Anne Perry: Acceptable Loss

He could think of nothing to say.

“Parents especially are part of who we are,” she went on. She looked down, away from meeting his eyes. “I still can’t tell myself that my father failed because he took his own life. I wonder if I fight so hard over the things I believe in, to prove I’m not like that. I don’t give in.” She looked up again, and her eyes were full of tears. “I identify with the soldiers I nursed in the Crimea, and delude myself I’m like them, because I saw how they suffered and I loved their courage so much.”

Rathbone realized that he too was suffering a disillusion, not in Ballinger, because he had never cared for him, but in Margaret herself. Perhaps he had expected her to be more like Hester-more able to face the unbearable, more foolishly, passionately brave. And yet it was those very qualities in Hester that had frightened him, and had made her such an unsuitable wife for him. He had wanted Hester’s virtues, but without the danger. He loved Margaret, but not with the reckless fervor that counts no risk and no price too high.

Was he disillusioned in her, or in himself?

“She wants me to mount an appeal,” he said, remembering the scene vividly, although it had been a couple of days ago.

They had been standing in the withdrawing room, the dusk heavy outside, the gas lamps burning but the curtains still open onto the garden. She was dressed in dark gray, as if ready for mourning, and her face was colorless. She was so angry she trembled.

“Are you?” Hester asked, interrupting his thoughts. “Do you have any grounds? Did Winchester make some mistake?”

“No,” he said simply.

She swallowed and cleared her throat. “Did you?”

“Not so far as I know. Tactical, perhaps. Maybe if I had tried harder, I could have persuaded him not to take the stand himself, but he was adamant. I don’t think you can refuse to let a man speak in his own defense, if you have warned him of the danger and he still insists. But perhaps I should have thought of something.”

“You can’t go on retrying a case every different way until you get the verdict you want,” she pointed out.

He looked down at the desktop. He knew he shouldn’t say what he was going to, and yet the words spilled out.

“Margaret says I should have built in some error, so that I could have appealed afterward. She believes I have put my own career before her father’s life, because I am ambitious and essentially selfish.” He met her eyes. “Is that true? If I really loved her, more than I loved myself, would I have?”

“Have you ever made a deliberate mistake?” she asked, as if turning the thought over in her mind.

“No.” He smiled bitterly. “Not deliberate. Many accidental. Would an appeal court know the difference?”

“Possibly,” she granted. “But unless you were totally incompetent, it wouldn’t make them grant a new trial, would it? Anyway, what good would a new trial do? They’d only come to the same decision, except that someone else would be representing Ballinger, probably less well, and certainly with less dedication. It isn’t reasonable, Oliver. Don’t try arguing with her. You won’t win, because she isn’t listening. She is terrified. Everything she is and believes is slipping out of her grasp.”

“I’m still here,” he said simply. “She just doesn’t want me. I’ve done everything I can to save Ballinger. I failed. But I think I failed because he’s guilty.”

“She’ll realize that in time.”

He knew in that moment, with an overwhelming grief, that he was not sure he would ever see Margaret with the same tenderness and trust, even if eventually she did accept the truth.

“She has made it a condition,” he said aloud.

“A condition? For what?” Hester looked puzzled.

“If I do not manage to appeal for her father, Margaret will leave me, go back to comfort and care for her mother.” Now that he’d said it, it was real, not just a nightmare hovering around him like a covering darkness. And yet the house was unbearable. They walked around each other, icily polite. He came to bed late. She was either asleep or pretending to be. He did not speak. It was over a week since they had touched each other, even in the smallest gesture. It was infinitely worse than being alone.

Hester was looking at him, her face a little pinched with anxiety. “And if you could manage to think of some way of bringing about an appeal, which you would still lose, because the evidence is the same, then she would forgive you?” she asked.

He started to answer, and then realized that he did not know.

“She is grieving, Oliver.” Hester answered her own question. “She is in too much pain and confusion to listen to reason. She wants a way out of the truth. At least part of her knows she will have to accept it one day, but now she can’t face it. She wants you to rescue her from it, and she blames you because you can’t.”

“She’s not a child!” he said with a flare of his own confusion and loss. “The truth of it is that she has to choose between her father and me, and she chooses him, guilty or not.” Saying it was like cutting his own flesh. “You wouldn’t have done that. You would always choose Monk.”

“I don’t know what I would choose,” she said honestly. “I haven’t had to. There’s part of all of us that chooses the most vulnerable, the one who needs us most, because we can’t live with the guilt of turning our backs on them.”

“Are you thinking of Scuff?”

“I don’t think so. He would never expect me to sacrifice anything for him. I’m not sure he would even understand the idea, although he would do it himself, without thinking.”

“That’s what Margaret wants from me, loyalty without thinking.”

“If you love someone, you do not ask them to destroy the best in themselves,” she answered. “Love also means the freedom to follow your own conscience. If you can’t be true to yourself, you don’t have much left to give anyone else.” Again she touched his arm through the cloth of his jacket. “Don’t give in to temptation because it would be more comfortable for you, in the short term. She needs you to be the best in yourself. In time she will be glad of it.”

“Do you think so?” Rathbone was asking for the answer he wanted to hear.

“I hope so,” was all she could say.

He looked at her steadily, thinking that she possessed a kind of beauty he had not really appreciated before. Her face was too angular, but there was an intense gentleness in it he saw only now. She was awkward at times, too quick; far too clever; her honesty was sometimes painful to receive; but there was a generosity of spirit he needed; and always, always there was courage.

She blushed very slightly and stood up.

“Give her time,” she said again. “And perhaps it would be better not to tell her I called.” She hesitated, then decided not to add any more.

She passed close to him on her way out, but only smiled briefly as she reached the door. “Thank you for the tea.” And she was gone, and the silence washed in again, surrounding him with loneliness.

The following morning the message came from Newgate Prison that Arthur Ballinger wanted to see him, urgently. Rathbone had no choice but to go. He was duty-bound as Ballinger’s lawyer, apart from the fact that Ballinger was Margaret’s father, and a man condemned in a matter of days to be hanged. Less than two weeks were left. Rathbone could not even imagine how that would feel.

He dreaded finding the previously bluff and rather arrogant Ballinger now a pathetic ghost of himself. Would he be frightened of death now? Surely a priest was the only one who could help him?

Would he plead for Rathbone to find some way, any way at all, to save him from the rope? That would be embarrassing, even repulsive, and Rathbone would wish for any form of escape from that. He might even feel nauseated. His throat was tight and his stomach was churning already.