such hopeless and foredoomed violence? Could she ever have imagined she would get away with it?
"Why did you kill him, Mrs. Carlyon?" he said urgently, leaning towards her. It was raining outside and the cell was dim, the air clammy.
She did not look away, but closed her eyes to avoid seeing him.
"I have told you! I was jealous of Louisa!"
"That is not true!"
"Yes it is." Still her eyes were closed.
"They will hang you," he said deliberately. He saw her wince, but she still kept her face towards his, eyes tight shut. "Unless we can find some circumstance that will at least in part explain what you did, they will hang you, Mrs. Carlyon! For heaven's sake, tell me why you did it." His voice was low, grating and insistent. How could he get through the shield of denial? What could he say to reach her mind with reality? He wanted to touch her, take her by those slender arms and shake sense into her. But it would be such a breach of all possible etiquette, it would shatter the mood and become more important, for the moment, than the issue that would save or lose her life.
"Why did you kill him?" he repeated desperately.
"Whatever you say, you cannot make it worse than it is already."
"I killed him because he was having an affair with Louisa," she repeated flatly. "At least I thought he was."
And he could get nothing further from her. She refused to add anything, or take anything from what she had said.
Reluctantly, temporarily defeated, he took his leave. She remained sitting on the cot, immobile, ashen-faced.
Outside in the street the rain was a steady downpour, the gutter filling, people hurrying by with collars up. He passed a newsboy shouting the latest headlines. It was something to do with a financial scandal and the boy caressed the words with relish, seeing the faces of passersby as they turned. "Scandal, scandal in the City! Financier absconds with fortune. Secret love nest! Scandal in the City!"
Rathbone quickened his pace to get away from it. They had temporarily forgotten Alexandra and the murder of General Carlyon, but as soon as the trial began it would be all over every front page and every newsboy would be crying out each day's revelations and turning them over with delight, poring over the details, imagining, condemning.
And they would condemn. He had no delusion that there would be any pity for her. Society would protect itself from threat and disruption. They would close ranks, and even the few who might feel some twinge of pity for her would not dare to admit it. Any woman who was in the same situation, or imagined herself so, would have even less compassion. If she herself had to endure it, why should Alexandra be able to escape? And no man whose eyes or thoughts had ever wandered, or who considered they might in the future, would countenance the notion that a wife could take such terrible revenge for a brief and relatively harmless indulgence of his very natural appetites. Carlyon's offense of flirtation, not even proved to be adultery, would be utterly lost in her immeasurably deeper offense of murder.
Was there anything at all Rathbone could do to help her? She had robbed him of every possible weapon he might have used. The only thing still left to him was time. But time to do what?
He passed an acquaintance, but was too absorbed' in thought to recognize him until he was twenty yards farther along the pavement. By then it was too late to retrieve his steps and apologize for having ignored his greeting.
The rain was easing into merely a spring squall. Bright shafts of sunlight shone fitfully on the wet pavement.
If he went into court with all he had at present he would lose. There would be no doubt of it. He could imagine it vividly, the feeling of helplessness as the prosecution demolished his case effortlessly, the derision of the spectators, the quiet and detached concern of the judge that there should be some semblance of a defense, the crowds in the gallery, eager for details and ultimately for the drama of conviction, the black cap and the sentence of death. Worse than those, he could picture the jury, earnest men, overawed by the situation, disturbed by the story and the inevitability of its end, and Alexandra herself, with the same white hopelessness he had seen in her face in the cell.