Stealing Athena

by Karen Essex

  In the cities of London and Edinburgh, Winter 1807–1808

  THE LAWYERS EXPLAINED EVERYTHING to her—not once, not twice, but thrice, because, each time, she could hardly believe her ears. Elgin had sworn to stop at nothing to ensure that Mary was punished, by law and by God, and dragged through as much public humiliation and private pain as possible. Despite that, Mr. Nisbet, and everyone who knew Elgin, tried to persuade him against this sort of public drama, he stampeded ahead, with no thought to the consequences. “I will not stop until an Act of Parliament is on record, demonstrating for this and all future generations that Mary is an adulteress,” he said.

  There were to be two trials, the first of which was already under way. Elgin was suing Robert in a London court for criminal conversation, that is, for seducing his wife. Mary was waiting for Robert to return from the ordeal, but they already knew what the outcome would be, and what Elgin’s prime motivation was in this particular instance—money. Elgin claimed, in this trial, that Mary had been a perfect wife and that the two of them had lived happily and harmoniously until Robert entered their lives and seduced innocent Mary away. For this tribulation, Elgin was demanding twenty thousand pounds in damages. The outcome was quite certain because Robert was not issuing any defense. He merely allowed his lawyer to read a statement, saying that in a rush of emotion, he had written love letters to Mary, to which she had not responded. Robert was not about to fuel Elgin’s argument that Mary was an adulteress.

  But Elgin was not going to stop at one trial, no matter the outcome. Under Scottish law, he was allowed to sue for divorce based on adultery, which he would have to prove in court. He could not be dissuaded from pursuing this avenue of retribution, though it would mean dragging the mother of his children through the most disgraceful of proceedings. He did not care.

  “Can I not sue Lord Elgin for custody of my own children?” Mary asked the lawyer her parents had hired to defend her in the latter prosecution.

  “Actually, no, Lady Elgin. A married woman has no legal status.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?” Mary asked.

  “Why, it means that the married female has no legal existence acknowledged by the courts. If a woman is married, her husband must execute any legal or business transactions on her behalf. All that a woman has belongs to her husband, and that certainly includes the offspring. I’m afraid that it would be impossible to initiate a suit in your name. There is no precedent.”

  Mary felt her heart begin to beat violently in her chest. “Surely there is a way to have my children returned to me? They are my children! They came out of my own body; they are my flesh and blood.”

  “But in the eyes of the law, they belong to the father,” the lawyer said dispassionately. He would have been accustomed to dealing with a woman’s hysterics when presenting this news.

  “But they need their mother. They are little children!” Mary’s eyes darted frantically from her mother to her father, but neither offered any suggestion or consolation. Apparently they were already aware of her helplessness before the law.

  “Since I do not legally exist—which is what you are telling me—if I marry Mr. Ferguson, might he sue Lord Elgin for custody of my children?”

  “He might, but if he is not the children’s natural father, then he has no legal grounds on which to do so. The courts will uphold the rights of the father in every case. A suit would be futile indeed.”

  “The only way for a woman to achieve satisfaction in an English court is to be a man. That is what you are saying, correct?” Mary’s fury rose up. She was trembling inside, but she did not want to give this scrawny, black-clad vulture of the law the satisfaction of knowing how badly she was shaken. Let him think she was simply mad. “Apparently nothing—neither money nor titles nor social connections—can cure one of the condition of being female!”

  “Lady Elgin, I understand your consternation, but surely you understand that children must belong to someone, and English law says that that person must be their father.”

  She might have pulled off his spectacles and clawed his beady eyes out of his head. But he was merely the messenger. It was not he, or even Elgin, who deserved her fury at this moment. It was the way of the world, the way things were, that infuriated her.

  “It isn’t fair,” she managed to say. She felt that she had to say something.

  “Perhaps in some instances the law is not fair, but laws must exist to prevent society from descending into chaos.”

  He said this as if he meant it to be comforting. He was that sort of man, she thought, the sort who was alternately meek and coldly rational. Did he actually approve of the way things were? Would he rip his own children from the bosom of his wife?

  When the lawyer left, Mary turned to her parents, those two who had always been able to repair any harm that befell her. “What is going to happen to my children? Who is going to make sure that Bruce finishes his dinner? You know that he won’t eat a single vegetable unless I coax and threaten him. Who will fix up Mary’s hair the way she likes it, to match her dolly’s? Who will sing to my babies when they are afraid?” She put her arms around her belly as she had when she was carrying each one of them, to hold them, protect them, and feel their presence. But they were not there. She could protect them no longer. “At least William was taken from me in a natural way. At least it was God who wanted my most precious one, and not Elgin.”

  Mr. Nisbet poured his daughter a brandy and encouraged her to drink it up. She let the stinging liquid slide down her throat, feeling all the passion go out of her body, until she was just a limp, defeated thing sitting by the fire.

  ROBERT THREW THE PAMPHLETS and newspapers on the table. “Read all about it,” he said, imitating a London newsboy. “Read about Lady Elgin’s refusal to honor the commitments of the marriage bed. Read how her wicked seducer conspired to ruin a fine and pious lady.”

  There it was, under her nose, where she could no longer avoid it: “The Trial of R. J. Ferguson, Esquire, for Adultery with the Countess of Elgin, Wife of the Earl of Elgin.”

  “Read all about it, Mary, how you, a poor innocent female and the model of Christian behavior, were wickedly seduced away from your loving husband and made to commit all manner of evil. You know why Elgin painted the story this way, do you not?”

  “To make you look as dastardly as possible so that he might collect the damages?”

  “Yes, which he did, though not as much as the bastard originally demanded.”

  “Well, what did the court award him?”

  “Ten thousand pounds! That is what the loss of you is worth, my dear. I hope you are happy with your value!”

  Robert tore off his greatcoat. Mary could not tell if he was angry or relieved. “’Tis a filthy society we live in, Mary, that wants to learn the private details of others’ lives. Filthy and wicked are the ones who tell these stories in purple language and exaggerated lies, and wicked and filthy are the ones who consume it all daily, along with their breakfasts.”

  “I should think you would have wanted to protect me from this sort of thing,” she said, tossing the horrible pamphlet aside, only to reveal the article in the London Times, detailing the proceedings.

  Messrs. Hamilton and Morier and others who were in the service of Lord and Lady Elgin at the Mohammedan Court, where Lady Elgin was a social favorite of the Turkish Luminaries, and where, in her more pious days, she insisted upon services of the Christian religion being performed daily, testified as to the affectionate marriage between the Elgins before the appearance of Mr. Ferguson—

  “Oh, it’s all horrible. I cannot look at it. One does not want to see one’s name and one’s habits bandied about like this! It’s intolerable.”

  “The greatest protection is a solid armor, which you must build against public opinion, Mary. We will be criticized all our lives for having the courage of our convictions—you for not allowing yourself to be Elgin’s miserable slave, using your fortune to bail him out of his spending habits
and risking your life to bear him more children; and me for seducing a vulnerable woman and subsequently for marrying a woman who allowed herself to be seen as scandalous. Hypocritical, ironical, and paradoxical, but mark my words, that will be society’s judgment upon us.”

  Mary allowed her eyes to glance at the demeaning words on the pages. “I remember gloating over the published details of Emma Hamilton’s life and the satirical cartoons of her exploits. Everyone loved seeing her in compromised positions. Now it seems that I’ve ended no better than she.”

  “You haven’t ended, Mary. You are not even thirty years old.”

  “I have ended up in Mrs. Hamilton’s position, which I scorned terribly. I did not dream that I would suffer the same insults. Elgin made a point once that I was just like her. Do you think he saw something in me, Robert? Some piece of me that was willing to be compromised? Other women are better than I. They take their suffering silently. I could not be made to do so.”

  “Mr. Swift put it well and succinctly when he said that satire is a glass where beholders generally discover everyone’s face but their own,” Robert said. “We are all vulnerable to public scrutiny and opinion. But here is what I think of public opinion. I give it less notice in my life than I give to the ass of the rat who eats the cheese in my cupboard. I suggest that you do the same. I am going to resign from the House of Commons immediately.”

  Mary started to protest. “But, Robert, the reforms you’ve been working for! All lost!”

  “I no longer care a fig for society’s structures, or the good opinion of its sanctimonious prigs. I only care for you. I brought this filth home so that you could begin to develop your armor, Mary. This is nothing compared to what will come out in the divorce trial.”

  “What? He is going to pursue that?” She had prayed every day that Elgin would be satisfied with ruining her reputation in the civil trial against Robert, and with whatever damages he might recover. The judgment against Robert was enough for Elgin to receive the Act of Parliament granting a divorce. He would only pursue a trial for divorce in Edinburgh, on their home soil, to punish her. She shared these ideas with Robert.

  “Lass, be warned, and be ready. He would not be bringing this to trial unless he had convinced some of your closest associates—friends, servants, staff, perhaps even relatives—to give damning testimony. And you will have to be there, listening to every word of it.”

  “I don’t understand. In doing this to me, he is bringing equal amounts of shame upon himself and his children. What sort of monster lives inside of him?” She was terrified to think that all the years of their marriage, this beast was lurking, waiting to attack.

  “I have known Elgin for a long time. I never liked him, but I did not dream that he was capable of going this far. He’s mad! Public opinion is already turning against him for what he is doing. Did you know that he sent another request for a British peerage based on his contribution to the British arts, and was flatly turned down? Most people are disgusted by his public pursuit of your ruin. No one is going to offer him a diplomatic appointment after this.”

  Elgin did seem on the road to personal ruin. A list of his enormous debts was published in the Times for the entire world to see. Mary had heard that Elgin’s private letters to the General Paymaster and the Prime Minister, begging yet again to be reimbursed for his ambassadorial expenses including the excavation and shipment of the marbles, totaled his debts at ninety thousand pounds, including the accumulated interest. She did not doubt the figure, having paid for a goodly portion of it out of her own pocket. If anyone should be reimbursed it was she, but of course that would never happen. It would be remarkable if Elgin ever saw a cent himself.

  “He’s bankrupted himself, ruined himself,” she said. “He will blame the marbles, and force anyone within earshot to listen to how his great devotion to the English arts has taken all of his money. He will never admit that it’s his own habits that have gotten him into trouble.”

  Robert had been pacing, mulling something over in his mind. He snapped his fingers, looking every bit the cat that has just swallowed the sparrow. “That is the way to stop him, Mary. Lay claim to his precious marbles. You are the one who funded the excavations, the removal, and the shipping. Why, they are yours as much as his. If you threaten to take them away, he will capitulate.”

  Why had she never thought of that? Indeed, they were as much hers as anything accumulated in the marriage. She had the receipts and invoices to prove it. “They are his only possessions left that are worth anything,” she said. “Broomhall is leveraged, and all of his stocks were sold long ago. Do you think it’s possible?”

  “I think we should investigate whether it is possible.”

  “Mind you, I do not want custody of those things! I have seen the last of them, I hope. They are beautiful, Robert, but that sort of beauty is, oh, I don’t know, too much for us mortals to possess.” There was something too disquieting about the marbles. She remembered the frightening vision of Nemesis.

  “Such fanciful thinking from a solid Scottish girl,” Robert said, teasing her.

  “You have not seen them. They are mystical, perhaps even possessed.”

  He was smiling at her, and she could not blame him. She must have sounded ridiculous. It was nothing she could explain to him. The story would be too long.

  “Even if they are not enchanted things, which I believe they are,” she said, “I still do not want to be mistress of one hundred twenty tons of marble. But if I threaten to take them away from him, perhaps Elgin will settle things with me quietly. Perhaps if he thought he was going to lose them with no credit for collecting them, and not a cent made in profit, he would not be so quick to try to keep me from seeing my own children.”

  MY ENTIRE LIFE WITH Elgin has been disassembled!”

  Robert had just walked in and was handing his coat and hat to the footman when Mary greeted him in the foyer at Archerfield. The Nisbets had stopped worrying over Mary and Robert’s relationship, and had started to accept that he would be the son-in-law with whom they would grow into old age. They had come to depend on him to assist Mary and her lawyers in strategizing against Elgin. Truth be told, they had ceased to disapprove of him at all, welcoming him fully into their family as the single bulwark against the insanity they feared would befall their daughter over the loss of her reputation and her children.

  “What are you talking about?” Robert asked, his demeanor immediately switching to one of concern. “Surely he has not imagined some new means of tormenting you?”

  “There has been a revolt in Constantinople! Do you recall that, last year, it was my old friend Count Sébastiani who persuaded the Sultan to break his alliance with Russia in favor of France?”

  “Yes, of course. I don’t hold it against him. He’s a good chap, and he really did use all his efforts to assist you when Elgin was in prison.”

  “Oh yes, I know,” Mary said. She had nothing but fondness for the count, whom she would always remember as a friend. “But that forced England to side with Russia, wiping out all of our hard-won diplomatic gains with the Ottomans. Now it’s even worse. The Janissaries, who used to escort me all over town, have staged a revolt! They confined the Sultan to the seraglio, and the poor man was assassinated there by the Chief Black Eunuch!” Mary remembered that very man, the one who tried to sabotage her meeting with the Valida by refusing to send the state barge that the Valida had ordered to transport Mary. He had carelessly endangered her life by forcing her to ride in a tiny boat in tempestuous waters. All of that seemed so very long ago. Little Mary had just been born and Bruce was but a babe.

  Mary’s heart bled for the Valida, and for Hanum, who had been the Sultan’s favorite. What was happening to her old friends now? Undoubtedly, both women were now confined in the same tower in which the Valida had lived for so long, waiting for her son to take power. With the change in regime, it would be nearly impossible for Mary to get a letter through. “I shall have to go to chapel later today to p
ray for the safety of my friends. Though who knows? The Capitan Pasha himself could have been behind it all. I suppose we shall never know. For all the intimacy I shared with them, I must say that the Ottomans remained inscrutable.”

  “While we are turning the corner on the past, I have received new information that may shock you even more.”

  “I do not think I can tolerate another shock, Robert.” What now? Was someone else dead?

  “Some powerful people are claiming that Elgin’s precious marbles may be utterly worthless.”

  “What?”

  Robert waved a pamphlet in the air. “Elgin has many detractors, Mary, the most formidable of which is the Society of Dilettanti. They are upholding the opinion of Payne Knight that Elgin’s statues are Roman copies. The charge is outrageous, of course. Sir Joseph Banks consulted with the world’s leading antiquarian scholars. The statues are not copies.”

  “I, above all, know that,” Mary said. “I and the Learned Men found numerous references to what we saw in the ancient texts, which proved their authenticity. I do not know why Mr. Knight persists in his opinion.”

  “Undoubtedly because the arrival of the works of Pheidias on British shores automatically devalues everything he and his cohorts managed to steal out of Italy! That is why.”

  Robert had engaged all of his London contacts to try to find out Elgin’s present strategy concerning the marbles. At great expense, Elgin had bought—with what, Mary could not imagine; it could only be more credit—a town home at Piccadilly and Park Lane to display them.

  “Elgin’s great fixation has been transformed into one of those circus spectacles, Mary, where the ring is full of trick riders, rope dancers, and acrobats!”

  Robert had amassed a number of articles from London newspapers detailing the goings on at the house where the marbles were displayed. He spread these on the table, Mary ordered tea, and the two of them pored over the papers greedily.