Her eyes flick between the judge and jury. "The outward skin of that intimacy survived," she says, stammering, "even when it was dead within."
"The rankest hypocrisy!"
"I was anxious not to distress the admiral by any open scandal—"
Hawkins narrows his eyes. "Logic will suggest to the gentlemen of the jury that either you were lying in this letter, with its warm declarations of sisterly love, or that you're lying now: that there was no breach, because you did not in 1862 believe the woman you addressed so dotingly to be adulterous, since the alleged confession never took place."
"Not so, not so." Mrs. Watson takes a drink of water, swallows as if it's ground glass.
Hawkins leaps on. "How is it, I wonder, that you can recall with such precision the date of the alleged confession?"
"I noted it down in my memorandum book."
His slim eyebrows shoot up. "With what intention?"
"None. I hardly know. On a sort of impulse—"
"An impulse, a plan, a plot, in fact, someday to destroy your dearest Helen's marriage?"
Bovill stumbles to his feet. "I object, my Lord, in the strongest—"
"I should be happy to rephrase that," concedes Hawkins. "Mrs. Watson, were you anticipating that you would one day give evidence against her in a divorce case?"
"No!"
"A divorce case, in fact, of which you are the origin, the prime mover. It was you, was it not, a clergyman's wife," Hawkins barks before she can answer, "who when the petitioner called on you last month, lost not a moment in encouraging his jealous imaginings. Far from attempting to pour Christian unction on the troubled waters of that marriage, you immediately hired a spy for the purposes of surveillance on his wife. Pretty sharp work, if I may say so!"
"The admiral was in great distress," Mrs. Watson protests.
"So you found him a solicitor for the purpose of obtaining a divorce—in direct defiance of the teachings of your husband's church, by the way. You egged him on to cast off a lady you'd always envied for her personal charms, her lovely children, her lofty position in Maltese society. A lady on whom you'd privately vowed to have vengeance, ever since she'd complained of your fawning over her husband."
"Come, come," begins Bovill, half-rising.
But Hawkins has already spun to address the jury. "It will be for you, gentlemen, to decide where there is any grain of truth in all this tarradiddle.
Whether this false friend turned open enemy can be trusted to report on private conversations with the respondent, who, as Mrs. Watson knows, is barred from defending herself. Whether perhaps some talk on the subject of Lieutenant Mildmay's unreciprocated infatuation with the respondent did pass between the two ladies, but Mrs. Watson has distorted and exaggerated it. Or whether in fact the tale of the stained dress and the confession, brought out today like a rabbit from a hat, is the most egregious coup de théâtre."
Strangely enough, Helen's enjoying herself.
"I am not well," whimpers Mrs. Watson. "May I be granted a rest?"
"Hm. You were inexhaustible in answering my learned friend's questions," remarks Hawkins. "But I have just one more."
"Will you carry on?" Judge Wilde asks her.
"If I must."
"On September the twenty-fifth of this year, the day the admiral deserted his wife and home, did you take away their two daughters?"
"He was gracious enough to consign them to my care," Mrs. Watson says faintly. "Mine and my husband's."
"And have these girls—at the tender ages of eleven and twelve—been allowed to meet, correspond with, or even glimpse their mother since that date?"
"They have not."
She steps down, looking older.
Was that antidote enough to the woman's poison? Helen wonders. Hawkins is a superb performer, but the story of the so-called confession still seems to linger on the courtroom's stifling air. It will be a sad twist if what damns Helen is not the truth but these lies.
She's suddenly bone-tired. She barely listens as Bovill continues his narrative: the departure of the Watsons, the transfer of the respondent's affections from Mildmay to Anderson, then Admiral Codrington's receiving orders to return to England in the summer of 1864, and Colonel Anderson's fortuitously coincidental request for home leave. She only comes to attention when Bovill remarks, "Her old friend Miss Faithfull, as we will prove, aided and abetted the sordid affair."
Fido, Fido, Helen thinks giddily, you may run to the ends of the earth but you can't escape your share of punishment.
Bovill's holding up a volume that Helen recognizes as her leather-bound appointments book.