Anne Perry: A Sunless Sea

“I wanted to see how you were,” he began, as if that were the kind of emotion he often felt. “There might be something I could do that I haven’t thought of. If you would permit me?”

She was silent for several moments, weighing his intention behind the words.

“For Margaret’s sake?” she asked finally. “You must still hate Mr. Ballinger and me because of him. I had no idea …” It sounded like an excuse, and she stopped as soon as she realized it.

“I never imagined that you knew,” he said quickly, and honestly. “The shock of finding out such a thing, and beginning to understand what it meant is enough to paralyze almost anyone. And you had no alternative except loyalty. By the time you knew of it there was nothing to be done to save anyone.”

She looked puzzled for a moment, as if trying to distinguish between his judgment of her, and his judgment of Margaret.

“You were his wife,” he said, in self-defense as well as by way of explanation.

“Have you come to see Margaret?” Hope refused to die in her.

“If I may?” That was a polite fiction. Mrs. Ballinger had never refused him access to Margaret; it was Margaret herself who would not speak to him.

She hesitated. He knew she was considering not whether to take the message, but how; what manner would offer any chance of success.

“I will go to ask her,” she said at last. “Please wait here. I …” She swallowed with difficulty. “I would rather not have a scene that would embarrass any of us.”

“Of course,” he agreed.

It was nearly a quarter of an hour before she returned, which showed a measure of the difficulty she had had in persuading Margaret. As Rathbone thanked her and followed her back across the hall, he found himself increasingly angry with Margaret, not on his own behalf but on her mother’s. He could not even imagine the blow Mrs. Ballinger had taken from her husband’s guilt, and then his murder cutting off all hope of a reprieve. Not that there had been any. He would have died with the hangman’s noose around his throat. Her entire world had collapsed hideously. She had no one but her children on whom to lean. The failure of Margaret’s marriage and her refusal to accept her father’s guilt must keep all the wounds open and bleeding.

Margaret was standing in the middle of the overcrowded parlor, waiting for him. She was very plainly dressed. Like her mother, she was still in black, although hers was relieved by jet jewelry and a brooch set with seed pearls, a tiny glimmer of white against the darkness. As always, she stood with grace, her head high, but she was thinner than the last time he had seen her, and very pale, almost colorless.

She did not speak.

To ask how she was would be absurdly formal, setting a tone that would be hard to break. Her health had always been excellent and it was hardly the issue between them; any distress she felt now was emotional.

He felt awkward and knew that in his immaculately tailored clothes he must look out of place in this room with its drab walls, and too many family pictures on every surface. What could he say that was honest? Why had he come?

“I wanted to talk to you …,” he began. “To see if we could understand each other a little better, perhaps move toward some kind of reconciliation …” He stopped. Her face gave nothing away, and he felt both foolish and vulnerable.

Her fair eyebrows rose. “Are you saying what you think you ought to, Oliver?” she asked quietly, no lift in her voice. “Paving the way to justify yourself because you want to set me aside with a clear conscience? After all, you need to be able to tell your colleagues that you tried. It would reflect poorly on you if you didn’t. Everyone would understand that an eminent lawyer like you would not wish to be married to the daughter of a criminal, but you should at least not make that offensively clear.”

“Is that how you think of yourself: the daughter of a criminal?” he said with far more edge to his voice than he had meant to.

“We were talking about you,” she responded. “You are here; I did not come to you.”

That also hurt, although he should not have expected her to come to him. Right or wrong, it was always the man who pursued-except perhaps with Hester. If she had quarreled with someone she cared for, whether she had been right or wrong, she would have sought them out. He knew that from the past. Was he unfairly comparing Margaret with her? Hester had faults as well, but big, brave ones, never a pettiness of mind. He was the one who had not been daring enough for her. He should not be petty now.

He took a deep breath. “I came hoping that if we spoke, we might heal at least some of the breach between us,” he said as gently as he could. “I have no idea what the future will bring, and I was certainly not trying to make excuses for it. I don’t need to explain myself to anyone else-”

“Which is as well, because you can’t!” She cut across him. “Not to me, or to my family.”

He kept his temper with difficulty. “I was not thinking of you as someone else.” They were both still standing, as if physical ease were impossible. He thought of asking if he could sit down, or even simply doing it, but he decided not to. She might take it as an implication that he thought he belonged here, and that he saw it as a right, not a privilege.

“How were you thinking of me, then?” she asked.

“As my wife, and-at one time at least-also as my friend,” he said.

Without warning the tears filled her eyes.

For an instant he thought that there was hope. He started to take a step toward her.

“You threw that away,” she said quickly, raising her head a fraction, as if to ward him off.

“I did what I had to do!” he protested. “Everything the law allowed me, to defend him. He was guilty, Margaret!”

“How often do you repeat that to yourself, Oliver?” she said bitterly. “Have you convinced yourself yet?”

“He admitted it to me,” he said wearily. They had been over all of this before. He had lived out the whole wretched tragedy for her-Ballinger’s desperate fight for life, then finally his admission of guilt. He had given her few details, to spare her distress, and her knowledge of details that were ugly and cruel, things she need never know.

“And that’s enough for you?” She flung the words at him like an accusation. “What about the reasons, Oliver? Or didn’t you want to know them? Can’t you for once be honest and stop hiding behind the law? Or is it all you know, all you understand? ‘The book says this! The book says that!’ ”

“That’s not fair, Margaret,” he protested. “I can’t work outside the law-”

“You mean you can’t think outside it,” she corrected him, her eyes burning with contempt. “You are a liar, perhaps first to yourself; you can consider actual morality when you want to. You can for Hester. You’ll bend all your own precious rules when she asks you to.”

“Is that what this is?” he said with painful understanding. “Jealousy of Hester, because you think I would have done differently for her? Can’t you understand that she would never have asked me to?”

Margaret gave a harsh, bitter laugh. The sound of it lacerated the last of his emotions. “You’re a coward, Oliver! Is that why you care for her so much? Because she’ll fight the battles for you, and never expect anything of you but to follow? What about Monk? Would you fight for him?”

He did not know how to answer her. Could any of what she said be true?

“Did you ask my father why he did all those things you accused him of?” she went on, perhaps sensing her victory. “Or did you not want to know? It might disturb your comfortable world of right and wrong where everything is decided for you by generations of lawyers from the past. No need to think! No need to make any difficult decisions, or stand alone. Certainly no need to take any dangerous action yourself, question any of your own comfortable certainties, or risk anything.”