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THE AFTERNOON EVIDENCE began with Hillyer calling Sir John Armitage to the witness stand. Now, at last, the attention was complete. The jurors sat up straight, eyes wide open.
Armitage swore to his name and occupation, then faced Hillyer with grace and intense seriousness.
“Good afternoon, Sir John,” Hillyer said gravely, his face almost without expression. “I believe you have known Philip Sidney for many years. Indeed, it was on your recommendation that he gained his position at the British Embassy in Washington.”
“Indeed.” Armitage shook his head ruefully. “It was perhaps the worst mistake I have ever made in a man. I knew his mother. A very fine woman. She—I suppose like many women do—saw only the best in her son. I accepted that she was basically correct in her judgment of him. I now regret that.”
“He did not live up to his mother’s words?” Hillyer asked.
Jemima looked across at Sidney and saw such pain in his face that it was as if she had felt it herself. She thought of how she would have felt, had her father recommended her for something and been bitterly disappointed in her. She could not bear it. She could not bear it for Sidney, and she hardly knew him! She had unwittingly seen what should have been private. Was it true, and she was just being a coward, complicit because she was not brave enough to face the truth?
Armitage was talking about Sidney’s earliest years in the embassy. He seemed to have been excellent.
“You saw no fault in him?” Hillyer pressed.
“No, none at all, at that time,” Armitage admitted. “I even imagined he had an outstanding career ahead of him. Indeed, I thought so until—” He stopped suddenly, as if he had unintentionally let slip more than he had intended. There was a moment’s silence.
“Until what?” Hillyer prompted.
“It is not relevant to this case,” Armitage replied.
“We should judge that,” Hillyer told him. “I—”
Daniel shot to his feet for the first time in the trial. “Your Honor, if it is irrelevant, it should not be offered. Once the jury has heard it, it will affect their view, and thus their judgment. Even with the best intentions, we do not forget our feelings, just because we no longer remember what prompted them.”
“Indeed,” the judge said, shaking his head. “Mr. Hillyer, you know better than that. Fly-fishing, sir? I cannot allow you to plunge in with a net!”
Hillyer sighed. “Yes, Your Honor. I apologize. I will come at it a little later, more directly.”
The judge gave him a sour smile and nodded. “Indeed.”
Jemima let her breath out very slowly. She dared not look at Patrick. She did glance at Daniel, but he was staring straight ahead of him. Surely Armitage had been about to refer, perhaps obliquely, perhaps quite openly, to the attack on Rebecca. At the very least, it would have been a thread someone would follow. The jury had heard this, and had to be wondering what it was that could not be said.
Daniel must have known what he was doing, mustn’t he? Did he intend to defend Sidney, really defend him? And as the question came clearly in her mind, Jemima knew that, yes, he did.
What had changed?
She turned her attention back to Armitage’s testimony.
* * *
—
PATRICK WAS ALMOST silent on the way home, and even later over dinner. When he did speak he did not mention the trial. Jemima felt her mother watching, and twice Charlotte was on the edge of asking him a question, her face filled with concern. But Jemima smiled and spoke of something else. It was not until the bedroom door was closed that he spoke. He stood in the center of the room, stiff with pent-up tension.
“Did you know he was going to do that?” he asked, his voice brittle and sharp.
“No! Of course I didn’t,” she said straightaway. “Armitage was the prosecution’s witness. We took it for granted he was going to say that Sidney seemed to be all right, but underneath he was bad. And he did! But he must have intended to drop the assault in—”
“Not Armitage,” Patrick cut across her. “Daniel! If he’d waited a couple of seconds later, Armitage would’ve said it. Then it would all have come out eventually. You couldn’t keep it in, no matter how you tried.”
“Don’t keep saying ‘you’!” she interrupted. “It’s not me…”
“Not you, Jemima Pitt—‘you’ are the English, the society, the people Sidney belongs to. People sticking by their own, no matter what.”
She felt her heart cramp with an overwhelming sense of loss. “I thought I was Jemima Flannery! Am I suddenly ‘them’ and not ‘us’? Is that what it?
?s about? Not whether Sidney is guilty or innocent of either crime, but whether he’s English or American?”
