The Determined Lord Hadleigh. Virginia Heath
Chapter Thirteen
The Old Bailey—May 1820
She had attended every single day of the trial. Alone in the gallery, her face pale, sitting erect, her slim shoulders pulled back as she stared straight ahead. Her hands were hidden among the folds of her skirt. It had taken Hadleigh almost a week to realise that she hid her hands because they provided the only clue to the way she was truly feeling as they twisted a ruined handkerchief into tight, agitated spirals which she kept proudly from view.
She had a child, he knew. A son who was a little over a year old. Yet she never brought the babe to the court as some did in a bid to elicit sympathy. Nor did she give any indication she noticed the hordes who had come to gloat at her tragedy. The blatant pointing and unsubtle whispering; the shameless newspaper artist who frequently perched himself directly in front of her and sketched her expression incorrectly for the breakfast entertainment of the masses—such was the gravitas of this case that everyone wanted to know about it. And about her.
The traitor’s wife.
That quiet dignity had both impressed him and humbled him because it was eerily familiar. Her honesty, yesterday, had shaken him to his core. In a last-ditch attempt to save her husband and prove his good character, the defence had called her as a witness at the last minute. Unexpectedly. They asked leading questions, to which she could answer only yes or no, then stepped aside so that he could cross-examine her.
‘Was he a good husband?’
She had looked him dead in the eye. ‘No.’ He had expected her to lie, but gave no indication of his surprise. Her gaze moved tentatively to the furious man in the dock. ‘No. He wasn’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘He wasn’t at all who I had hoped he was.’
‘This court requires more explanation, Lady Penhurst. In what ways was the accused a bad husband?’ He’d had an inkling. More than an inkling, if he was honest, especially as he had lived in a house where a marriage had become a legal prison, but as the Crown Prosecutor his job was to present the government’s case as best he could. The jury deserved the whole truth about the man in the dock, no matter how unpalatable it was. Or how intrusive.
‘He was violent, Lord Hadleigh.’ His friend Leatham had said as much. Violent and depraved and his heart wept for her suffering. She reminded him of another woman in another time. One who had also endured stoically because she had had no option to do otherwise and had not wanted to burden him with her troubles. The bitter taste of bile stung his throat at the awful memory so long buried.
‘He beat you?’
Her eyes nervously flicked to her husband’s again because she knew that if he was acquitted, she would pay for her disloyalty today and there was nothing in law to stop that happening. But her spine stiffened again with resolve and she slowly inhaled as if to calm herself and find inner strength. He knew how much that small act of defiance cost her. ‘If I was lucky, only weekly.’ Her gloved index finger touched the bridge of her nose where the bone slightly protruded. ‘He broke my nose. Cracked a rib—’
‘Objection!’ The defence lawyer shot to his feet. ‘My learned friend knows what happens between a husband and a wife in the privacy of his house is not pertinent to this case.’
Hadleigh addressed the judge. ‘I believe it is pertinent m’lud. It gives the jury an insight into Viscount Penhurst’s character.’ Because a man who used his wife as a battering ram was rarely a good man, as his own mother had learned to her cost.
‘We have debated this many times before, Lord Hadleigh, therefore I know you are well aware the law clearly has no objections to a husband disciplining his wife.’ The judge had the temerity to look affronted that it had been brought up in the first place, seemingly perfectly happy that a husband had the right to beat his wife senseless and the courts who supposedly stood for justice would do nothing. ‘You will desist this line of questioning immediately and the witness’s answers will be struck from the proceedings.’
Hadleigh nodded, his teeth practically gnashing, consoling himself that while the law was an ass as far as the rights of married women were concerned, at least the seeds had been sown. You could strike words from the record, but once said, they took root in the mind. A few of the jurors had looked appalled. That would have to do. ‘My apologies.’ Hadleigh made no attempt to sound sincere before he turned back to her and the job in hand. ‘Lady Penhurst—you lived predominantly in Penhurst Hall in Sussex during your marriage, did you not?’
‘I did.’
‘Then do you expect this court to believe that you lived in that house and never suspected what was going on in the cellars right beneath your feet?’ Her husband had run part of a vast smuggling operation, utilising his estate’s close proximity to the sea to receive and sell on thousands of gallons of brandy in exchange for guns. Guns destined for France, and more specifically to the supporters of the imprisoned Napoleon who were desperate to see their great leader restored to power.
‘I have eyes, Lord Hadleigh. And ears. Therefore, I knew he was up to something but, to my shame, I had no idea what and nor did I truly attempt to find out.’
‘Why to your shame?’
‘Because my life was easier if I asked no questions. It is hard being married to a man who answers them with his fists.’ Another thing he had learned through bitter experience. ‘But with hindsight, I wish I had confided in someone.’
Then, unprompted and in a tumbled rush, she had begun to reel off what she had seen and heard which she had thought suspicious. Things she had neglected to mention the first time he had interrogated her fresh from her husband’s arrest, doubtless because she didn’t dare say a word against him then in fear of his retribution. Hadleigh had had no intention of calling her to the stand for precisely that reason—wives, even grossly abused ones, rarely turned against their husbands or even testified at all—so her sudden extensive and embellished testimony surprised him.
The guards in the cellars, the menacing servants who watched her every move and reported it back to her spouse, the odd messages which arrived at the house at odder hours which Penhurst always burned after reading, the new and endless supply of money that he spent like water. Most significant were the dates she freely