All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred seventeen)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

(part two hundred seventeen)

You are always trying to get me into trouble. I feel the man who ventures leafing this opus in public will find himself beckoned behind a curtain, by a mysterious robed figure. Poor Reg would wait in vain to hear of me again.

Weem recited, in a humorless, discouraged way, and Élucide felt her gaze narrow. She took up her coffee and sipped. “Help yourself to another. Manfred and I teased each other in about that vein. If you’re capable of thinking you could find evidence between the lines, and that I’m not telling the truth, you can leave my house.”

He looked above her shoulder through the glass, a twilight squint with misery enough in it.

“I’ll be going in a minute, anyway. Takes a whole speech to get in all the ways I want to put this. You’re thinking that truth is a mighty shield. That when you swear on the Bible, truth, whole truth, nothing but…all that’s the foundation the law is built on. Trials are staged to bring out the truth. So you think of doubt, beyond the shadow of, as protection for the defendant, the American way, making things fair for the underdog… Not letting the innocent get hanged. But doubt makes a fine blunt instrument for the prosecution. Benefits him, maybe, most of all. The jury is asked to frame it in their minds that they ought to doubt. Ought to be slow to believe, need to see a preponderance of evidence. ‘You know what a preponderance is, sir?’ ‘Sure, I reckon. Ain’t stupid’.”

These lines were acted. Élucide gave Weem half a smile.

“Everything that comes before a juror that doesn’t look to him like a preponderance, has to look like a possible lie. What happens to the witness when she’s asked, how well did you know this man? Barely at all, she says. But if you were lying to protect him, what would you say? If he was lying to protect you?”

“I don’t think I’ll be asked to testify.”

“Your letters, the ones Demrose kept.”

“You mean, they can enter those into the record?”

“They will. Might pick and choose.”

“Well. Nothing is very bad, I’m sure…but obviously I don’t remember every word I wrote. Teasing, joking.” She shrugged, shouldering, not casting off. Manfred would tell them he had not courted her. She would say she had liked him, but had not cared for him. The prosecutor would say, to the jury…is it possible…?

“It’s possible,” Weem said, “to want to marry a woman, to think about marrying her, to figure you’d move a mountain or two for her, if she allowed. Even when she hasn’t encouraged you, and you might’ve gone years without seeing her.”

They had a joke between them. “The only man I could ever have married was Roman Unversaght.” Weem wouldn’t understand how true this really was. Élucide had a house that was hers to order as she preferred, time that she spent under her own management, a small circle of people she enjoyed seeing. She had a magazine to edit. And more money than Weem. Three papers had folded under his employers; only one had paid the salary owed. Ottawa was a whistle-stop in his career.

229

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part two hundred eighteen)

(2025, Stephanie Foster)