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“So…what is he going to say? She did know him, Patrick!”
“Are you suggesting that she let him in?” His voice was incredulous.
“No! I’m not suggesting it, but his defense might. He isn’t going to fold up and keep a gentlemanly silence! Not if he’s the kind of man who’d break in in the first place. He could say she invited him, and then changed her mind and screamed!”
He raised his eyebrows. “So, he tore the necklace off her throat and ran? Please, Jem, that’s hardly a defense.”
“No, it’s an attack in return. But are you willing to take that risk? Or, more to the point, are you sure Rebecca is?”
He looked startled. He started to speak and then changed his mind, as if realizing she was thinking of something they had not touched on yet.
“I know Tobias wants justice for her,” Jemima tried again. “But at any price? Has he even realized anything of what she feels? I’ve tried to imagine, but I can’t!”
“Wouldn’t you want to see Phillip Sidney punished if he’d done that to you?” he reasoned.
“I don’t know! I might think I did, until it came to telling everybody about it.”
“But it wasn’t her fault!” he exclaimed indignantly. “She’s utterly and completely innocent in all of it!”
“And helpless, in her nightclothes, and lying in bed—”
“Exactly! How could she possibly be more innocent?”
“Or vulnerable, or helpless, or passive?”
He looked at her sharply. “What are you saying? That it is somehow her fault? That she should have taken some kind of…precaution? Like what? Gone to bed with all her clothes on? You’re being unreasonable, Jem.”
“No, I’m not! Or, yes, perhaps I am. I’m trying to put myself in her place and think what I would want,” she explained. “I’m perfectly sure I wouldn’t want to be known as the woman who lay passively while a man broke into her room and tore her clothes and ripped off her necklace and have to sit there while other people’s imaginations go…everywhere. I don’t want to be thought of as a victim!” She felt her frustration with him rising, cross
ing over into anger. “I’d hate it! Even if people weren’t thinking that, wondering if I was telling the truth, or if perhaps I’d let him in.”
“She didn’t! That’s ridiculous!”
“And people’s imaginations are never ridiculous?” she said with amazement. “We think nobody knows what we’re imagining, that it’s private.”
“It is!”
“Oh, please! It’s written on your face half the time. And it slips out in little remarks you think nobody understands, when there are only men present.”
“You’ve never been there when there were only men present.”
“I’ve been there when there are only women present!” She saw the smile melt away. “And so has Rebecca,” she finished.
He remained silent.
“I know Tobias thinks she’ll feel better if Sidney is punished, and he may be right. But what if he isn’t? He can’t take it back.”
“Don’t you think he will be right?”
“I don’t know! But if it all comes out in trial, Sidney’s going to want to deny it.”
“He can’t. Tobias saw him there. Tobias is a very important man. Everybody respects him.”
“In Washington. Over here, they respect Sidney.”
“They won’t when they learn what he did!” Patrick said with contempt.
“Patrick…my darling…people in London are exactly the same as everywhere else: they believe what they want to.”
