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“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 wondered if 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 uncomfortable.
“Why can’t we allow people to break a betrothal if they realize it was a mistake,” he went on passionately, “without assuming there must be some fearful sin on the part of one or the other of them? Why do we care so much if a woman is pretty or not? If all we want is something lovely to look at, we can buy a picture and hang it on the wall. We do this!” He flung out his arms. “We create a society where people go to law instead of saying to each other the simple truth. And now instead of a broken romance—which, God knows, hurts enough, but we all experience it—we have scandal, disgrace, shame, and worst of all, we have destroyed one of the brightest talents of our generation. And over what? A misunderstanding.”
There was definite movement in the gallery now, a whispering, a buzz. Even the jurors were muttering.
Sacheverall rose to his feet, his face red.
“Sir Oliver is being disingenuous, sir, and I cannot sit here in silence and allow it. He knows as well as I do that a young woman’s reputation is precious to her. A man who robs another person of reputation steals one of his, or her, most priceless possessions … one that can never be got back again.” He glanced at the jurors; he did not care about the public. “That is not a false value. It is a very real one.”
His expression twisted to undisguised contempt, and he was moving forward from his seat. “Sir Oliver would be one of the first to complain if his good name was compromised. In fact, he may discover after the loss of this case just how painful it can be when people no longer think of you as well as they once did.” He was now out in front of the court, not more than a couple of yards from where Rathbone stood. He was a large man and seemed to crowd the area. He moved his hands around, taking up even more space. Everyone was watching him, but the expressions Rathbone could see were very varied, and not all of respect.
“It is natural enough to resent losing a case, especially as dramatically as he lost this one.” Sacheverall smiled fleetingly towards Rathbone. “But that was his error of judgment in accepting it and choosing to fight it in the first place. Now he is blaming all the rest of us”—he swung his arms wide to embrace everyone present—“for Melville’s misfortune. That is manifestly preposterous. We are not at fault in any way. Keelin Melville chose to behave unnaturally, to deny her womanhood and attempt to follow a masculine profession from which she would, of course, have been excluded had she not practiced such a deception.”
There was a rumble from the body of the room, but he ignored it. He also ignored the growing darkness in the coroner’s face, the tight pull of his lips and the drawing down of his brows.
“She also deceived Barton Lambert, her friend and benefactor, who had from the very beginning shown her only kindness and a trust she did not honor and did not return.” He gestured contemptuously towards Rathbone. “For Sir Oliver to complain now, and accuse society at large, is to show his own shallowness of character and to demonstrate that, far from learning by his error of judgment, he is determined to compound it.”
The coroner was so furious he scarcely knew where to begin.
“Mr. Sacheverall,” he said loudly and very clearly, “I believe Sir Oliver included himself in his castigation of society. Perhaps your own involvement in these events did not allow you to listen to what he said with the attention which I think was its due. I have heard what has been said here today up to this point, and unless there is evidence yet to come which contradicts it, I cannot help but agree that the death of Keelin Melville was a tragedy which need not have happened. And for you to suggest that she was depraved, that she deceived Mr. Lambert willfully, I find unjustified and most distasteful.”
Sacheverall’s face reddened, but it was as much in anger as shame. There was no shred of retreat in his attitude, and his chin jerked up, not down.
“Unless you have something to say which is germane to the issue, Mr. Sacheverall,” the coroner continued, “you will return to your seat and keep from any further interruption to our proceedings.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you have any information we should know as to when Keelin Melville took the poison which killed her, where she obtained it, or when?”
“No—I …”
“Did you observe anything which you have not told the
police?”
“No—I …”
“Have you anything useful whatever to add?”
“I …”
“Then please resume your seat—and do not interrupt us again!”
Sacheverall retreated in ill-concealed fury. There might have been sympathy for him among his peers, or his friends in society. There was none in the courtroom. Whatever the people there had thought of Keelin Melville in her lifetime, now they had nothing but a sense of pity and an uncomfortable suspicion that they were in some way, no matter how small a way, to blame for her death.
The coroner called Isaac Wolff to the stand. He was obviously in a state of deep grief. His face was almost bloodlessly pale, his eyes had the hollow look of a man who is suffering a prolonged illness, and he spoke quietly and without any lift or timbre in his voice.
The coroner treated him with the greatest courtesy, asking him only those facts which were necessary to corroborate or enlarge upon what was already known.
Wolff answered as briefly as possible, and his bare hands grasped the rail as if he needed it in order to keep his balance. The room was full, for the most part, of ordinary people, and they were too sensible of the presence of loss not to share in it. There was not a sound among them as he spoke. No one fidgeted or turned away. No one whispered to their neighbors.
