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 shared. Dates when her husband had been home which coincided with the same dates the Excise Men had recorded sightings of smuggling ships on the Sussex coastline. Dates Hadleigh had already appraised the court of during this significant and well-discussed trial. All in all, it had been a damning testimony, an incredibly detailed and courageous one, and one he was of the opinion she had come to the court room determined to share despite being a named from the outset as a witness for the defence.
Lady Penhurst was a very brave woman.
As a reward, she was subjected to the most spiteful rebuttal from both her vile husband and the defence that Hadleigh had ever heard in all his years in the courtroom. Horrendous mudslinging which highlighted the gross disparity between the law for men and the law for women. He had been reprimanded by the judge for bringing up the way she was beaten by her husband, but that same judge had blithely ignored all Hadleigh’s objections to her haranguing because the court deserved to know what sort of a woman the witness was before they chose to believe her.
She was a liar. Who had lain with a succession of men for money. Deranged. Cold and frigid. A drunkard. Unfit to be a mother. Throughout the litany, she had stood proudly, her clasped hands shaking slightly, her expression pained but defiant. Grace in the face of the contemptible. He admired that, too.
By the end, Hadleigh hated his profession and himself more for not adequately defending her, even though it was neither his place nor his job to do so. But as it had been his intrusive questions she had answered with more detail than he could have possibly dreamed of, he knew she was suffering this contemptible onslaught thanks to him. Knew, too, that she had helped him by hammering the last few nails into Penhurst’s already rotten coffin regardless of the inevitable cost to herself.
As she left the witness box, she held her head high, but her eyes had dimmed. He knew it wasn’t the first time she had been whittled down and belittled by his sex. He’d seen that same expression many times and, while he could never ignore it, he had played along with his mother and pretended he hadn’t seen it. That nothing was amiss. That all would be well. A flimsy lie that had never come to fruition. Oh! To be able to turn back time and do things differently...
Hadleigh couldn’t shift his immense sense of guilt and shame throughout his closing arguments, although bizarrely that painful, niggling, unprofessional emotion made them sound stronger than any closing speech he had ever made before. Perhaps because he had argued for her. Used his voice in an arena where she had none. Treason aside, more than anything he now wanted Penhurst to pay for what he had done to the quietly proud and stoic woman sat all alone in the gallery.
Then the jury were sent to huddle in a private room to discuss their verdict, away from the circus in the gallery. They came back unanimous in less than ten short minutes.
Guilty.
Of high treason.
Her face had blanched then. Her blue eyes filling with tears and for the first time she stared down at her lap as her husband was dragged screaming from the court. He had hoped she didn’t regret her part in the verdict. It had been small, but largely insignificant, because Hadleigh had done his job well. But then he had no emotional attachment to Penhurst, so could regard the man’s inevitable demise through a detached and pragmatic lens. For her, there would be complicated ramifications as well as the release from her suffering. Penhurst had fathered her child and been her husband. There were many in society who would judge her unfairly and she was unlikely to ever be welcomed within its hypocritical ranks again thanks to the sins she had not committed but which branded her nevertheless.
While the judge retired for the night to consider the punishment, she had left the court alone as always and gone who knew where, not realising that more machinations far out of his sphere of control would occur before morning which would make her future life undeservedly more impossible than it already was.
Hadleigh learned it had been a reporter for one of the scandal sheets who had blithely informed her that her husband’s title and estate had been transferred back to the Crown, his ill-gotten fortune and all his assets seized. It was a petty act of revenge as far as Hadleigh was concerned, designed to put the fear of God into his yet unknown co-conspirators. A stark reminder of what a traitor could expect for his crimes against England and its King even in this enlightened day and age. But Penhurst’s infant son was no traitor and nor was the child’s abused mother, yet now both of them would also pay for his crimes and for much longer than the crooked Viscount would. Their entire lives had been ruined with one vengeful stroke of a pen.
That was not his concern.
