William Monk 19 - Blind Justice
proved too weak.
Should he have loved her more? Or should he have waited for a searing passion, a love that governed his whole life, before he married?
That was ridiculous. How many people even felt such a thing? Perhaps it was no more than a fever that passed anyway. Infatuation is not love. Love needs trust and balance. It needs both sharing and also the ability to be at peace in silence. Perhaps it needs a common faith in certain values, in honor and compassion, and the courage to go forward in the face of pain. It has to contain mercy, and gratitude for the joys of life, on both sides.
It must not demand perfection. What would perfection know orunderstand of the frailties of a vulnerable person, the failures of someone brave enough to try what is difficult?
Margaret had been immature.
Rathbone had been immature also. He should have been gentler with her. Certainly he should have been wise enough not to undertake Ballinger’s defense alone. But if he had taken assistance she would have blamed him for not having thrown his whole weight behind it. She would have said his backing away from the case in any regard would make the court assume he thought Ballinger guilty from the start.
He had still not told her the whole story about the dreadful legacy her father had deliberately left to him, his final vengeance. She would still blame Rathbone, and hate him the more for it. It would mend nothing.
Was it a gentleness in him that stilled his tongue? Disillusion is one of the bitterest pains anyone can face. Some people cannot bear it; they break under the weight. Margaret was one of those. Maybe he still had some lingering tenderness toward her, a need to protect her from the truth if she did not have to know it.
Or was he simply too bruised and too weary inside to face another series of quarrels and rejections? Not that it mattered. There was no need to tell her.
He had never had to face the worst of disillusion himself, not one that came anywhere near hers. His own father was the best man he had ever known. Even standing here on the edge of the empty summer garden, watching the birds and the few butterflies sitting on the silent, brilliant flowers, he smiled thinking of Henry Rathbone. Of course, his father was fallible, and he himself would be the first to admit it. He was a mathematician and inventor, a man whose mind was brilliant, yet when others spoke of him it was his kindness they spoke of first.
He could remember his mother only as a slim figure from his childhood, someone warm and safe who made him laugh, comforted his early pains and fears, and who told him he could accomplish anything, if he tried hard enough. She believed in him totally.
She had died when he was twelve and away at boarding school. Shehad said he could do anything; he had thought then if he had been at home surely he could have saved her. He remembered the sharp, twisting pain of loss and the disbelief in his boyish mind, and then the guilt. He should have been there. Why had she not told him, not trusted him? What was wrong with him not to have seen it himself? She must have been ill for a long time before. It wasn’t sudden.
All that had gone through his thoughts. Only later, several years after, did he realize she was protecting him. He was twelve, thinking himself almost a man, but she knew what a child he was. Had he been there, he would’ve wanted to save her, and he would’ve failed—and that would’ve hurt him deeply. She had known that.
There was only the echo of those memories left now, a gentleness in the mind when he thought of her and the things she had cared for, when he imagined her presence. She had never lived to see him pass the bar examinations, see his mounting success, his triumph in battles for justice that had seemed impossible. Had she ever imagined he would be knighted by the Queen, would be Sir Oliver? And now he was a judge. She would have been so proud!
Margaret likely had none of those emotions when she thought of her father. To lose someone you love because he dies from illness is a sweet ache. To lose everything good you believed of him is a pain that stains all he left behind. It poisons the very air of memory.
Ballinger had had his revenge on Rathbone, from beyond the grave. He had bequeathed him the obscene photographs at the heart of the case. They were hidden away now, locked in a safe so well concealed he doubted anyone else would ever find it. He had used one of the photos once. He
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