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“Yes, she was in Venice.”
“Was she aware of what was being said about her?”
She colored faintly. “Yes … I … I wrote and told her. I felt she should know.” She bit her lip. “I hated doing it. It took me over an hour to compose a letter, but I could not allow this to be said and go uncontested. I could defend her by denying it, but I could not initiate any proceedings.” She stared at Harvester as she said it, a slight frown on her brow.
Rathbone thought she seemed very concerned that Harvester should understand her reasons, and it occurred to him that perhaps he had coached her to give this answer, and she was watching him to see if she had done so correctly. But it was a fact that was of no use. There was nothing he could make of it to help Zorah.
“You gave her the opportunity to defend herself in law,” Harvester concluded. “Which she is now taking. Did you receive a reply to your letter?”
“Yes, I did.”
There was a murmur of approval from the gallery. One of the jurors nodded gravely.
Harvester produced a piece of pale blue paper and offered it to the usher.
“My lord, may I place this letter into evidence and ask the witness to identify it?”
“You may,” the judge agreed.
Lady Wellborough said that it was the letter she had received, and in a slightly husky voice, she read it aloud to the court, quoting the date and the plantiff’s address in Venice. She glanced at Gisela only once and met with the merest acknowledgment.
“ ’My dear Emma,’ ” she began in an uncertain voice “ ’Your letter shocked and grieved me beyond words. I hardly knew how to set pen to paper to write you a sensible answer.’ ”
She stopped and cleared her throat without looking up from the paper.
“ ’First may I thank you for being such a true friend to me as to tell me this terrible news. It cannot have been easy even to think how to say it. Sometimes the cruelty of life seems beyond bearing.
“ ’I thought when my beloved Friedrich died there was nothing else left to hope or fear. For me it was the end of everything that was happy or beautiful or precious in any way. I truly did not think any other blow could wound me. How very wrong I was. I cannot begin to describe how this hurts. To imagine that anyone at all, any human being with a heart or a soul, could think that I could have injured the man who was the love and core of my life, is a pain I do not think I can bear. I am beside myself with grief.
“ ’If she does not withdraw absolutely, and confess she was intoxicated or mad, I shall have to take her to court. I shall loathe every second of it, but I have no choice. I will not have Friedrich spoken of so—I will not have our love defiled. To my everlasting grief and loneliness, I could not save his life, but I will save his reputation as the man I loved and adored above all others. I will not, I will not have the world suppose I betrayed him.
“ ’I remain your indebted friend, Gisela.’ ”
She let the paper rest on the railing and looked up at Harvester, her face white, struggling to keep her composure.
No one was looking at her; almost every eye was on Gisela, even if all they could see was her profile. Several women in the gallery sniffed audibly, and one juror sat staring fixedly and blinking rapidly. Another blew his nose unnecessarily hard.
Harvester cleared his throat.
“I think we can safely assume that Princess Gisela was deeply distressed by this turn of events, and it caused her even greater pain above that which she already suffered in her bereavement.”
Lady Wellborough nodded.
Harvester invited Rathbone to question the witness.
Rathbone declined. He heard the rustle of surprise from the gallery, and his eye caught the movement of a juror and the disbelief in his face. But there was nothing at all he could do. In such a desperate situation anything he said would only give Lady Wellborough the opportunity to repeat her evidence.
The judge adjourned the court for luncheon, and Rathbone strode past Harvester and went immediately to the private room where he could speak to Zorah alone, almost dragging her with him, leaving the ugly mutters or grumbles of the crowd as the gallery was cleared.
“Gisela did not kill Friedrich,” he said the moment the door was closed. “I have no evidence to make your charge even seem reasonable, let alone true! For heaven’s sake, withdraw now. Admit you spoke out of emotion and were mistaken—”
“I was not mistaken,” she said flatly, her green eyes calm and perfectly level. “I will not abandon the truth simply because it has become uncomfortable. I am surprised that you think I might. Is this the courage in the face of fire which earned you an empire?”
“Charging into the enemy’s guns may make you a name in history,” he said acidly. “But it is an idiotic sacrifice of life. It’s all very poetic, but the reality is death, agony, crippled bodies and widows weeping at home, mothers who never see their sons again. It is more than time you stopped dreaming and looked at life as it is.” He heard his voice growing higher and louder and he could not help it. He was clenching his fists until his muscles ached, and without being aware of it, he chopped his hand up and down in the air. “Did you not hear that letter? Didn’t you look at the jurors’ faces? Gisela is a heroine, the ideal of their romantic imagination! You have attacked her with a charge you cannot prove, and that makes you a villain. Nothing I can say is going to change that. If I counterattack it will make it worse.”
She stood quite still, her face pale, her shoulders squared, her voice low and a little shaky.
“You give up too easily. We have barely begun. No sensible person makes a decision when he has heard only one side of a story. And sensible or not, the jury is obliged to wait and hear us as well. Is that not what the law is for, to allow both sides to put forward their case?”
