Delacourt smiled and the anger seeped out of him, his body easing in his chair into a different kind of tension.
“I won’t wrap it up for you, Commander. Rape is a crime that is desperately difficult to prosecute. That is partly why I chose to specialize in such cases. I like to delude myself that I can achieve the impossible.”
He steepled his fingers. “People react to it in different ways. Most often, I believe, it is not even reported. Women are so ashamed and so hopeless of any justice that they tell no one. Strangers tend to think they must have deserved it in some way. That is the most comfortable thing to think, especially for other women. Then it cannot happen to them, because they do not deserve it.”
He moved slightly again. “Some people believe that if a woman defends herself thoroughly, she will not be raped.” He smiled bitterly. “Only beaten to a pulp, or murdered, which would, of course, show she was a virtuous woman, albeit a dead one.
“Men whose daughters are raped feel the rage you just described,” Delacourt went on, his face puckered with his own anger and sense of futility. “The younger the girl, the deeper the pain and the fury, and usually the sense of personal failure, that they did not prevent the atrocity from happening. What use are you as a father if your child is violated in this terrible way, and you were not there to stop it?”
Pitt could imagine it only too easily.
Delacourt was watching him. “We don’t want our children to grow up, except in the sense of happiness,” he said. “We want them to find someone who will love them, when they are ready for the idea, not before. We want them to have children of their own, and if they are sons then to have successful careers—all without the pain and the failures that we have had.”
Pitt shook his head, not able to find words.
“We know it’s not possible,” Delacourt agreed. “But we are still not ready for reality. If it is our wives who are raped, then we are confused, outraged not only for her but for ourselves. She has been violated, and something we considered ours has been taken away—not only from her but from us. Life will not ever be the same again. Somebody must be punished. Our civilized minds say it should be long imprisonment. Our more primitive core demands death. In our dreams that we would not admit to, we would accept mutilation as well.”
Pitt opened his mouth to protest, then merely sighed, and again said nothing.
Delacourt had not yet finished. “And thoughts we don’t want to have enter our minds.” Delacourt had not yet finished. “Was it really rape? Did she in some way invite it? Surely she must have. Why did it happen to her, and not to someone else? She’s different now. She doesn’t want anyone to touch her, even me! And I’m not certain that I want to touch her anyway. This man has ruined my life. I want to ruin his, slowly and with exquisite pain, as he has done to me.
Delacourt leaned forward a little. “And if it is brought to trial she will have to tell the whole court, detail by detail, everything he did to her, and how hard she fought, or not. He will be there, in the dock, watching, listening and reliving it himself. Possibly as you look at him you will see the light in his eyes, his tongue flickering over his lips. His lawyer will say everything he can either to suggest she has the wrong man, is mistaken, hysterical, deliberately lying—or else that she was perfectly willing at the time, but is now crying otherwise to try to protect her reputation. Perhaps she is afraid that she is with child, and her husband knows perfectly well it is not his, but a lover’s?”
“I am back to the beginning, then,” Pitt replied, now paralyzed by futility. “We can do nothing. We rule an empire that stretches around the world, and we cannot protect women from the depraved among us?”
Delacourt gave a very slight shrug, rueful, but there was a gentleness in his face. “It’s not impossible, Commander, just extremely difficult. And even when we succeed, the cost is high—not to us, but to the women. You have to be certain that you think it’s worth it. Are you sure you are willing not only to live with the result yourself,