstood, her English not being fluent.”
Castelbranco blinked back tears.
Pitt forced the pictures of Angeles out of his mind, and then-with even more difficulty-made himself forget Jemima: her passionate face so like Charlotte’s; the trust in her eyes when she looked at him, the father who had
