Defend and Betray - Anne Perry [164]
“Does he?” Edith said softly. “Please don’t try to give me hope, Hester, if there really isn’t any. It is not a kindness.”
The major drew breath to speak, and both turned to look at him. Then he changed his mind and remained silent and unhappy, facing Hester.
“There is hope,” Hester said firmly. “But I don’t know how great it is. It all depends on convincing the jury that—”
“What?” Edith said quickly. “What can he convince them of? She did it! Even Rathbone himself has proved that! What else is there?”
Hester hesitated. She was glad Major Tiplady was there, although there was nothing he could do, but his mere presence was a kind of comfort.
Edith went on with a faint, bitter smile. “He can hardly persuade them she was justified. Thaddeus was painfully virtuous—all the things that count to other people.” She frowned suddenly. “Actually we still don’t know why she did do it. Is he going to say she is mad? Is that it? I don’t think she is.” She glanced at the major. “And they have subpoenaed me to give evidence. What shall I do?”
“Give evidence,” Hester answered. “There’s nothing else you can do. Just answer the questions they ask and no more. But be honest. Don’t try to guess what they want. It is up to Rathbone to draw it from you. If you look as if you are trying to help it will show and the jury won’t believe you. Just don’t lie—about anything he asks you.”
“But what can he ask me? I don’t know anything.”
“I don’t know what he will ask you,” Hester said exasperatedly. “He wouldn’t tell me, even if I were to ask him. I have no right to know. And far better I don’t. But I do know he has a strategy—and it could win. Please believe me, and don’t press me to give you answers I don’t have.”
“I’m sorry.” Edith was suddenly penitent. She rose to her feet quickly and walked over to the window, less graceful than usual because she was self-conscious. “When this trial is over I am still going to look for a position of some sort. I know Mama will be furious, but I feel suffocated there. I spend all my life doing nothing whatsoever that matters at all. I stitch embroidery no one needs, and paint pictures even I don’t like much. I play the piano badly and no one listens except out of politeness. I make duty calls on people and take them pots of conserve and give bowls of soup to the deserving poor, and feel like such a hypocrite because it does hardly any good, and we go with such an air of virtue, and come away as if we’ve solved all their problems, and we’ve hardly touched them.” Her voice caught for an instant. “I’m thirty-three, and I’m behaving like an old woman. Hester, I’m terrified that one day I’m going to wake up and I will be old—and I’ll have done nothing at all that was worth doing. I’ll never have accomplished anything, served any purpose, helped anyone more than was purely convenient, never felt anything really deeply once Oswald died—been no real use at all.” She kept her back to them, and stood very straight and still.
“Then you must find work of some sort to do,” Hester said firmly. “Even if it is hard or dirty, paid or unpaid, even thankless—it would be better than waking up every morning to a wasted day and going to bed at night knowing you wasted it. I have heard it said that most of what we regret is not what we did but what we did not do. I think on the whole that is correct. You have your health. It would be better to wait on others than do nothing at all.”
“You mean go into service?” Edith was incredulous and there was a frail, slightly hysterical giggle under the surface of her voice.
“No, nothing quite so demanding—it would really be more than your mother deserves. I meant helping some poor creature who is too ill or too mithered to help herself.” She stopped. “Of course that would be unpaid, and that might not work …”
“It wouldn’t. Mama would not permit it, so I would have to find lodgings of my own, and that requires money—which