William Monk 09 - A Breach of Promise

nodded, still watching Rathbone, waiting for him to go on.
    “She was horrified when she knew,” he resumed, remembering with painful vividness the look in her eyes. It had been close to panic. He had been impatient with it then.
    “But she did not explain?” The coroner’s face also was touched with deep sadness.
    “No.”
    “I presume you asked?”
    “Of course. I pleaded with her to tell me, in total confidence, if she knew anything to Miss Lambert’s discredit or if there was anything in her own life which prevented her marrying …”
    He heard the faint rustle in the courtroom, but no one laughed.
    “She told me there was not.” He took a breath. “I did not accept her word. I employed an agent of enquiry to research into both Miss Lambert’s past and hers. He found nothing.” He owed Monk something better than a bare statement. “If there had been longer, I daresay he would have learned the truth, but events overtook us. It appeared Melville’s affair with Mr. Wolff was reason enough. Of course, we now know it was … a love between man and woman, not illegal, not abnormal.” He hadnearly said “not scandalous,” but perhaps since they were not married, there would be those who would consider it so. “Such as is usual enough,” he said instead.
    “What was her frame of mind, as far as you could judge, when Mr. Sacheverall brought Isaac Wolff to the stand and accused him of a homosexual relationship with Melville?” There was a chill in the coroner’s voice, and he did not look towards where Sacheverall was sitting.
    “She was deeply distressed,” Rathbone answered truthfully. “Very deeply. But she denied it to me.”
    “Did you believe her?”
    “I … I don’t know. I neither believed nor disbelieved. I was concerned with trying to rescue what I could from the situation. I hoped I might persuade Miss Lambert to settle for a small amount of damages, so at least Melville might not be financially ruined, as well as socially and professionally.” He found the words difficult to say. They still hurt. The failure was deep and twisting inside him.
    “Did you tell Miss Melville your hopes?”
    “Of course.”
    “Do you know of anything that occurred that afternoon which would so alter the circumstances as to make her despair and take her own life?”
    “Sacheverall had called a prostitute to the stand in the morning who had sworn that the affair she had observed was of a sexual nature,” Rathbone said bitterly, “not the friendship both Wolff and Melville had insisted. But if that was the final incident, then I would have expected her to have taken the poison during the luncheon adjournment, and according to the surgeon she did not.”
    “Did Miss Melville at any time speak of taking her life, or say anything which led you, even in hindsight, to suppose she was thinking of it?”
    “No.” Rathbone’s voice sank. “Perhaps I should have realized how desperate she was, but I had formed the belief that her art was so precious to her she would have lived to practice it regardless of anything else. I … in hindsight, I even wonderedif she had been murdered … but I know of no way in which anyone else could have administered the poison to her, nor any reason why they should.”
    “I see. Thank you, Sir Oliver. I have nothing further to ask you.”
    Rathbone remained where he was. He wanted to say something else, something about the whole ridiculous situation which had brought about a needless tragedy and destroyed one of the most luminous talents he had ever known, not to mention a vibrant, intelligent human being capable of suffering and laughter and dreams.
    “It need not have happened!” he said angrily, leaning forward a little over the slender rails of the witness stand, his hands gripping them. “If any of us had behaved with a little more sense, a little more charity, it would all have been avoided. Keelin Melville could be alive now, still creating beauty for us and for our heirs in this city, this country.”
    There was a murmur of shock in the gallery, and then something which could even have been approval.
    He leaned over farther. “For God’s sake, why can’t we allow women to use whatever talents they have without hounding and denying them until they are reduced to pretending to be men in order to be taken at their true value?”
    There was a shifting of weight on the public benches, and a rustle and creak of fabric. People were