She clears her throat. "I understand you called at Langham Place, looking for me."
He finds himself helplessly matching her civil tone. "That's correct. I'm afraid I can't ask you into the club—"
"Rules," she says, nodding.
He throws a glance up and down Pall Mall. There's really nowhere a man and a woman of their class can go to speak to each other in private. "Would you—will you join me?" She says it squeamishly.
Harry thinks how it would sound in court. The petitioner and the hostile witness, glimpsed sitting close together in intimate tête-à-tête in a hansom. .. But everything sounds sordid to him nowadays; his imagination is contaminated. He opens the door and gets in.
Their knees almost touch. Harry busies himself unfolding and tugging at the leather door, until they're at least partially enclosed.
"Why do you persecute me?" Fido bursts out.
Harry stares at her in the dim. "Well, I like that!"
"This sealed letter your brother produced in court," she says. "Have you been plotting my destruction, all these years?"
He leans his elbows on his knees, till his face is only inches from hers. "You're the one who accused me of behaving like some crazed ape."
A sob escapes from her throat. "I was a guest in your house; I was only a girl. Can you look in your heart and deny, deny that you at least tried..."
"It must be your lack of experience of my sex that deludes you as to the brutishness of our appetites." He leans away, to study her more scientifically. "The fact is, not in my wildest dreams, not even if delirious or demented would I ever consider carnal relations with you."
She turns away, curling into herself with mortification.
His breathing is heavy. He knows he's being cruel, but she deserves it, and it may do her good. After a moment, he says, more gently, "But I rather think you're sincere in your belief that something of the sort happened."
"Of course I'm sincere!"
"Then you're a sad dupe. The story has Helen's dirty ingerprints all over it."
Fido stares at him.
He's getting somewhere, now. "However did she manage to convince you?"
She speaks in a small, hoarse voice. "I know what you're doing. You're taking advantage of my confusion as to what took place."
"Why on earth would you be confused?"
"I'd taken a syrup, for my asthma..."
"Ah," Harry groans. He sees it all now. Such simple stuff out of which Helen weaves her schemes.
"When I woke up you were just going out the door," she insists. "Can you look me in the eyes and swear to me that you never got into the bed, even—"
"Of course I can," he roars. "And in return, I ask you to trust what you do remember: in all the years you shared my home, I never did you any harm, did I?"
Fido only blinks.
"Wake up! Hasn't the witch deceived you, over and over?"
After a long moment, Fido shakes her head. "I grant you, Helen does exaggerate, sometimes. She sees things as if by limelight—"
"She lies," he corrects her, flatly, "with a monomaniacal disdain for the truth. She makes things up like a child who hardly knows the difference."
"You're hardly a neutral judge of her character."
He lets out a sort of laugh. "You're in thrall to her. I was too, once, so I recognize the symptoms. You mistake her firework displays for true feeling. Believe me," Harry says hoarsely, "you'll recover in the end, and regret it took you so long."
The moment teeters. Then Fido speaks coolly. "To business. This document your brother waved about—exactly what does it contain, may I ask?"
He almost admires her for standing her ground. He feels a surge of improvisatory brilliance. "Oh, you needn't trouble yourself about that, Miss Faithfull," he says, reverting to the formal. "It's in your power to keep it permanently sealed."
"They're speculating and joking about me in every coffee-house in London," she says, gesturing so violently she slaps the pleated leather door.
"Speculations and jokes will blow away like chaff," Harry tells her. "If you appear as my witness on the twenty-third—"
"Your witness?" Fido's voice is shrill.
He manages a smile. "Now you're back in London, my wife's side will serve you with a subpoena and compel you to appear, on pain of being charged with contempt of court."
"I know that."
"But only your conscience can instruct you what to say. As two rational beings—let's put an end to all this awfulness, shall we?"