"I don't have to lie," Ash said, standing to his full height and maybe then some, as the lines of his face hardened again. "Despite what my brother might think."
"Oh, Cabot," Kathryn said with a heavy sigh, "why are they all mad at you this time?"
Cabot's innocent look was priceless. Charlotte had been there, had watched him do away with three dead people and question his brother's honesty to boot, and still, if she were sitting in the jury box and staring at that face, she'd be fooled into thinking her husband guiltless. How many cases had he won on that face of his?
Still, the thought of those children, burned beyond recognition, wouldn't let her be. "He obliterated three lives," she told Kathryn. "Negated their very existence, transformed them from victims into criminals themselves." She turned to Cabot. "You cheapen the value of life itself when you do that."
"Oh, Charlotte. There you go climbing on that high horse of yours. Would they be any less dead if I'd let the murder charge stand? Or would it just have left us explaining to Mother why her baby was crossing his hands behind his head in the Alameda County Jail and facing the prospect of a noose around his neck?" Cabot dusted an imaginary piece of lint from his lap as he gave her time to accept his logic. Irrefutable, as always.
"But it was offensive," she said finally. "It offended me as an officer of the court, as a servant of justice."
"No," Cabot argued, "it offended you as a woman. As a lawyer you know it was a brilliant legal maneuver. And in court, as I've told you time and again, you are a lawyer, not a woman."
"Is that like a vagrant and not a person?" Ash bent over to yank at the laces of the boots he'd probably had on since the previous morning. "Or an arsonist who's innocent?"
"In a lawyer's portfolio, Charlotte, there is no room for emotion. When you read for the law you learn to deal in crime, precedent, and punishment. If you're looking for sentiment, I suggest you read a romantic novel," Cabot said with disdain, then signaled Arthur to wheel him into the offices at the front of the house. "If you'll excuse me," he said, gesturing toward the files he held in his lap, "I've work to get done."
"You don't like sentiment in the courtroom?" Charlotte called after his back, nearly laughing at the irony. "What was that about me crying this morning?"
His hand came up and stopped Arthur's progress. He leaned over the arm of his chair to get a better look at her. "Indeed. What were those tears, Charlotte?"
She shook her head at him. "Nothing. A cinder in my eye. From those damned fans." Guiltily she looked at Kathryn. "Sony."
"Charlotte, you sound more like a man every day," Kathryn said. "The next thing we know, Cabot will have you puffing on cigars and swilling brandy."
"I just might," Cabot responded. "Don't think for a second that every decision in the law is made in a courtroom. It's in the back rooms where the real work is done, and if Charlotte wants to ever progress beyond dog bites and landlord-tenant disputes, she's going to have to get into those dens of iniquity and leave her sensibilities outside."
"It doesn't seem as if you've left her any sensibilities." Cabot's brother looked up from his boots to examine her slowly from head to toe. From his grimace it appeared that he was not impressed with her court clothes.
"Any is more than she needs," Cabot answered. "Crying in court! Really, Charlotte! Leaving me to turn your little soft spot for children around and throw it back at the DA...."
"For heaven's sake, Cabot," Ashford said, finally managing to spring his swollen feet from his oxford ties. "She's a woman. She's got tender feelings."
While he spoke, he motioned toward her squawking alligator valise as if it contained the proof of her maternal instincts. As if just because she was reluctant to let a living creature die, she had some innate need to mother it.
"I'm a lawyer," Charlotte told her brother-in-law. One brother was nearly as bad as the other! She snatched up her Gladstone and headed for the stairwell. "A lawyer, Mr. Whittier," she repeated. "Not a twit."
Of course, pressed to the wall, she would have had to admit that there was a certain amount of dignity lost as she carefully carried up the stairs a legal case full of angrily chirping bird.
"Where are you off to?" Kathryn called after her. In her voice was that slight quiver which was usually reserved for discussions with Cabot.
"My study," Charlotte said, for want of a better name for the bright room in the cupola of the house. The room where, because the elevator only went as far as the second floor, her secrets were safely hidden from Cabot.
"You mean the high room?" Kathryn asked. Charlotte stopped in her tracks without answering and waited for her to continue.
Finally, when there was no further word from her mother-in-law, Charlotte took another step.
"Is that where you mean?"
When Charlotte had married Cabot she had taken great pains to assure the older woman that she had no interest in taking over the running of Kathryn's house. Becoming a lawyer would take all the energy and attention she could give it. As far as Charlotte, and everyone else, was concerned, Kathryn was the lady of the house. Charlotte had even gone as far as to make sure Kathryn had no objection when, after just a few months of marriage, she moved certain of her belongings into the high room and her plants to the rooftop surrounding it.
And it had been fine until now. It inconvenienced no one and gave Charlotte a place where she could be... well, just Charlotte.
"Of course that's where I mean," she answered, anxious to get the little chickadee fed without missing any further discussion of Ashford's case. "Why?"
"Well, dear," Kathryn hedged, "I do realize that the house is yours now, yours and Cabot's, that is, and you are certainly free to make whatever arrangements you wish. But considering the boys' tendency to argue..."
This last she said as if the two men were still quite young, as if it were before the accident, and she was worried about them getting into a scuffle around her antique urns.
What she meant was that if Ash's room was on the same floor as Cabot's, it could prove an embarrassment to the latter.
It was something Charlotte should probably have thought of herself. But then hadn't Cabot spent two years before their marriage and the five years since drumming that feminine sensitivity out of her, all so that she could be the second best lawyer in all of Oakland?
Of course, it didn't take a woman to notice the details. Cabot didn't miss a trick, a nuance, a hint, of anything in his household or his cases. She, on the other hand, was as likely to miss a trolley going through the parlor as the subtle problems that accompanied her husband's condition. And if Kathryn thought it best, well, she certainly knew her sons better than Charlotte.
"You'd like to put Ashford in the high room?" She tried to keep the disappointment from her voice. After all, she still had her bedroom, her office, the back porch—a hundred places on the grounds to find solitude when she still needed it. It was just that the high room was hers. Hers alone.
"It does seem the most obvious solution, doesn't it?" Kathryn asked while Charlotte fought to keep the resignation from showing in her nod.
"I could go to a hotel," Ash offered from the bottom of the stairwell, obviously wishing as fervently as she that he were anywhere else.
"Remanded to your brother's custody," she reminded him. Maybe Ashford didn't understand the letter of the law, but she had a very clear picture of the next few weeks, and in it the sun wasn't shining over Whittier Court.
"Well, then, the couch is fine," he said, looking at the walls as if they were already closing in on him. "Heck, it's a big house, Charlotte, and it's yours. I certainly wouldn't want to put you out of your study."
"I've no objection to you taking over the high room," Charlotte said, brushing off calling the room her study, or the house hers. Kathryn had little enough in life to call her own. Charlotte was not going to take the woman's house from her just because she'd married her son.
And if Cabot didn't need a study, why should she? "Really," she added
, wishing she felt half as generous as she sounded, and thrice as generous as she felt.
She couldn't help loving that high room, with its eight arched windows, two in each direction. At every hour of the day there was something to watch—the sun rising, playing on Lake Merritt, dappling the trees, and finally setting at the end of the day. She loved taking down her hair up there and brushing it until it glistened, then pulling it back into its bun to face the world. She loved the lace curtains, and the flowered slipper chair she'd taken down from the attic to set beside the windows.
"You'll no doubt want me to remove a few of my things," she said, imagining the wrong impression Ash could get from the condition she'd left his room in. "But the room is yours, of course. I was only borrowing it while you were away."
"You aren't practicing your cigar smoking up there, are you?" Ash asked. "Or have you other vices even Cabot doesn't know about?"
Kathryn rapped her cane on the hardwood floor. "Don't you go teasing Charlotte," she said, though Charlotte had the sense that he wasn't teasing so much as he was accusing her of something. "I'm quite sure she hasn't a single vice."
"Charlotte!" Cabot's angry voice implied otherwise as he shouted her name from his office. "Charlotte Whittier, get your corpus calossum in here at once and explain this! I thought we agreed that your little Comstock case for Virginia Halton was ancient history."
***
His sister-in-law looked as though she'd been caught with someone else's fish on her line.
"Charlotte?" Cabot demanded. "Are you out there?"
"Coming!"
She glanced down at the valise in her hand and then at the doorway, looking nearly vulnerable for a moment despite the tight bun and the starched collar. Ash noticed that when she wasn't carefully sucking it in, the woman's lower lip was full—lush, even. And, at the moment, he thought it was trembling slightly.
"I'll put him upstairs," Ash said, climbing the couple of steps and trying to take the case from her hand. She hesitated, clinging to the briefcase handle while his hands gripped the sides.
"Charlotte!"
Hesitantly she released her hold on the bag. There was no question the lip was indeed quivering when she called out to Cabot that she was coming.
Ash remained on the stairs, watching as she straightened her shirtwaist, threw back her shoulders, and lifted her chin before crossing the threshold into the offices that had been built as part of the house when his father had begun the construction years before Ash had even been born. Two offices, one for father and one intended for son. His father would die all over again if he knew that they now were for husband and wife.
Once Charlotte was gone, he put the briefcase down with a quick promise to the bird within. On flat, tired feet he padded through the foyer into the front vestibule, unable to resist a quick look out onto the wide green lawn to satisfy his curiosity. More than likely he'd have noticed on the way in if it hadn't been for the damn peacock.
Naturally, the old sign was there, just as he suspected. The back of it was still and forever peeling, assuring him that it read as it always had: whittier and son, attorneys-at-law. Whittier and Whittier, she'd said. He didn't think that Cabot's wedding vows would have extended to the sharing of his little empire. It wasn't like Cabot Whittier to share anything he felt belonged exclusively to him.
"When Cabot's interested in hearing who I suspect might have done it, send Rosa up, will you?" he asked his mother, stooping to kiss the top of her head as he passed her on his way to the stairwell.
"You don't mind being back in the high room, do you?" she asked when he reached for the briefcase that waited on the steps. "Other arrangements could certainly be made if that room disturbs you."
"Of course not," Ash said over his shoulder as casually as he could. He took the steps two at a time, stopping at the second-floor landing for a quick look to see what had changed. Seven eight-panel mahogany doors, all closed, still lined the hall. On the papered walls that separated the bedroom doors were portraits of his ancestors, many in judge's robes, some even complete with wigs. A bench across from each painting allowed a resting place for the contemplation of the Whittier roots.
That was how his father had put it. The Whittier roots. The phrase always left Ash feeling like the one rotten apple the family tree had produced.
In the bag at his side the bird chirped weakly to remind him of its hunger.
Up the second flight of stairs his old room waited for him. The curtains were drawn and the sun streamed in, pointing to his old desk, the pages of an open book flipping in the breeze, a hairbrush with a few dark strands set beside it. The desk was still there, but now it was haphazardly redecorated with shawls and feminine gewgaws and yard upon yard of lace. Even his dresser, where once mighty soldiers fought battles over blocks upon which to stand, was covered with a frilly runner. The lacy doily was nearly hidden by a collection of small bottles, a mortar and pestle, and a stack of fresh clean cloths.
And from the sounds coming from beneath his bed, it appeared that his sister-in-law's feeding station was attracting more than simply birds.
Kicking the door shut, he pulled back the chair from his desk, and started to set Charlotte's satchel there. He stopped at the sight of a pair of ladies' cotton hose that lay crumpled on the seat. Apparently his sister-in-law had made herself quite at home in his old room. He held up one of the stockings, its top banded with the same delicate edging that covered everything else in the room, its ankle embroidered with intricate little flowers, and let it hang from his raised arm. Nothing he'd removed from his own person had ever shown quite so much shape.
But a grown woman's foot couldn't be that small, could it?
The bird shrieked at him and he dropped the stocking guiltily. "Well, she shouldn't have left it around," he said in his own defense, placing the satchel on the trunk at the foot of the bed. Upon opening it he found that the bird, apparently angry at his confinement, had taken out his frustration on the contents of Charlotte's Gladstone, ripping papers and decorating them with his droppings.
"Where's your lace collar?" he asked the bird, gently taking him out and cradling him in his palm. "Or doesn't she let you wear it outside this room?"
She was something, that Charlotte. Fooling the world into thinking she didn't have a feminine bone in her body, tricking him into feeding her little runt of a bird when his own parrot was probably starving to death. Moss Johnson's job was strictly to be Ash's man in the warehouse, not on board the Bloody Mary. Had it occurred to him, then, to go onto the ship and feed Liberty? He hoped so, or the whole harbor would be deaf from the parrot's version of "Little Brown Jug." Deaf and scandalized.
He looked over the various bottles on his dresser, wondering what he was supposed to feed the tiny thing in his hand. He really ought to be downstairs, helping Cabot sort out the details of his return to Oakland. Of course, Cabot would do it better than he could. Cabot had always done everything better than Ash ever could.
The way they told it, Cabot had been faster than the wind before the accident. He'd probably swum across the bay in record time, though it didn't seem anyone had ever bothered to clock him.
Now the man had to settle for just walking on the water.
Rolling on it.
***
"Charlotte, this case is too dangerous, too controversial, for you to be taking on. You're trying to build a career here, not change the world," Cabot said, throwing the letters she'd received into the wastebasket.
"I'm trying to do both," she said, digging the letters back out. "Women have rights, Cabot, or they should have."
"Oh, please," Cabot said, raising his hands in mock defeat. "Don't start in again with your damn suffrage talk. If I have to hear about the forward-looking territory of Wyoming one more time, I think I may just buy you a ticket and let you go freeze your tail off out there for a month or two."
"But I don't see why if Wyoming allows women the vote, and to serve on juries and in its courts, that the great
state of California—"
"Charlotte, we've been over this a million times. Wyoming precedent won't apply here because it's not a state. When you've got a population of forty-two thousand in the whole territory, you'd let the damn dogs have the vote!"
"And do you put women and dogs in the same category?" she asked him, pacing around the room rearranging whatever wasn't nailed down.
"From what I've heard, they both have cold noses," Cabot said. "And they are noisy and messy and they don't give you any peace."
He sighed heavily and, pushing his papers aside, rested his elbows on his desk.
"We don't have time for this, Charlotte. We've got to hire a private investigator for the legwork and we've got to go over every shred of evidence with a fine-tooth comb. I have a bad feeling this is going to be our toughest case."
"But you're tired," Charlotte said, watching as Cabot rolled his head, stretching his neck out first this way and then that. "Maybe we should do this later?"
"If we wait until I'm not tired, Charlotte, they'll have hanged my brother and buried my grieving mother as well." He reached for his glass on the desk, found it empty, and grimaced.
"I'll get you some more," Charlotte said, hopeful for the opportunity to leave the room and check on whatever had happened to the fledgling she'd left in Ashford's care. If what Cabot was always saying about his brother was true, the bird was probably already dead from neglect. And then there was Van Gogh, the little one-earred rabbit she'd named for that poor artist Cabot's friend from Paris had told them about, who'd no doubt left a welcome present right on Ash's coverlet.
"Sit," Cabot directed her as she stood and reached out for his empty glass. "You can make better use of your time researching the penal code than playing at the domesticated little woman. Did you ask him if he had any alibi?"
Charlotte set the glass down on the desk, careful to center it on the coaster the way Cabot preferred. She pulled the servant's cord for Maria and then took her seat again. Cabot's face was drawn; his fingers played relentlessly with the spokes of his chair wheel. "Are you all right? It's not like you to snap at me so."
Mittman, Stephanie Page 4