William Monk 03 - Defend and Betray

claims.”
    “What do you want to do, give up?” Hester snapped.
    “What I want is immaterial,” Monk replied. “I cannot afford the luxury of meddling in other people’s affairs for entertainment.”
    “I’ll go and see her again,” Rathbone declared. “At least I will ask her.”
        Alexandra looked up as he came into the cell. For an instant her face lit with hope, then knowledge prevailed and fear took its place.
    “Mr. Rathbone?” She swallowed with difficulty, as though there were some constriction in her throat. “What is it?”
    The door clanged shut behind him and they both heard thelock fall and then the silence. He longed to be able to comfort her, at least to be gentle, but there was no time, no place for evasion.
    “I should not have doubted you, Mrs. Carlyon,” he answered, looking straight at her remarkable blue eyes. “I thought perhaps you had confessed in order to shield your daughter. But Monk has proved beyond any question at all that it was, as you say, you who killed your husband. However, it was not because he was having an affair with Louisa Furnival. He was not—and you knew he was not.”
    She stared at him, white-faced. He felt as if he had struck her, but she did not flinch. She was an extraordinary woman, and the feeling renewed in him that he must know the truth behind the surface facts. Why in heaven’s name had she resorted to such hopeless and foredoomed violence? Could she ever have imagined she would get away with it?
    “Why did you kill him, Mrs. Carlyon?” he said urgently, leaning towards her. It was raining outside and the cell was dim, the air clammy.
    She did not look away, but closed her eyes to avoid seeing him.
    “I have told you! I was jealous of Louisa!”
    “That is not true!”
    “Yes it is.” Still her eyes were closed.
    “They will hang you,” he said deliberately. He saw her wince, but she still kept her face towards his, eyes tight shut. “Unless we can find some circumstance that will at least in part explain what you did, they will hang you, Mrs. Carlyon! For heaven’s sake, tell me why you did it.” His voice was low, grating and insistent. How could he get through the shield of denial? What could he say to reach her mind with reality? He wanted to touch her, take her by those slender arms and shake sense into her. But it would be such a breach of all possible etiquette, it would shatter the mood and become more important, for the moment, than the issue that would save or lose her life.
    “Why did you kill him?” he repeated desperately.“Whatever you say, you cannot make it worse than it is already.”
    “I killed him because he was having an affair with Louisa,” she repeated flatly. “At least I thought he was.”
    And he could get nothing further from her. She refused to add anything, or take anything from what she had said.
    Reluctantly, temporarily defeated, he took his leave. She remained sitting on the cot, immobile, ashen-faced.
    Outside in the street the rain was a steady downpour, the gutter filling, people hurrying by with collars up. He passed a newsboy shouting the latest headlines. It was something to do with a financial scandal and the boy caressed the words with relish, seeing the faces of passersby as they turned. “Scandal, scandal in the City! Financier absconds with fortune. Secret love nest! Scandal in the City!”
    Rathbone quickened his pace to get away from it. They had temporarily forgotten Alexandra and the murder of General Carlyon, but as soon as the trial began it would be all over every front page and every newsboy would be crying out each day’s revelations and turning them over with delight, poring over the details, imagining, condemning.
    And they would condemn. He had no delusion that there would be any pity for her. Society would protect itself from threat and disruption. They would close ranks, and even the few who might feel some twinge of pity for her would not dare to admit it. Any woman who was in the same situation, or imagined herself so, would have even less compassion. If she herself had to endure it, why should Alexandra be able to escape? And no man whose eyes or thoughts had ever wandered, or who considered they might in the future, would countenance the notion that a wife could take such terrible revenge for a brief and relatively harmless indulgence of his very natural appetites. Carlyon’s offense of flirtation, not even proved to be adultery, would be utterly lost in