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"Can we still win?"
Desmond hesitated in his walk to the gate, and considered it; his mind perhaps until then more fixed on his proposal to her. Catherine's was on the case. "It is possible—yes, possible. It is a shame we could not shake the handwriting expert."
"The judge seems to be against us."
"Oh, I do not know if I would put it as strongly as that. Oh, no. And Sir Robert demonstrated the weaknesses in the Postmistress's evidence quite effectively, I thought."
"Yes. A brilliant cross-examination." Catherine shifted the weight of her shawl on her arms. "However, his excuse earlier of being unwell -"
"Oh, no, no," said Desmond. "Quite genuine, I am sure. A strange man, Sir Robert. At times so cold, so -"
"Passionless."
"And yet he has a real passion for this case. Odd, is it not?"
"Does he?" said Catherine.
Desmond turned, about to climb back into the taxi, and told her a secret she must not divulge to anyone else: what a very great sacrifice Sir Robert Morton had made in order to bring Winslow vs. Rex to court, for all it seemed now to be a lost and hopeless cause.
Catherine and her father heard the news from Violet, carried in on the shouts of the newspaper sellers outside the front door. "Oh, sir," she said, moving inside. "Oh, sir. Miss Kate." And out it came, the final fall of the executioner's axe. It fair broke her heart, Violet said, to think of how sorry they would be, and none of the family even in court when the judge gave the verdict, although perhaps that was for the best, all taken into account.
"It would appear, then, that we have lost," said Catherine, after Violet had left, turning from the sorry scene in the court to onions and the evening meal. No doubt they would have to follow her example.
Arthur gave a nod, not rising from his chair. He seemed to shrink a little in front of her. "Yes. We lost."
It had been the right thing to do, Catherine reminded herself in the face of her father's new-found fragility, the invalid chair, and other things, like her broken engagement and John marrying someone else in almost indecent haste, or the growing number of spaces and gaps around the house, each representing an additional small sacrifice to their cause. Her throat constricted. "I am sorry, Father."
Outside the crowd of journalists and bystanders bayed like so many wolves.
Sir Robert had the courage to face them, at least. Once announced, he stood in the doorway to the back room to report on their final defeat.
"So, we failed. Well. There it is," Arthur said, when he had finished. "I do not think anyone can say we did not try our best."
"No," murmured Sir Robert. He glanced at Catherine. "No one could say that of you, sir." A tremor crossed his face; he looked away again. "I should—that is—I should leave."
Before either of them could respond, Violet reappeared. The journalists at the front door, she said, wouldn't go away until Mr Winslow gave them a statement.
Catherine turned to her father, a protest dying on her lips as he shook his head at her.
"I shall find something to say," he said. "Yes. It must be done. No, no, don't worry, Kate. Sir Robert—excuse me."
They watched him leave. Catherine walked to the table, cluttered with Father's papers and memorabilia connected to the case. She pushed at a pamphlet with her finger before raising her head, observing Sir Robert. He was looking after her father, a small frown on his face and leaning on his cane.
"You did your best, too, Sir Robert," she said.
Sir Robert's attention was instantly drawn back to her with a barely perceptible start. "The trouble is—I fear I was not myself all day. The heat in that court room really was so infernal."
"Your cross examination of the postmistress was masterly, and I am sure you would have shaken the handwriting expert had the judge not intervened."
Sir Robert, pausing to pick up a newspaper from the table, then folded it in half and let it fall again, as the muffled sounds of shouts came from the front of the house. "Do you think so? You are too kind. And now—I am determined to take up no more of your time—will you show me another way out, please?"
"Yes, of course," said Catherine. The apology she had intended to make must wait. She would have to put it in a letter. It might be less penance than she deserved for her unjust assumptions, but there would be more than enough penance to go round over the next few days and months and years. For one moment her vision wavered, but she blinked to clear it. She straightened and directed Sir Robert out the back way—through the garden, and under the trailing pink roses, now waving in a blessedly cooling breeze. Catherine paused to appreciate the feel of it against her face; a much-needed antidote to the oppressive heat that had prevailed in the courthouse and the city earlier in the day.
Sir Robert seemed to revive a little in the air, too. "Nevertheless," he said. "I am not entirely convinced I did as much as I should have done in the courtroom today, and if so, you have my unreserved apologies."
Catherine caught hold of the gate. "Nonsense, Sir Robert. I was there." She drew in her breath. "It is I who should make an apology to you. A confession and an apology in fact."
"No," he said, turning, his hat in hand. He shook his head. "Please, no. Dear lady, I am sure the one is rash and the other is superfluous—I would far rather hear neither. And you, I feel, have quite enough to contend with today." He held out his hand to her.
She shook it; that being the only recompense she could make. Something sparked between their fingers, irrelevant and quite impossible. Catherine folded her arms in against the thin fabric of her pale summer frock and watched Sir Robert Morton walk away.
"I doubt we shall meet again," she said under her breath, and it felt like pronouncing final sentence. She leant her head briefly against the wood of the gate for a moment, before closing it and bolting it firmly shut.
She paused in the garden. So, she thought, it was all over. What now?
Catherine did not marry Desmond. Despite everything, she knew she had done the right thing when she folded up her answer into an envelope and the relief flooded through her. To marry Desmond would have been worse than folly, after all; it would have been wrong. Her mother might say, "I hope you know what you are doing," but she did not try to persuade her.
Catherine continued her work at the Women's Suffrage Association while they remained in London—demoralised as she was, she could not lose her only source of income. And, of course, that was the best thing to do—to be busy and purposeful, however great the odds were against her there, too.
Father finally consented to go into a nursing home for a while—he protested, but not anything like as much as they had expected.
"Which in some ways is almost the most worrying thing," Mother had said, as she and Catherine sorted through all their belongings that had not already been sold, folding over a lace-edged table cloth with a repressed sigh.
While Father was away at the nursing home, they proceeded to sell the house. It was the only sensible course of action. Sir Robert's bill had been less than she and Father were certain it should have been, and an attempt to question it via Desmond had been met with a firm insistence that there had been an error in the earlier quotation and that Sir Robert refused to accept more than his due—the current, correct total.
"He seemed to take great offence," said Desmond. "I am sure, after all, that he must be right."
"Did he," said Catherine, who had learned to recognise Sir Robert's tricks and where they were most likely to be employed, if a little too late. "I'm not so sure about right—immovable on this point, I suspect, which is not the same thing." It had not, however, been so great a reduction as to impugn the Winslows' honour, nor anything like enough to truly soften the levelling blow of the case's loss. How could it have been?
Once the house had been put up for sale, Catherine and her mother had instructed Desmond to find a suitable place in a quiet seaside town, and once it was all done and dusted then Father could join them there and recover his health in the relative tranquillity and sea air. They settled on Seaford, which was deemed suitable enough for invalids that it had its own large convalescent home, while the poor bathing it offered it had made it easier to find a house than in some of the neighbouring sea resorts.
Ronnie, back at school, had raised little fuss about the whole affair, although he said to Catherine again, before he left, that he didn't do it. She had assured him that she believed him before she kissed him goodbye. Otherwise his letters were as full of exams and pranks and cricket as usual. One day, when he was older, though, what would he think? Catherine hoped that by then people would have forgotten and he wouldn't find himself still branded a thief and a fraud by the world.
She had wondered whether Dickie would protest, but he had merely said, "Oh, Lor', has it come to this," before adding that he wasn't surprised. "Only thing to be done. Hard luck, old lady."
"Yes," Catherine had said. It did feel awfully like retreating in shame, but there it was. They had tried to prove Ronnie's innocence, to challenge the Crown—and they had failed. People must think what they liked about the Winslows, but she would choose to remember that they had caused changes to how such cases were now to be handled at Osborne and Dartmouth, as well as raising questions in the Commons—and in the minds of thousands.
In Seaford, Catherine could hardly listen in on debates in the Commons, although she read them in the papers as avidly as ever, perhaps more so. She had to take the train to Lewes to attend the nearest branch of the Women's Suffrage Association. She travelled to any events they held and wrote strongly worded letters to men of influence while her more fiery counterparts in the WSPU continued to break windows and set pillar boxes and MP's houses alight. Some days she understood how they felt, no matter how little she approved of using violent means to obtain one's goals.
Her two pound per week having been another casualty of the move, she took up a correspondence course to improve her secretarial skills. She already had considerable experience but no certified qualifications, so she hunted for employment by day and, in the evening, returned to the small house on the end of the Esplanade to plug away at her typewriting and shorthand.
"Hmm," Father said, picking up her notes from her desk, as she entered. "I thought it was Ronnie I sent to learn semaphore and Morse. Are you sure a careless bird has not walked over your inkpot and paper?"
"Quite sure," said Catherine, in the middle of shedding her coat and hat. She hung both up on a peg and joined him at the table. Violet had left her a plate of sandwiches. She was still with them, since, regarding herself as unquestionably part of the household, no one had worked up the heart to tell her otherwise, and now the move had been made, they could manage her wages anyway.
"Any luck?"
Catherine reached for an egg and cress sandwich and had to swallow an unwisely large mouthful before she could reply. "I'm afraid not. As soon as any prospective employers see my references are from a suffragist organisation they promptly turn white and tell me they will let me know, which they never do."
"Oh, dear."
"Yes." She took another bite and sat beside him. The novelty of the seaside was waning after a few months, especially as autumn slid away towards winter. Nothing was so dreary as a resort out of season, particularly late afternoon on a rainy November day, with little company of note and few places to go. Catherine found herself missing the case—it had been a constant source of activity and purpose. Oddly, she even missed Sir Robert's visits. The man might be wrong about women's rights, Home Rule, the House of Lords, and Trade Unionism and a great many other matters, but it had been the one time she had been able to debate them face to face with the enemy, and she had enjoyed the cut and thrust of it more than she had realised.
She put down the remainder of the sandwich on her plate and sighed. Life seemed to be full of lost causes.
"Perhaps you should take down my memoirs," Father suggested. "It would be good practice."
"Arthur," said Mother, walking in, "remember you are not to tire yourself."
"I don't think he was serious," said Catherine. "Were you, Father? Or do you have wild tales of your adventures in the darkest depths of the bank?"
"Alas, no."
"And if you had, you wouldn't let me print them."
"Quite. Highly inappropriate."
"Have you seen my white shawl?" asked Mother. She fluttered around the room, and like a surprisingly destructive light breeze, set the bookshelves, low table, desk and mantelpiece into disarray.
"Grace, what are you doing?"
"Looking for my shawl, Arthur. I did say. You aren't sitting on it, are you?"
Arthur gave Catherine a look, before deigning to say that he was not, in fact, sitting on a shawl, and that he believed he would have noticed had he been.
Mother drifted away into the other room, and Catherine helped herself to a second sandwich.
"Have you seen the evening papers?"
She swallowed hastily and looked up. "Should I?"
Father removed his glasses and placed them on the table. "Oh, a brief debate in the Commons on your pet subject."
"Oh, dear," said Catherine. She unfolded the Daily Herald and hoped that Mrs Pankhurst had not done anything too dreadful to discredit their cause today. She turned over to the parliamentary pages. "I hadn't realised. I saw Mrs Withy in the Post Office earlier and she usually tells me if anything of that sort has happened."
"Nevertheless, I think you will want to see this."
Catherine read on, through a debate over safety on the railways that seemed to have been sidetracked, via recent Suffragette actions, to Votes For Women, but before that digression had been shut down, Sir Robert Morton had spoken. Catherine looked up, tired enough to wish not to read it. Must he speak against them at every turn? Could he not at least save his ammunition for when it counted, not shoot them down at the least mention of the subject? Her heart, already low, sank further. She found her place in the dense columns again. As she parsed the next few lines, her brows rose. She read them again, this time aloud: "Sir Robert then said a few words in favour of the issue -" She smoothed out the paper, but the remainder was merely a thousand more words over the high number of accidents still occurring daily on the railways. "Only a few words? Well, that is not like him. I daresay it is an error."
"If it is, The Times has made the same mistake," said Arthur. He watched her.
"I must find somewhere that takes Hansard," said Catherine, moving onto The Times, although it too declined to print the speech. She would have to try the public library in the morning. Surely one of the national papers must give more details on such a shocking turnaround?
"Well, and what do you say to that?"
Catherine ran her finger along the words, leaving inky traces on its tip. A slow tide of happiness rose within her, lifting her heart and spirits. If Father thought she could account for it, he was wrong. It was the most incredible thing she had read in the newspapers for a very long time. She met his gaze, and smiled. "Wonders will never cease."
Father's face softened. "Yes. Wonders will never cease."