A Christmas Hope (16 page)

Claudine knew it was necessary she answer them anyway. It was difficult. She was ashamed to admit the truth, especially to people whose good opinion she would like to have had.

“I married a man who was suitable,” she said quietly, “in my parents’ view, after considerable thought. He appeared to be sober, honest, hardworking, talented, and likely to be faithful to me. He was all these things … I shouldn’t speak in the past—he still is.”

Forbes Gifford looked even more puzzled. She seemed to be making the exact point that he had, and the opposite of what she had implied.

She drew in her breath, let it out slowly, and tried to compose herself. Even so, when she began again, her voice was husky.

“He is also unkind,” she told him. “He seldom criticized me openly to begin with, but it was always there in a remoteness, the praise of others in comparison with me, the condescending explanations of things I did not immediately grasp, and then afterward the reminder that he had taught me. I grew to despise myself and believe that I was displeasing to him, possibly to most people.”

Forbes Gifford frowned but not at her. His eyes remained gentle and increasingly distressed by the story she was telling. She saw that there was no need to explain further.

“He did not love me,” she said simply. “Nor did I love him. It is a long time since we shared anything with
pleasure, or even with kindness. We do not laugh at the same things or admire the same moments of beauty. I wish him no harm, but I am happier when I do not have to see him or speak to him. I think it is possible he feels the same of me. Perhaps I am not even the quality of person I could have been, had I believed in myself and my own worth. Humility is a sweet virtue in anyone, but to be without faith or hope only destroys. It is much harder to find when you are unhappy.”

She could see plainly in his face that she need say little more.

“Alphonsine is a lovely young woman, and I refer not to her face, which we can all see, but to her spirit. Please do not crowd her into doing something that she knows to be bitterly wrong in order to cement a marriage with a man who does not love her, nor does she love him. And if you are still intending to, believing it in her best interest for the future, consider that if he would lie and let an innocent man hang for a crime his friends committed, how well will he care for his wife, if it should in some way inconvenience him?”

“You have said enough,” Forbes interrupted her. “It will be most unpleasant to do as you say, but there is no alternative that is acceptable. I thank you for your honesty.
It cannot have been easy. Your own example makes the best argument you could for virtue over expediency.” He glanced at Oona then back at Claudine. “Thank you. It shall be done as you suggest.”

Claudine was too choked with relief, gratitude, a strange sense of freedom, to answer him.

“Well then, you’d better get on and deal with the rest of it, hadn’t you!” Squeaky said when she told him the next morning.

“The rest of it?” She was at a loss. “Alphonsine will tell the police—Sergeant Green, or whatever his name is—and they will withdraw the charges against Mr. Tregarron.”

“If they believe her,” he said dubiously, pulling his face into an expression of tortured doubt.

“We’ll have to make it so that they do,” she said, not quite sure what she meant. She could not bear to have come this far, and at such cost, and give up now. Was she absolutely sure it was the truth, sure enough to swear on oath? Sure beyond any doubt at all?

“Right!” Squeaky agreed. “Why should they?”

She lost her temper with him. She was tired and had been bitterly embarrassed telling Forbes Gifford so much that was painful in her own life. She had never put it into words before, and it had hurt more than she had expected. It was a story of absolute failure. Now Squeaky was doubting her, too, and in the place where she felt safer than anywhere else, even her own home.

“If you don’t believe it, then I had better continue without you,” she said angrily, starting to rise to her feet.

“Wait!” he said abruptly. “Don’t go all soft on me now! I believe you, but you need the police to. I only want you to think about how you’re going to make that happen.” He looked at her with a slight squint. “What’s the matter with you? You seem all … pushed out of shape.”

He was more perceptive than she had foreseen, but she did not want to tell him all she had revealed to Forbes Gifford about her personal circumstances. “I don’t know how to make the police believe me, except that Alphonsine and Mr. Barton say the same thing about where people were, and it fits in with what I saw.”

“Then you’d better go and see if Tregarron says the same,” Squeaky said flatly. “I’ll arrange it.”

She was incredulous. “How are you going to do that? I’m hardly family. They wouldn’t admit me to his cell. And for goodness’ sake be careful what you say. Don’t you—”

He froze her with an indignant glare. Slowly he rose to his feet. “Where’ll I find you when I’ve done it?” he inquired with raised eyebrows. “And don’t ask any questions you don’t want the answers to.”

It was arranged the following day. Claudine was let into the prison and conducted to the cell where she would be allowed fifteen minutes with Dai Tregarron.

She had rehearsed in her mind several times what she would say to him. Each time it was different, and nothing was satisfactory, let alone good. She was so nervous her fingers were stiff. Her legs were a little wobbly, and she did not feel as if she could draw sufficient breath.

When Tregarron came in, he looked smaller than she remembered him, and somehow faded, as if dust and the harsh light had robbed him of luster. Above all, he looked appallingly tired, the lines in his face deep and the vitality drained away from him.

He stood in the doorway, unwilling to come in, and she knew he was embarrassed in front of her.

She hesitated for a moment then began. “I have very little time, Mr. Tregarron. Please come in and sit down so I may speak to you without having to raise my voice, and perhaps be overheard.”

“If you are sorry for me, you don’t need to be,” he said, moving forward only a few steps. “And if you’ve come to save my soul—”

“I haven’t,” she said sharply. “If you want your soul saved, you will have to do it yourself. Of more immediate concern to me is saving your neck. That is, if you did not strike Winnie Briggs so hard that she died of the blow.”

“I didn’t,” he said, taking another step toward her and putting his hands on the back of the wooden chair. “But nobody’s going to believe that. It’s either me or one of those fancy young gentlemen from well-bred and well-heeled families. Who do you think they’re going to believe? For that matter, who do you think they can afford to disbelieve?” He pursed his lips. “Sorry, Olwen, you’re off in some dream of your own.”

“I haven’t time to argue with you,” she said impatiently. “Please sit down. You are making me stare up at you, and it is uncomfortable. I need to know exactly what happened. And, please, be precise.”

“Why? It makes no difference now.” He looked desperately tired, as if he had worn himself out thinking, struggling to untangle in his mind a knot that may only be pulled forever more tightly.

“There are two witnesses,” she told him. “If what you say is the same as they do, then you will be believed. Now stop wasting what little time we have, and tell me.” She did not add that neither Alphonsine nor John Barton had seen who actually struck Winnie Briggs.

“Witnesses?” His eyes widened. Hope was naked in his face, and then the moment after, it turned to disbelief. “No there aren’t. There was no one else on the terrace. If there had been, they’d have said something before now. There was nowhere they could have been. Someone’s lying, for their own reasons. It won’t hold up in court.” His voice was edged with despair, which was the sharper for the brief flare of hope.

“They were behind a window, in a room where they should not have been. Now stop arguing and wasting what few minutes there are. Do you want to hang for this?” She was being brutal, but she was afraid the warden would return for her any moment and it would be too late. “What happened?”

He swallowed as if there were something solid stuck
in his throat. “I brought Winnie, because they wanted someone who’d be a bit fun,” he began. “And honestly, I think they also wanted to shock a few people. They thought it would be amusing.” He blushed very faintly; it was no more than a hint of color in his pallid cheeks. He caught her glance, both of disgust and of urgency. “We were laughing and generally behaving like fools. Winnie was good value. She had a sharp tongue, that one, and a ready wit. They liked her. Then Foxley wanted a bit more, wanted to kiss her, and she told him to wait. He thought she was putting him off, and he got more pushy. Crostwick stepped in, but he did it clumsily and it made things worse. Foxley was in a bad temper anyway, and then he thought Crostwick was above himself so he shoved him away, quite hard. That was when Halversgate got involved as well. And the wineglass broke. The shards like daggers.”

His voice dropped.

“I told Winnie to get out of it, and she tried to, but Foxley caught hold of her. She pushed him away. I think she was scared by this time. Foxley lost his temper and slashed out at her. He caught her hard with one of the shards, maybe harder than he meant to, and she went down. She hit her head, and she didn’t move again. At
first no one took any notice. They were busy getting angrier with each other. I tried to pull them off and get to her, but Crostwick hit me, pretty hard. Halversgate was terrified out of his wits and tried to do something, but Foxley hit him, too, and he staggered back.”

He looked at Claudine with haunted eyes. “That gave me a chance to get to Winnie. I thought she’d just passed out, but when I tried to find a pulse, I couldn’t. I think I was too scared to try properly. My hands were shaking like I had the ague myself. That was when you came out—so you know what happened after that.”

“Thank you,” she said with a warmth of relief surging through her. “That matches what the witnesses say they saw. You are perfectly certain that it was Creighton Foxley who hit her?”

“Yes.”

“Have you already said so to Sergeant Green?”

“There didn’t seem to be a point. They all said it was me.”

“Well, I suppose they wouldn’t admit it was them, would they?” She rose to her feet. “Thank you. I will find out exactly how we should proceed now. Keep hope, Mr. Tregarron.”

“Flowers, white flowers,” he said softly.

She turned at the door to stare at him. “What white flowers? What are you talking about?”

He smiled. “Where Olwen walks, white flowers spring up in the earth behind her.”

Her eyes filled with sudden tears, and she banged on the door for the warden to let her out. She did not want Tregarron to meet her eyes again, in case he saw far too much in them. She was behaving like a fool.

Wallace was outraged. He stood in the middle of the rug in front of the fire and stared at Claudine as if he could hardly believe what she had said to him.

“It is absolutely out of the question! Have you taken leave of your senses?” he demanded. “Have you even the faintest idea what it will do to our reputation if you launch on such a preposterous course? I don’t know how you can be so totally unreasonable. Who have you spoken to about this? You make it sound as if you have been telling half of London.”

“Forbes Gifford and Oona,” she replied lamely. She, too, was standing, and she would not sit down as long as
he was lecturing her as if she were some obtuse schoolgirl. “I had no choice in that, since Alphonsine is the witness who saw what actually happened.”

Wallace dismissed this with an abrupt jerk of his hand. “For heaven’s sake, Claudine, she’s a girl of—what is she, nineteen? She knows nothing. That’s obvious by the fact she is prepared to throw away a perfectly good future with everything she could wish for, because she fancies she is in love with some young nobody who hasn’t a penny to his name, but no doubt has a very ready eye on her fortune. Such a stupid girl is hardly worth listening to about anything.”