first gold coin he can find—a half-sovereign—and hurls it in the man's direction. But it hits the shiny paintwork of the cab and bounces into the gutter.
"All I beg of you is, let me see my babies!"
"Hold your tongue for one moment," he barks in her face. He stoops, claws the half-sovereign out of the mud and holds it up for the driver. She's still clinging to his other arm.
The driver beams at him. "Well, now, that's what I call handsome..."
Harry turns away, towards the club's entrance, then—changing his mind—in the opposite direction. He walks a few steps, Helen a leaden shackle on his arm. What must they look like—a military lecher and his cast-off? "What can you possibly hope to gain by this, this exhibition?" he asks her, very low.
"They wouldn't let me into your club. They say you won't receive my letters. I'm at the brink of utter distraction!"
Something in her tone rings false to Harry. Is it just that he can no longer believe a word she says, since so much of what she's said to him over fifteen years of marriage has turned out to be claptrap?
"I'll take back everything my solicitor's said of you, all the, what are they called, countercharges," she promises with a gulp so violent it sounds as if she's retching up a stone. "I'll bow to your will in everything, Harry—if only you and the girls will come home."
He stares at her.
"What's done is done, but let's put it behind us, and try to be content in the years that remain to us. Come home, my love!" And she stretches up, on tiptoe, and twines her arms around his neck, and moves to kiss him. On Pall Mall, at ten past noon.
Harry's about to hurl her from him. He can feel it in his hands already, the satisfaction it will give him to rip Helen's arms (like coils of strangling ivy) away from his neck, to shove her away and see her drop into the gutter, revealed for all to see as the broken whore she is.
But something freezes his hands. The not-quite-convincing delivery of her lines? Something guarded, even calculating, in the back of her wide blue eyes? Whatever the hint is, it's enough to make him stand very still—hold hard, old boy, hold hard—while Helen hangs around his neck, planting desperate, muffled kisses on his beard. Everything my solicitor's said of you: he repeats her words to himself. All the, what are they called, countercharges. (As if she wouldn't recall the term!) Cruelty, yes. Husbandly brutality. That must be what she's hoping to provoke with her coarse effusions, with her humid lips: one public act of violence from Harry that just may be enough to sway a jury.
So he stands very still, instead, and takes a long breath. It doesn't matter who's gawking at this strange pair, on Pall Mall; what is vital is for Harry to stay out of this woman's trap. With the infinite delicacy of a policeman dismantling a bomb, he reaches behind his neck to unknot Helen's hands. "I know your game," he whispers in her ear, "and I'm not playing."
She looks back at him, eyes burning, unblinking.
It takes him considerable effort to undo her plump pink fingers, but he does it so carefully, with such apparent tenderness, that it strikes him that passersby must take them for lovers oblivious to the world.
Subpoena
(Latin, "under penalty":
a writ commanding the presence of
a witness in court to give testimony)
The "old maid" of 1861 is an exceedingly cheery personage, running about untrammelled by husband or children; now visiting her relatives' country houses, now taking her month in town, now off to a favourite pension on Lake Geneva, now scaling Vesuvius or the Pyramids...
Frances Power Cobbe,
"What Shall We Do with Our Old Maids?" (1862)
More men than women in the first few issues, until our audience is established," suggests Emily Davies, biting on the end of her pen.
"Quite," says Fido. Her mind is not on business, as she sits in her office at the press, but she hopes she's hiding it. Fido can't breathe properly; ever since Helen slammed the door of Taviton Street behind her, there's been a rigidity in all the passages of her lungs, like old India rubber gone brittle. At the office she keeps all the windows closed, to shut out the black smuts of the London autumn. At home she does the same, and smokes her Sweet Threes for hours, but they don't bring her any