jury, "that the moment has finally come to argue the case of my much persecuted client."
Hawkins, for the respondent: that's how the papers describe him, Fido remembers.
"I regret that the adjournment was necessary. But I have the fullest confidence that despite all the arguments prejudicial to Helen Codrington you heard two weeks ago, you will have held your judgement in righteous suspense, remembering that your verdict is one of moral life or death for the lady. This is a tragic story," Hawkins goes on sonorously, "of an ill-matched couple who, by British law, I trust you will find, must remain married for the rest of their days and make the best of it. Such a verdict will teach a valuable lesson to husbands, that if they choose to live more or less apart from their wives, they cannot, at some future period of their own convenience, shake off the yoke they have come to find heavy."
Fido's eyes seek out Harry, sitting beside his lawyers. In profile, he's a wooden figurehead, weathered by storms.
"The respondent is of a lively and artless disposition," admits Hawkins, "given to speaking in superlatives, and kicking against the chains of custom. Unwise, perhaps, in agreeing in her carefree girlhood to become the helpmeet of a sober naval officer in his middle years—unwise, I grant you, but never criminal."
A few snickers from the audience.
Hawkins looks graver. "Raised in the relaxed atmospheres of India and Italy, my client has foreign habits, such as letting gentlemen escort her at night, or conversing with them while sitting up in bed. These habits may arouse your English distaste, but it would be most unfair to judge them by English rules of propriety."
Does anyone believe a word this man is saying? Fido wonders.
"A web of malicious, salacious innuendo has been all my learned friend has offered to prove Mrs. Codrington's misconduct," remarks Hawkins. "For a couple to live separate lives, even with each other's full sanction, is dangerous, especially for the wife. A husband's frequent visits to another woman—in this case, Mrs. Watson," he adds darkly, "are generally assumed to be harmless, whereas a wife's friendship with another man is vulnerable to the most sordid suspicions."
Well, that much is true, Fido admits; there's nothing symmetrical in marriage. If Fido didn't know the truth—if Helen were any other woman in the world—she'd probably give her the benefit of the doubt.
"But the petitioner was fully aware of his wife's friendships," Hawkins points out, "and did nothing to curtail them. Regarding Lieutenant Mildmay: may I—need I—point out that my client would hardly have asked for him to be examined if she were conscious of the least guilt in her relations with him? Mildmay's declining to be interviewed may be due to a natural dread of publicity, or perhaps some lower motive: it is not impossible that he may feel some enmity towards her for refusing him her favours..."
Fido almost admires the light way the man drops in these outrageous suggestions.
"We have been told of wild conversations, private trysts and assignations," Hawkins sweeps on, "but all this testimony has been circumstantial and contradictory. We have heard inferences, not facts, from a shabby line-up of witnesses, including an embittered housekeeper, a footman discharged for a brutish attack on a fellow servant, and the most patently hostile of former friends, Emily Watson," says the barrister with a handsomely curled lip. "Much of this so-called evidence is obscene fantasy. My learned friend has asked you to believe, for instance, that a lady and gentleman would commit adultery in an upright position on a quay under full dazzling moonlight! Or on a cabin bench of no more than twelve inches in width, on a journey by gondola of no more than ten minutes!"
"Three would do," shouts someone from the gallery, which provokes roars of mirth.
Fido goes hot. Unspeakable things can all be spoken in this packed, stifling room: it's a little hell at the heart of the metropolis where a sort of alchemy turns everything to dirt.
After a brief hiatus as Judge Wilde orders the offender found and ejected from the court, he gives Hawkins a warning.
"The court must pardon my explicitness, my Lord," says Hawkins magnificently, "since it is the tool required to hack through the thickets of innuendo that threaten to ensnare my client."
Now he calls his witnesses one by one: another boatman who denies that the gondola got particularly out of trim on the nights when Mrs. Codrington was in it with either of her escorts; another