interest. Instead he arranged for her to marry Fenton Pole, a very agreeable young man who has treated her well."
"But she has still not forgiven her father, even after this time?"
"No."
"Why not? Such a grudge seems excessive."
"She - she was very ill," she said defensively. "Very disturbed - after the birth of her child. It sometimes happens." She stared at him, her head high. "That was when she began to be angry again. It has largely passed."
"Mrs. Carlyon - was it your daughter, and not you, who killed your husband?"
She swung around to him, her eyes wide, very blue. She really did have a most unusual face. Now it was full of anger and fear, ready to fight in an instant.
"No - Sabella had nothing to do with it! I have already told you, Mr. Rathbone, it was I who killed him. I absolutely forbid you to bring her into it, do you understand me? She is totally innocent. I shall discharge you if you suggest for a moment anything else!"
And that was all he could achieve. She would say nothing more. He rose to his feet.
"I will see you again, Mrs. Carlyon. In the meantime speak of this to no one, except with my authority. Do you understand?" He did not know why he bothered to say this. All his instincts told him to decline the case. He could do very little to help a woman who deliberately killed her husband without acceptable reason, and a flirtation at a dinner party was not an acceptable reason to anyone at all. Had she found him in bed with another woman it might be mitigating, especially if it were in her own house, and with a close friend. But even that was not much. Many a woman had found her husband in bed with a maid and been obliged to accept in silence, indeed to keep a smile on her face. Society would be more likely to criticize her for being clumsy enough to find them, when with a little discretion she could have avoided placing herself - and him - in such a situation.
"If that is what you wish," she said without interest. "Thank you for coming, Mr. Rathbone." She did not even ask who had sent him.
"It is what I wish," he answered. "Good day, Mrs. Carlyon. " What an absurd parting. How could she possibly have a good anything?
* * * * *
Rathbone left the prison in a turmoil of mind. Every judgment of intelligence decreed that he decline the case. And yet when he hailed a hansom he gave the driver instructions to go to Grafton Street, where William Monk had his rooms, and not to High Holborn and Peverell Erskine's offices, where he could tell him politely that he felt unable to be of any real assistance to Alexandra Carlyon.
All the way riding along in the cab at a steady trot his mind was finding ways of refusing the case, and the most excellent reasons why he should. Any competent barrister could go through the motions of pleading for her, and for half the sum. There was really nothing to say. It might well be more merciful not to offer her hope, or to drag out the proceedings, which would only prolong the pain of what was in the end inevitable.
And yet he did not reach forward and tap on the window to redirect the cabby. He did not even move in his seat until they stopped at Grafton Street and he climbed down and paid the man. He even watched him move away along towards the Tottenham Court Road and turn the corner without calling him back.
A running patterer came along the footpath, a long lean man with fair hair flopping over his brow, his singsong voice reciting in easy rhymes some domestic drama ending in betrayal and murder. He stopped a few yards from Rathbone, and immediately a couple of idle passersby hesitated to hear the end of his tale. One threw him a threepenny piece.
A costermonger walked up me middle of the street with his barrow, crying his wares, and a cripple with a tray of matches hobbled up from Whitfield Street.
There was no purpose in standing on the paving stones. Rathbone went up and knocked on the door. It was a lodging house, quite respectable and spacious, very suitable for a single man of business or a minor profession. Monk would have no need of a house. From what he could remember