Weighed in the Balance Read online

  I am going to Felzburg to see if I can learn more there. It may all hang on whether there actually was a plot to bring Friedrich back or not. Naturally, I shall let you know anything I discover, whether it is to Zorah’s benefit or not. At present I fear it may well be of no service to her at all.

  What I hear of her is only partially to her credit. If you can persuade her to withdraw her accusation, that may be the greatest service you can do for her, as her legal adviser. If Friedrich was murdered, and that does seem possible, it may have been by one of a number of people, but they do not include Gisela.

  I wish you luck.

  Monk

  Rathbone swore and threw the letter down on his desk. Perhaps it was foolish, but he had hoped Monk would discover something which would show a new aspect of Gisela, perhaps a lover, a younger man, a brief obsession which had led her to long for her freedom. Or perhaps Friedrich had discovered her indiscretion and threatened to make it public, and leave her.

  But Monk was right. It was almost certainly a political crime, if there were a crime at all, and Zorah’s accusation was motivated more by jealousy than any basis in fact. The only legal advice he could honestly give her was to withdraw her charge and apologize unreservedly. Perhaps if she pleaded distress at Friedrich’s death, and deep disappointment that he could not lead the battle for independence, there might be some compassion towards her. Damages might be moderated. Even so, she would almost certainly have ruined herself.

  “Apologize?” she said incredulously when Rathbone was shown into her room with its exotic shawl and red leather sofa. “I will not!” The weather was considerably colder than when he had first come, and there was a huge fire roaring in the grate, flames leaping, throwing a red light into the bearskins on the floor and giving the room a barbaric look, curiously warming.

  “You have no other reasonable choice,” he said vehemently. “We have found no proof whatever of your charge. We are left with suppositions, which may well be true, but we cannot demonstrate them, and even if we could, they are no defense.”

  “Then I shall have to make an unreasonable choice,” she said flatly. “Do I assume this is your very proper way of retreating from my case?” Her eyes were level and cold, a flare of challenge in them, and acute disappointment.

  Rathbone was irritated, and if he were honest, a little stung. “If you do assume it, madam, you do so wrongly,” he snapped. “It is my duty to advise you as to facts and my considered opinion as to what they may mean. Then I shall take your instructions, providing they do not require me to say or do anything that is contrary to the law.”

  “How terribly English.” There was both laughter and contempt in her face. “It must make you feel impossibly safe—and comfortable. You live in the heart of an empire which stretches all ’round the world.” She was angry now. “Name a continent and your British redcoats have fought there, carried by your British navy, subdued the natives and taught them Christianity, whether they wished to learn it or not, and instructed their princes how to behave like Englishmen.”

  What she said was true, and it startled him and made him feel suddenly artificial, violated and rather pompous.

  Her voice was charged with emotion, deep and husky in her throat.

  “You’ve forgotten what it is like to be frightened,” she went on. “To look at your neighbors and wonder when they are going to swallow you. Oh, I know you read about it in your history books! You learn about Napoleon and King Philip of Spain—and how you were on the brink of invasion, with your backs against the wall. But you beat them, didn’t you! You always won.” Her body was tight under its silk gown, and her face twisted with anger. “Well, we won’t win, Sir Oliver. We shall lose. It may be immediately, it may be in ten years, or even twenty, but in the end we shall lose. It is the manner of our losing that we may be able to control, that’s all. Have you the faintest idea what that feels like? I think not!”

  “On the contrary,” Rathbone said sardonically, although his words were only a defense against his own misjudgment and vulnerability. “I am imagining losing very vividly, and I am about to experience it in the courtroom.” He knew as he said it that his own small personal defeat did not compare with the defeat of nations, the loss of centuries-old identity and concepts of freedom, however illusionary.

  “You’ve given up!” she said with a lift of surprise which was contempt rather than question.

  In spite of determining not to be, he was provoked. He would not let her see it. “I have faced reality,” he contradicted. “That is a different side of the same coin. We have no alternative. It lies with me to tell you the facts and give you the best chance I can; and with you to choose.”

  Her eyebrows rose sharply. “Whether I surrender before the battle or fight until I may be beaten? What a nice irony. That is exactly the dilemma my country faces. For my country I think I do not choose assimilation, even though we cannot win. For myself I choose war.”

  “You cannot win either, madam,” he said reluctantly. He hated having to tell her. She was stubborn, foolish, arrogant and self-indulgent, but she had courage and, after her own fashion, a kind of honor. Above all, she cared passionately. She would be hurt, and that knowledge pained him.

  “Are you saying I should withdraw my charge, say that I lied, and ask that creature’s pardon for it?” she demanded.

  “You will have to eventually. Do you want to do it privately now, or publicly, when she proves you incapable of supporting your charge?”

  “It would not be private,” she pointed out. “Gisela would make sure everyone knew or there would be no purpose. Not that it matters. I will not withdraw. She murdered him. The fact that you cannot find the proof of it alters nothing.”

  He was galled that she should place the responsibility upon him.

  “It alters everything in the law!” he retorted. “What can I say to make you understand?” He heard desperation rising in his voice. “It seems very likely that we may be able to give serious evidence to the theory that Friedrich was murdered. His symptoms are closer to yew poison than internal bleeding. We may even be able to force an exhumation of his body and an autopsy.” He saw her wince of distaste with satisfaction. “But even if that proves us correct, Gisela was the one person who had no access to yew leaves. She never left his side. For heaven’s sake, ma’am, if you believe he was assassinated for some political reason, say so! Don’t sacrifice your own reputation by making a charge against the one person who cannot be guilty, simply in order to force the matter to justice!”

  “What do you suggest?” she asked, her voice tense, cracking a little under the strain of effort to be light. “That I accuse Klaus von Seidlitz? But he is not guilty!”

  She was still standing, the firelight reflecting red on her skirt. It was growing dark outside.

  “You know it was not Klaus. You have no proof it was Gisela.” Hope suddenly lifted inside him. “Then withdraw the charge, and we will investigate until we have enough evidence, then we’ll take it to the police! Tell the truth! Say you believe he was murdered but you don’t know by whom. You named Gisela simply to make someone listen to you and investigate. Apologize to her. Say you now realize you were wrong to suspect her, and you hope she will forgive your error of judgment and join with everyone to discover the truth. She can hardly refuse to do that. Or she will indeed look as if she may have colluded. I will draw up a statement for you.”

  “You will not!” she said fiercely, her eyes hot and stubborn. “We shall go to trial.”

  “But we don’t have to!” Why was the woman so obtuse? She was going to cause such unnecessary pain to herself! “Monk will learn everything he can—”

  “Good!” She swung around and stared towards the window. “Then let him do it by the time we meet in court, and he can testify for me.”

  “That may not be in time …”

  “Then tell him to hurry!”

  “Withdraw the charge against Gisela. Then the trial will not take place. She may
ask damages, but I can plead on your behalf so that—”

  She jerked back to glare at him. “Are you refusing to take my instructions. Sir Oliver? That is the right term, is it not? Instructions.”

  “I am trying to advise you—” he said desperately.

  “And I have heard your advice and declined it,” she cut across him. “I do not seem able to make you understand that I believe Gisela killed Friedrich and I am not going to accuse someone else as a device. A device, I may add, which I do not believe would work.”

  “But she did not kill him.” His voice was getting louder and more strident than he wished, but she was trying him to exasperation. “You cannot prove something which is not true! And I will not be party to trying.”

  “I believe it is true,” she said inflexibly, her face set, body rigid. “And it is not your calling to be judge as well as counsel, is it?”

  He took a deep breath. “It is my obligation to tell you the truth … which is that if Friedrich was indeed murdered, by the use of yew leaves, then Gisela is the one person whose actions and whereabouts are accounted for at all times, and she could not have killed him.”

  She stared at him defiantly, her chin high, her eyes wide. But she had no answer to his logic. It beat her, and she had to acknowledge it.

  “If you wish to be excused, Sir Oliver, then I excuse you. You need not consider your honor stained. I seem to have asked of you more than is just.”

  He felt an overwhelming relief, and was ashamed of it

  “What will you do?” he asked gently, the tension and the sense of doom skipping away from him, but in their place was a whisper of failure, as if some opportunity had been lost, and even a sort of loneliness.

  “If you see the situation as you have said, no doubt any other barrister of like skill and honor will see it the same way,” she answered. “They will advise me as you have. And then I shall have to reply to them as I have to you, so I shall have gained nothing. There is only one person who believes in the necessity of pursuing the case.”

  “Who is that?” He was surprised. He could imagine no one.

  “I, of course.”

  “You cannot represent yourself!” he protested.

  “There is no alternative that I am prepared to accept.” She stared at him with a very slight smile, irony and amusement mixed in it—and behind it, fear.

  “Then I shall continue to represent you, unless you prefer me not to.” He was horrified as he heard his own voice. It was rash to a degree. But he could hardly abandon her to her fate, even if she had brought it upon herself.

  She smiled ruefully, full of gratitude.

  “Thank you, Sir Oliver.”

  “That was most unwise,” Henry Rathbone said gravely. He was leaning against the mantelshelf in his sitting room. The French doors were no longer open onto the garden, and there was a brisk fire burning in the hearth. He looked unhappy. Oliver had just told him of his decision to defend Zorah in spite of the fact that she refused absolutely to withdraw her accusation or to make any sort of accommodation to sense, or even to her own social survival, possibly to her financial survival also.

  Oliver did not want to repeat the details of the discussion. It sounded, in retrospect, as if he had been precipitate, governed far more by emotion than intelligence, a fault he deplored in others.

  “I don’t see any honorable alternative,” he said stubbornly. “I cannot simply leave her. She has put herself in a completely vulnerable position.”

  “And you with her,” Henry added. He sighed and moved away from the front of the fire, where he was beginning to be uncomfortable. He sat down and fished his pipe out of his jacket pocket. He knocked the pipe against the fireplace, cleaned out the bowl, then filled it with tobacco again. He put it in his mouth and lit it. It went out almost immediately, but he did not seem to care.

  “We must see what can be salvaged out of the situation.” He looked steadily at Oliver. “I don’t think you appreciate how deeply people’s feelings run in this sort of issue.”

  “Slander?” Oliver asked with surprise. “I doubt it. And if murder is proved, then she will to some extent be justified.” He was comfortable in his usual chair at the other side of the fire. He slid down a little farther in it. “I think that is the thrust I must take, prove that there is sufficient evidence to believe that a crime has been committed. Possibly in the emotion, the shock and outrage of learning that Friedrich was murdered, albeit for political reasons, they will overlook Zorah’s charge against Gisela.” His spirits lifted a little as he said it. It was the beginning of a sensible approach instead of the blank wall he had faced even a few minutes ago.

  “No, I did not mean slander,” Henry replied, taking his pipe out of his mouth but not bothering to relight it. He held it by the bowl, pointing with it as he spoke. “I meant the challenging of people’s preconceptions of certain events and characters, their beliefs, which have become part of how they see the world and their own value in it. If you force people to change their minds too quickly, they cannot readjust everything, and they will blame you for their discomfort, the sense of confusion and loss of balance.”

  “I think you are overstating the case,” Oliver said firmly. “There are very few people so unsophisticated as to imagine women never kill their husbands, or that minor European royal families are so very different from the rest of us very fallible human beings. Certainly I will not have many on my jury. They will be men of the world, by definition.” He found himself smiling. “The average juror is a man of property and experience, Father. He may be very sober in his appearance, even pompous in his manner, but he has few illusions about the realities of life, of passion and greed and occasionally of violence.”

  Henry sighed. “He is also a man with a vested interest in the social order as it is, Oliver. He respects his betters and aspires to be like them, even to become one of them, should fortune allow. He does not like the challenging of the good and the decent, which form the framework of the order he knows and give him his place and his value, which makes sure his inferiors respect him in the same way.”

  “Therefore, he will not like murder,” Oliver said reasonably. “Most particularly, he will not accept the murder of a prince. He will want to see it exposed and avenged.”

  Henry relit his pipe absentmindedly. His brow was furrowed with anxiety. “He will not like lawyers who defend people who make such charges against a great romantic heroine,” he corrected. “He will not like women, such as Zorah Rostova, who defy convention by not marrying, by traveling alone in all sorts of foreign lands; who dress inappropriately and ride astride a horse and smoke cigars.”

  “How do you know she does those things?” Oliver was startled.

  “Because people are already beginning to talk about it.” Henry leaned forward, the pipe going out again. “For heaven’s sake, don’t you suppose the gossip is running around London like smuts from a chimney in a high wind? People have believed in the love story of Friedrich and Gisela for over a decade. They don’t want to think they have been deluded, and they will resent anyone who tries to tell them so.”

  Oliver felt the warmth of his earlier optimism begin to drain out of him.

  “Attacking royalty is a very dangerous thing,” Henry went on. “I know a great many people do it, especially in newspapers and broadsheets, and always have, but it has seldom made them liked among the sort of people you care about. Her Majesty has just recognized your services to justice. You are a knight, and a Queen’s Counsel, not a political pamphleteer.”

  “That is all the more reason why I cannot allow a murder to go unquestioned,” Oliver said grimly, “simply because I shall not be popular for drawing everyone’s attention to it.” He had placed himself in a position from which it was impossible to withdraw with any grace at all. And his father was only making it worse. He looked across at the older man’s earnest face and knew that his father was afraid for him, struggling to see an escape and unable to.

  Oliver sighe
d. His anger evaporated, leaving only fear.

  “Monk is going to Felzburg. He thinks it was probably a political assassination, perhaps by Klaus von Seidlitz, in order to prevent Friedrich from returning to lead the struggle for independence, which could very easily end in war.”

  “Then let’s hope he brings proof of it,” Henry replied. “And that Zorah will then apologize, and you can persuade a jury to be lenient with the damages they award,”

  Oliver said nothing. The fire settled in a shower of sparks, and he found he was cold.

  Hester was now sure beyond all but the slimmest hope that Robert Ollenheim would not walk again. The doctor had not said so to Bernd or Dagmar, but he had not argued when Hester had challenged him in the brief moment they had alone.

  She wanted to escape from the house for a while to compose her thoughts before she faced their recognition of the truth. She knew their pain would be profound, and she felt inadequate to help. All the words she thought of sounded condescending, because in the end she could not share the hurt. What is there to say to a mother whose son will not stand or walk or run again, who will never dance or ride a horse, who will never even leave his bedroom unaided? What do you say to a man whose son will not follow in his footsteps, who will never be independent, who will never have sons of his own to carry on the name and the line?

  She asked permission to leave on a personal errand, and when willingly granted it, she took a hansom east across the city to Vere Street and asked Simms if she might see Sir Oliver, if he had a few moments to spare.

  She did not have long to wait; within twenty minutes she was shown in. Rathbone was standing in the middle of the room. There were several large books open on the desk, as if he had been searching for some reference. He looked tired. There were lines of stress around his eyes and mouth, and his fair hair was combed a little crookedly, a most unusual occurrence for him. His clothes were as immaculate as always, and as perfectly tailored, but he did not stand as straight.