Emma Donoghue - The Sealed Letter

Fido almost admires the light way the man drops in these outrageous suggestions.

"We have been told of wild conversations, private trysts and assignations," Hawkins sweeps on, "but all this testimony has been circumstantial and contradictory. We have heard inferences, not facts, from a shabby line-up of witnesses, including an embittered housekeeper, a footman discharged for a brutish attack on a fellow servant, and the most patently hostile of former friends, Emily Watson," says the barrister with a handsomely curled lip. "Much of this so-called evidence is obscene fantasy. My learned friend has asked you to believe, for instance, that a lady and gentleman would commit adultery in an upright position on a quay under full dazzling moonlight! Or on a cabin bench of no more than twelve inches in width, on a journey by gondola of no more than ten minutes!"

"Three would do," shouts someone from the gallery, which provokes roars of mirth.

Fido goes hot. Unspeakable things can all be spoken in this packed, stifling room: it's a little hell at the heart of the metropolis where a sort of alchemy turns everything to dirt.

After a brief hiatus as Judge Wilde orders the offender found and ejected from the court, he gives Hawkins a warning.

"The court must pardon my explicitness, my Lord," says Hawkins magnificently, "since it is the tool required to hack through the thickets of innuendo that threaten to ensnare my client."

Now he calls his witnesses one by one: another boatman who denies that the gondola got particularly out of trim on the nights when Mrs. Codrington was in it with either of her escorts; another former servant who insists that on Malta Mrs. Codrington usually had a maid sleeping in her room. Fido's not really listening, she's distracted by a kind of stage fright: when will she be called?

Turning to the London evidence, Hawkins admits that his client's meetings with Colonel Anderson-by sheer coincidence, on home leave this summer-did become covert, "but only because the petitioner began to display an unaccountable hostility to his wife continuing in England the independent life she'd formed in Malta," he says. "As for the so-called assignation at the Grosvenor Hotel, no witness from the hotel has been produced, nor any evidence that Colonel Anderson took a bed-chamber. He and Mrs. Codrington can hardly have committed the act in question in the coffee-room! My learned friend has performed a similar sleight of hand on the letter found in the respondent's desk," Hawkins rushes on. "There is no proof that she ever sent it; it might have been merely a private soliloquy-an outpouring of emotion. Its language, in either case, is not that of hardened adulteress to paramour, but that of a troubled lady to a platonic friend, on the eve of his rash marriage. As a missive from a married woman, I do not deny it is imprudent, but it contains in its sorrowful tone and high-minded wishes for the co-respondent's welfare much that is creditable, and nothing -nothing -to prove that she broke her marriage vows with him."

Hawkins pauses to sip from a glass of water. Fido feels a mad impulse to applaud.

"But I understand that some gentlemen of the jury may still be feeling swayed by the many petty and misleading anecdotes got up by the petitioner's agents and counsel," says Hawkins sternly. "This is why the respondent's counterclaim states that if you are led into the error of believing her guilty of misconduct, she wishes you to be made aware of grave neglect and cruelty on the part of her husband which would have conduced to that misconduct, had it occurred."

His grammar's getting strained, Fido notices. It must be difficult for a barrister to keep up the pretence that he believes his clients. Are lawyers liars by definition? Do liars, then, make good lawyers? She thinks of a world in which all careers will be open to women, and wonders-aware of the absurdity of the thought-whether Helen Codrington would make a good barrister.

"Firstly, neglect," says Hawkins crisply. "The petitioner's insensitivity to, and virtual abandonment of, his charming young bride began as soon as she followed him from Florence to England. She found herself expected to occupy every day with running his household, bearing his children, and nursing his dying father. I put it to you, gentlemen of the jury, that by ignoring his wife's needs for stimulus and amusement, the petitioner left her to seek these things alone, unguarded, exposed to the rumours of a malicious world."

His tone turns hushed. "Those were not the only needs of hers he neglected to fulfill. The last issue of the marriage was born in 1853: some four years later, her patience exhausted and her heart broken, the respondent finally requested the dignity of a room of her own." He pauses to allow the whole audience to register his meaning. "Since the petitioner, as we have been told, did enter his wife's room on occasion-the door not being locked-it may be presumed that it was by his own acquiescence, or even by his own wish, that marital relations did not resume at any point in the seven years that followed. I need hardly remind you, gentlemen, that it is for the spouse of the stronger sex, not the weaker, to demand the exercise of conjugal rights."

Fido watches the jury: the smug faces, the uneasy ones.

"To shed more light on this delicate subject I now call Captain Strickland of the Royal Navy."

Strickland turns out to be a hangdog, red-haired subordinate of Harry's from Malta.

"Did the respondent complain to you bitterly about not seeing her husband from one day to the next?" asks Hawkins. "Ah, yes."

"Did the petitioner ever ask you how many children you had?" A glum nod. "I told him two."

"His reply?"

"I believe he said, 'That's quite enough. Follow my example and have no more.'"

This starts a scandalized ripple in the crowd.

"Did you think he meant simple abstinence," asks Hawkins grimly, "or-I beg the court's indulgence-the use of devices to thwart conception?"

"I don't recall what I thought, exactly," mutters Strickland, scratching his temple.

"Did the petitioner express any shame on the subject?"

"No, no. Pride, if anything."

"Pride!"

Bovill, muttering in Harry's ear, is offered the opportunity to cross-examine, but shakes his head.

It suddenly strikes Fido that the Codringtons are-or rather were-a thoroughly modern couple. Progressive, even, in some ways (even if in others they resemble some stomping crusader and his lecherous chatelaine). The discreet limitation of child-bearing, the separate friendships, the refusal to allow two unique characters to be assimilated into one-are these not ideals Fido and her friends at Langham Place have often invoked when discussing a new relation between the sexes?

The coincidence turns her stomach. Women like Helen taint the very notion of female independence. Is this what it all slides into in the end-grunting couplings on sofas?

Strickland gives way to a short, busy little man: a naval surgeon called Pickthorn.

Hawkins asks him, "Did they quarrel about the care of the children?"

"Indeed, yes," says Pickthorn, "and in particular Mrs. Watson's interference in their management. She-Mrs. Codrington-told me the admiral threatened to send the girls to England to live with his sister, Lady Bourchier."

The barrister raises his smooth eyebrows at that. "Now, turning to the matter of the bedrooms. What did Mrs. Codrington tell you on one occasion in 1862?"

"That when she attempted to go into the admiral's chamber, he'd put her out of the door, and hurt her in doing so."

"Hurt her," Hawkins repeats, eyes on the jury. "Did you confront the petitioner about this assault?"

"I thought it my duty, as the lady's physician. But he denied having used the least violence."