A Breach of Promise - Anne Perry [87]
Rathbone looked at Melville, who straightened his back slowly and lifted his face. He looked appalling, as if he felt so ill he might faint. It was impossible to begin to imagine what he must be feeling.
“I think we should leave,” Rathbone said to him quietly. “We cannot speak here.”
Melville swallowed with difficulty. “There’s nothing to say,” he answered between dry lips. “I never meant to hurt Zillah … or Isaac. And I seem to have done both. Zillah will recover. She will be all right.” He screwed up his face as if feeling a physical pain deep inside his body. “What will happen to Isaac? Will he be ruined? Will they try to send him to jail?”
This was no time for false hope for Wolff or for Melville himself. Sacheverall’s face should have swept any such delusions away.
“They may. If it is prosecuted there is really very little defense. It is something people don’t usually bother with—if no one under the age of consent is involved and no nuisance is caused by acts in public.”
Melville started to laugh, quietly, but with a wild desperation that warned it would turn to weeping any moment.
For once Rathbone did not even consider propriety, or even what his professional reputation would suffer. He put his hand on Melville’s shoulder and gripped him hard, even prepared to support him physically if necessary.
“Come,” he ordered. “The least we can do is offer you a little privacy. They’ve had their pound of flesh; let us deny them the pleasure of carving it off and watching the blood.” And he half hauled Melville to his feet, pulling him through the press of people, elbowing them out of his way with uncharacteristic roughness.
Out in the hallway, Melville straightened up. “Thank you,” he said shakily. “But I am composed now. I shall be … all right.”
He looked appalling. His skin was flushed and his lips dry. But his eyes were unflinching, and there was a kind of wild, black humor in them. He still knew something that Rathbone did not. Something that mattered.
Rathbone drew in a breath to ask yet again, then knew it would be a waste of time.
“Do you want me to settle?” he asked, searching Melville’s face, trying to see beyond the clear, aquamarine eyes into the man inside. What was there beyond brilliance of ideas, the mass of technical knowledge, the dreams in stone of a thousand generations of history stored and made new? What were the private dreams and emotions of the man himself, his likes and dislikes, the fears, the laughter, the memories? Or weren’t there any? Was he empty of everything else?
“I won’t marry her,” Melville repeated softly. “I never asked her to marry me. If I settle now, say I was wrong when I wasn’t, what will happen to all the other men in the future, if I give in?”
“You haven’t given in,” Rathbone answered. “You were beaten.”
Melville turned and walked away, his shoulders hunched, his head down. He bumped into someone and did not notice.
Aching for him, confused and angry, Rathbone hurried after him, determined at the least to find him a hansom and see that he was not harried or abused any further. He caught up with him and escorted him as far as the back entrance. He glared at a couple of men who would have approached Melville, and strode past them, knocking one aside roughly.
At the curb he all but commandeered a hansom and half threw Melville up into it, giving the driver Melville’s address and passing him up a more than generous fare.
When the cab was safely on its way, he went back into the courthouse having no idea what he was going to do the next day. When the case resumed he would have to try to find something to change the present opinion. What was there? The last witness had turned the balance beyond redeeming. His only hope was to attack, but what good could that do now? Melville was ruined whatever the result. The only possible advantage would be to save him something financially. And perhaps Barton Lambert, at least, might be willing to do that He had no need of money.
Rathbone’s last hope of achieving that by force, if he could not by appeal