William Monk 11 - Slaves of Obsession

Unionist, but it will not excuse anything in the eyes of the law. Is she married to this Breeland?”
    “No.”
    He sighed very slightly. “Well, I suppose that is something. And she is sixteen?”
    “Yes. But she won’t testify against him anyway.”
    “I assumed as much. And if she would, that would not help us greatly. Loyalty is a very attractive quality; disloyaltyis not, even if it is well justified. I swear, Monk, I sometimes think you spend your time trying to find ever more complicated cases for me, until you have one which will confound me completely. You have excelled yourself this time. I barely know where to begin.” But the expression on his face showed that already his mind was racing.
    Monk felt the first tiny lift of his spirits. If Rathbone saw it as a personal challenge, he would take it up. Nothing would ever allow him to retreat in front of Hester. The flash of humor, mockery and self-knowledge was there in his eyes, as if he knew Monk’s thoughts as well as he knew his own, and accepted them. If there was a moment of pain, of loneliness, it was hidden instantly.
    He began to question them both on every detail he could think of: questions about Casbolt, Judith Alberton, Philo Trace, and the whole of their journey to America and all they had done there. Particularly he was interested in Monk’s journey down the Thames with Lanyon.
    He looked distressed, and for a moment seriously out of composure, when Monk told of finding Alberton’s body in the yard, and of almost treading on the watch.
    Monk said little of the Battle of Bull Run. The horror of it was not something for which he had words. The few he found were difficult and stilted, the emotion too deep to be shared in this noisy, friendly, peaceful inn. And he was not ready to look at it again himself. It was too closely bound with his love for Hester, and with a strange, sharp sense of his own inability ever to be worthy of that beauty he had seen in her. And anyway, that was the last thing he could share with Rathbone. It would be the ultimate cruelty.
    He moved on swiftly to the account of finding Breeland, and how he and Trace had guarded him all the way to Richmond, and then Charleston, and home again.
    “I see,” Rathbone said when Monk had finished, with only a few words from Hester. “Then you may tell Mrs. Alberton that I shall call upon her, and she may direct me to her solicitor for instructions. I have a very considerable battle ahead.”
    Monk hesitated on the edge of thanking him, then did not. Rathbone had not taken it for him … for Hester perhaps … for the challenge possibly, for justice, but never for Monk, unless it were to prove himself equal to the challenge.
    “Good!” he said instead. “Very good!”

7
    R
ATHBONE RETURNED
to the courtroom rather hurriedly. His junior was perfectly capable of conducting the present case. It was a routine one: purely a matter of presenting the evidence, most of which was incontestable. It was as well, because all through the afternoon it was not the subject of
Regina
versus
Wollcroft
which occupied his mind, but how he would handle the case of
Regina
versus
Breeland and Alberton
which he had been rash enough to accept.
    He was not only uncomfortable with the case itself but with his own reason for agreeing to take it. He had read something of it in the newspapers, although it did not especially interest him because it seemed so clear-cut, but like most of the editorial writers, he was deeply sorry for Judith Alberton. Compassion was a noble emotion, but it was not a good basis upon which to go to law. Juries might be swayed by sentiment; judges were not. And public opinion was very harshly against Merrit Alberton. It seemed she had conspired with a foreigner to murder her own father. It was an affront to all decencies, to family loyalty, to obedience, to property and to patriotism. If every daughter were free to disobey her father in such a violent and appalling manner, then all society was threatened.
    Rathbone found that those assumptions irritated him, and that his respect for the establishment, while deep in the roots of his life—on the surface at least—was becoming a triflefrayed. He despised prejudice, tradition set in rigid minds and no more than habit.
    He had also accepted the case in part because he liked the challenge. There was an excitement in stretching himself to the full, and a danger. What if he were not equal to it? What if he failed to secure