you explain what you mean, Signor Scichma?" asks Bovill.
"It sway on one side, so we have trouble rowing," says the boatman, with an expressive movement of his hand.
"It swayed such that it was evident the two persons inside were sitting close together on the same bench, rather than on opposite benches?"
"I object, my Lord." Her barrister, Hawkins, has risen to his full height, suddenly fiery. "Unwarranted conclusions!"
Judge Wilde scratches one white, rampant eyebrow. "Mr. Bovill, if you'd care to rephrase your question?"
"Certainly, my Lord. Signor Scichma, what did you believe was the cause?"
"Just how you said. The two of them sit together."
Helen rolls her eyes; these are merely word games.
"It make me think of bad things," the boatman adds, like a schoolboy currying favour with the master. "I laugh with the other men about it."
Helen can hardly believe her future's going to hinge on the movement of a boat in a choppy harbour.
Hawkins rises elegantly to cross-examine the witness about what he derides as this "tale of a tub." Apart from insisting that it's in a boat's nature to sway, he seems to Helen to achieve nothing in particular.
Here comes the second witness, and Helen's stomach knots, because she knows him all too well: George Duff, that loathsome footman with the greasy hair. How did she put up with him for five whole years?
Duff's grudge gives him fluency. "Well, sometimes on landing, he'd wish her good night, Mildmay would, but sometimes he'd go with her into Admiralty House."
"And remain there?" Bovill prompts.
"Yes, sir, for twenty minutes. Or an hour even," Duff adds, less plausibly. "In a little sitting room that had a sofa in it. With the lights out."
Lying hound, thinks Helen. The lights were hardly ever out.
The woman sitting in front of Helen squeezes her companion's arm with glee. Helen has noticed that a lot of these females have come along in pairs, for mutual encouragement.
"Where would the petitioner be, while this was going on?" asks Bovill.
"Retired for the night, sir. Or sitting up writing in his office, not to be disturbed."
"Did you ever go into this sitting room while your mistress was there with Mildmay?"
"No, sir," says Duff with mild regret, shaking his hair out of his eyes, "but once I went into the passage leading into it—"
"When was this?"
"Late in i860. Or perhaps early in 1861," he says, eyes flicking from side to side. "I saw Mildmay standing with his arm round her neck." He mimes it, slinging his arm lecherously around an invisible woman.
Helen's troubled by a sudden sense of the warm weight of Alex Mildmay's arm. He was a sweet fellow—or at least she thought so till today, when she learned that he wouldn't so much as sign his name to save her. These men! Do they all hate women, or is it some knack they have of putting the past behind them as if on the other side of a thick pane of glass?
"And what did you do?" Bovill asks.
"I went away to the servants' quarters," says Duff virtuously.
On and on he testifies. Sounds on the dark staircase at Admiralty House; whisperings and rustling of dresses, exclamations, and the drawing of breath. A scrap of fabric found on the stairs after a visit by Colonel Anderson that Duff claims matched a certain rip in Mrs. Codrington's bodice that he noticed another day. This is beginning to sound like the kind of smut gentlemen keep in a locked bookcase, thinks Helen. Bovill produces a little model of the staircase, which prompts some satiric applause. Who makes these models, she wonders? Deft, slim-fingered children in some sweatshop in Soho?
Perhaps a third of Duff's allegations correspond to vague memories of Helen's. But of course the jury won't know the difference between his half-truths and his pure fictions. Nor does he mention all the wearisome days Helen spent fulfilling the duties of consort to the admiral-superintendent of the dockyards. Nor all the time with her girls, when she wasn't a bad mother, not by any reckoning.
She feels a little relieved when Hawkins stands up to cross-examine the witness. "Mr. Duff," he drawls, "would you agree that you displayed antipathy towards your mistress?"
The footman squirms, and tucks an oily strand of hair behind his ear. "Well. She frequently made complaints of me without cause."
"For instance?"
"That I wouldn't take my hat off when the host was carried by in a procession."
Actually, Helen had forgotten that piece of insolence.
"You're not insinuating that Mrs. Codrington is a Roman Catholic," says Hawkins sternly.