Anne Perry - A Breach of Promise

There was a moment's silence, then the usher gathered his wits and called rather loudly for Isaac Wolff.

It took only a few moments for Wolff to come from the back of the court. He stumbled as he climbed the steps up to the witness stand again.

"Mr. Wolff," McKeever said in his soft voice. There was absolute silence in the room. No one in the gallery fidgeted or whispered. The jurors sat with eyes fixed on Wolff, their faces stiff with pity and embarrassment. Neither Rathbone nor Sacheverall stirred. Everyone strained to catch McKeever's words.

"Mr. Wolff, I am sorry to call you again when you must be feeling your bereavement most deeply," he said. "But I feel you are perhaps the only one able to offer us a proper explanation. Why did Killian Melville spend her life dressed as a man and to all outward purposes living the life of a man? Before you answer"-he smiled very slightly; it was an inner necessity which drove him, an emotion he could not stifle, and certainly one devoid of any shred of humor-"I offer you the court's unqualified apology for its accusation of sexual vice, or any kind of crime on your part or, of course, upon Miss Melville's."

A shadow of very bitter humor flashed in Wolff's eyes but did not touch his lips.

"Thank you, my lord." His voice was too flat to carry gratitude. He did not look at anyone in particular as he summoned the words to answer. His gaze seemed to be over the heads of the gallery, but his vision inward, into memory. "Actually, her name was Keelin. Her mother was half Irish. She simply changed the spelling a little to sound more masculine."

The court waited.

He took a few moments to master his composure. "She was brilliant," he began quietly, but his voice was raw. "Even as a child she was fascinated by beautiful buildings of all sorts. Her father was a keen scholar and the family spent much time in the Mediterranean-Italy, Greece, Egypt, Palestine. Keelin would walk for hours among the ruins of the greatest cities on earth. She has sketches of the Roman Forum, the Baths of Caracalla, the Colosseum, of course. And in the rest of Italy of the great triumphs of the Renaissance, the exquisite simplicity of the Tuscan villas, of Alberti, of Michelangelo's domes and basilicas."

Everyone in the room was listening with eyes intent upon Wolff's face. Rathbone looked at them discreetly. Their faces were filled with emotion as their imaginations journeyed with him, dreaming, thinking.

"But she loved the eastern architecture also," Wolff went on. "She admired the mosques of Turkey, the coolness and the light. She was fascinated with the dome of the Blue Mosque and how the ventilation was so superb the smoke from the candles never made a mark on the ceiling." A shadow of memory softened the harshness of his grief for a moment. "She talked about it endlessly. I don't think she was even aware of whether I was listening or not."

No one moved or made the slightest sound of interruption. McKeever's face was intent.

"And when her father went to Egypt"-Wolff was absorbed in memory-"she went as well. It was a whole new dimension of architecture, more ancient than anything else she had even imagined. She stood in the ruins of Karnak as if she had seen a revelation. Even the light was different. I remember her saying that so often. She always built for light-" He stopped abruptly as emotions overwhelmed him. He stood with his head high but his face averted. He was not ashamed, but it should have been a private thing.

McKeever looked around the room slowly, bidding them await Wolff's ability to begin again without further losing his composure.

Rathbone glanced at Barton Lambert. He seemed like a man in a dream, his eyes almost glazed, his expression hovering between pity and incomprehension. Beside him, Delphine seemed touched with something which could even have been fear, or perhaps it was only the light and shadow distorting her anger. Undoubtably she was still furious.

"Would you like the usher to fetch you a glass of water?" McKeever offered Wolff, then, without waiting for his reply, nodded to the usher to do so.

"No… thank you, my lord." Wolff collected himself. He breathed in deeply. "Keelin was always drawing, but she had no interest in being an artist, though naturally it was what her father suggested. She drew only to catch the structures, to see on paper the finished work. She had no interest in drawing for its own sake. She would design her own buildings, not simply record other people's, no matter how marvelous they were. She was a creator, not a copier."

A bitter smile touched his mouth. "But of course no school of architecture was going to accept a female pupil for any serious study. But she wouldn't be thwarted. She found an architectural student who was attracted to her and borrowed his books and papers, asked him about the lectures he attended." A wry expression passed fleetingly across his face, an unreadable mixture of irony, tenderness and pain. "Eventually she took a job as an assistant to a professor, clearing up for him, copying notes for him, all the time absorbing everything he taught the men. She did this for years, and eventually realized that even though she could have passed the examinations she would still never be taken seriously as an architect, never given work as long as she was a woman. She had beautiful hair, soft, shining brown and gold. She cut it off…" In the gallery a woman gasped and closed her eyes, her hands clenched, her imagination of the cost of it clear in her face.

One of the jurors shook his head slowly and bunked away tears. Perhaps his own wife or daughter had hair he loved.

"She passed herself off as a boy," Wolff said, his voice catching for the first time. "Just to attend a particular lecture of a visiting professor and be treated as a student, not a servant, to be able to ask questions and be addressed directly in answer." He blinked several times, and his voice dropped a tone. "It worked. People thought she was very young, but they did not question that she was a man. She came home and cried all night. Then she made her decision, and from then on she called herself Killian, and to everyone except me, she was a man."

There was a murmur around the room. Several people shifted position with a creak of whalebone, a squeak of leather, a rustle of fabric. No one spoke unless it was in a whisper so soft it was inaudible above the movement.

"It has happened to others in the past," Wolff continued. "Women have had to pose as men in order to use the talents God gave them because our prejudice would not permit them to be themselves. There are two routes open to those who will not be stifled. They can do as many Renaissance painters and composers of music did, have their work put forward, but under their brother's or their father's names… or else do as army surgeon Barry did here in England, and dress as a man.

How she contrived that and carried it off in everyday life, I don't know. But she did. Some may have known her secret, but the authorities never learned until after her death. And she was one of the best surgeons, a pioneer in technique. Keelin spoke of her often"-he could not mask the trembling of his voice any longer-"with admiration for her courage and her brilliance, and rage that she should have had to mask her sex all her adult life, deny half of herself in order to realize the other half. If sometimes she hated us for doing this to her, I think we have deserved it."

McKeever stared at him, his mouth tightened very slightly, and he inclined his head in a fraction of a nod.

Rathbone felt brushed with guilt himself. He was part of the establishment. He remembered sharply another case of a woman who wanted to study medicine, and certainly had proved on the Crimean battlefields that she had the skills and the nerve, but had been prevented because of her sex. That too had ended in tragedy.