challenging him to be rude enough to argue.
Rathbone turned over the conversation again on the ride home. He took a hansom because he no longer kept a carriage of his own. He could easily afford it, but without Margaret to use it, it was an unnecessary luxury.
Was there really going to be a major fraud case brought against a church, or was York simply playing a game with Allan and Rathbone to see whose ambition was greater? He considered that quite a serious possibility. He had sensed a detachment in York, as if other people’s feelings were of amusement to him, but of no concern. He found it disconcerting. The man was clever, but he could not like him.
Beata York was a different matter altogether. There was a grace in her that he found quite beautiful. Even sitting here in the hansom jolting over the cobble in the flickering light of street lamps, if he closed his eyes he could see her face again quite clearly in his mind’s eye. He imagined the curve of her cheek, the quick humor in her eyes, and then the loneliness he had seen in that single smile, when she disagreed with York but could do no more than hint at it because of the restrictions of company. Was it different when they were alone? Was the distance between them less disguised?
The church case he mentioned would be very difficult indeed to handle. People’s religious feelings ran deep and were often completely irrational. It would take considerable skill to disentangle the law of the land from what might be perceived to be God’s law. The trouble was everybody had a different picture of God. Opposing views were not considered interesting, but rather all too often were felt to be blasphemous, and as such to be punished. Some religions even considered it the duty of their followers to undertake the delivering of such punishment themselves.
And who were the victims of such a theft? That was a whole other complicated area.
If it came to trial, did Rathbone want that case? It would be an honor to be given it, wouldn’t it? Or would he get it simply because he was too new on the bench to have the power and the connections to pass it off to someone else?
But it would be interesting, a challenge to his skill, and if he succeeded he might build up a reputation for dealing with complicated and sensitive issues. Dangerous, perhaps. The risk of failure always carried a price, but the rewards were correspondingly high. He had no one to consider but himself. Why not? Perhaps something with high stakes to play for, whether he won or lost, was what he needed.
He sat back in the hansom and watched the dark houses slip by him. Occasionally he saw chinks of light and imagined families sitting together, perhaps talking over the day. Where there were no lights they might already be in bed. He passed little other traffic and what there was moved briskly. Everyone had somewhere to go.
Yes, he would like the case, if he were given it. He would not look for excuses to pass it on.
A few weeks later, into the real warmth of the summer, Rathbone stood in the doorway of his drawing room and gazed at the immaculate beauty of the garden. Beyond the shade of the poplars the sun was hot. The first roses were in full bloom. The house next door had a rambler that had spread up into the lower branches of the trees, and its clusters of white blossoms gleamed in the sun.
His eyes took in the beauty of it, but it was curiously meaningless to him. His instinct to turn and say “Isn’t that lovely?” was so strong he had to remind himself there was nobody in the house to say it to. It was far too personal a thing to say to a servant. A maid would think it inappropriate and perhaps even be alarmed at the familiarity of it. A butler or footman would be embarrassed. To any of them it would betray his loneliness, and one did not do that. Servants knew perfectly well that masters or mistresses were flawed, made mistakes. No one was more aware of that than a lady’s maid or a valet. They knew of physical weaknesses and many emotional ones as well. But it was all unspoken.
He had lived alone quite happily before his marriage. In fact, long ago, when he had been in love with Hester and considering asking her to marry him, it has been the loss of his privacy, the thought of always having someone else in the house that had stopped him.
Could he have made her happy? Probably not the same way Monk did. He had not Monk’s fierce, brave, erratic passion. That was what Hester needed, to match her own.
But would Rathbone have tried, if he had had the courage to risk the hurt as well as the happiness? Now he would never know.
Should he have behaved differently with Margaret? He had been so certain of her, of them, in the beginning; it seemed incredible now how that had changed. Was he deluding himself? He remembered it all so clearly with a sharpness that was like the edge of a knife on the skin. She was not beautiful, but she had had a grace that was worth far more to him. That was an inner quality. Too often beauty masked the lack of anything deeper. How long could one remain fascinated by the glow of lovely skin or the perfect curve of a cheek or a neck if there were no courage or passion beneath it, no laughter or imagination, above all, no tenderness?
He had seen those things in Margaret, or he thought he had. Was it his fault that they had not survived her father’s disgrace and Rathbone’s failure to save him? It was unclear to him what else he could or should have done to try and fix them.
It was, after all, Margaret who had insisted Rathbone defend Arthur Ballinger. He had seemed the obvious choice then. He had been the most brilliant lawyer in London. That was not an affectation, simply the truth. And both of them had been certain that Ballinger was innocent.
The unraveling evidence had shown Rathbone his error, but Margaret had never accepted it. Even now, after Ballinger’s death, she refused. She still blamed Rathbone. He could see her face in his mind’s eye, ash pale, twisted with fury and a pain she could not bear. She had accused him of putting ambition before loyalty, love of himself before love of his family. She believed he had sacrificed her father on the altar of his own pride.
Nothing he said could persuade her that he had had no choice. Ballinger had been guilty, and whatever Rathbone had wanted, he could not prove anything else. God knew he had tried! To begin with, the evidence had been slight and could have been used to argue several different conclusions. Then, one by one, other events had driven the case to the final tragedy. Rathbone would never forget the horror of that, but nothing he could say or do mitigated his guilt in Margaret’s eyes. She knew Ballinger only as her father, the man who had loved her and protected her all her life. She could not see him as a blackmailer, a criminal.
Rathbone was only the man she had married and loved briefly. She had begged for his help, assumed his loyalty, and could not forgive his failure. In her eyes, there were but two possibilities: either her father was not as she had believed or her husband was not. It was all her life, all the memories, the fabric of who she was compared with a short marriage to a man she had cared for but perhaps never been passionately in love with. Looking back, Rathbone thought there had never been a real conflict in her mind. Of course she had chosen her father.
After his terrible death she had no longer wanted to be under the same roof as Rathbone. Her grief, her rage had been overwhelming. She had taken the few belongings that were hers and gone back to comfort her mother in her new widowhood and social disgrace.
At first Rathbone had believed that she would return within a few weeks, but time had gone on, and it was now more than a year since she had left. Several times he had attempted to bridge the gulf between them. He had thought she would realize that she was being unfair, blaming him for Ballinger’s death. She would accept that there was never anything he could have done to save him.
But every attempt at reconciliation had only driven the wedge deeper between them. Now he began to question whether they had ever loved each other at all, or if it had been more a matter of wanting to love, wanting not to be alone, and therefore seeing the good, building on it, slowly sharing more of the small pleasures of their daily lives.
When tragedy had come the fabric had proved too weak.
Should he have loved her more? Or should he have waited for a searing passion, a love that governed his whole life, before he married?
That was ridiculous. How many people even felt such a thing? Perhaps it was no more than a fever that passed anyway. Infatuation is not love. Love needs trust and balance. It needs both sharing and also the ability to be at peace in silence. Perhaps it needs a common faith in certain values, in honor and compassion, and the courage to go forward in the face of pain. It has to contain mercy, and gratitude for the joys of life, on both sides.
