The magistrate was a heavy set man named Judge Puit, gay whiskered and slowm moving, with the tired eyes of a man who had settled too many disputes between neighbors who used to be friends. He called the room to order, and the noise settled into an uneasy quiet, and the thing Eleanor had been dreading for 30 days began. Charles's lawyer spoke first. He was smooth, unhurried, and he built his case exactly the way Eleanor had known he would not, with lies, but with truths arranged to wound. "Your honor, the facts are not in dispute," he began.
On the 14th of December, Eleanor Whitmore, a widow of three weeks, arrived in Cedar Hollow with no money, no prospects, and nowhere to live. Within 7 days, 7 days. Your honor, she had married Nathaniel Carter, a man she had never before met, a man who happens to own one of the most valuable parcels of land in this county. We do not allege that Mr. Carter is a bad man.
We allege that he is a grieving, lonely man who was taken advantage of by a woman with nothing to lose and everything to gain. And we ask this court to recognize that such a union made in such haste for such transparent reasons is not a marriage at all. It is an arrangement, a fraud, and the property it was designed to secure ought not to be protected by it. A murmur went through the room. Eleanor felt it the way the crowd tilted half toward belief.
Then the lawyer produced the letter from Boston. He read it aloud, slow, letting each word land, and it was worse than Eleanor had braced for, because her husband's family had not merely called her barren and burdensome. They had built a whole portrait of her, a scheming cold woman, who had married their son for his money, who had failed in her only duty, who had wept crocodile tears at the funeral, while calculating what she could still extract until at last they had been forced to protect themselves by sending her away. It was cruel and it was clever, and worst of all, it was written in the confident, respectable hand of people the world was inclined to believe. Eleanor sat very still through all of it.
She would not cry. She had decided that in the dark hours before dawn, and she held to it now, though the words scraped every wound raw. She felt Clara's hand creep into hers under the table and grip it tight, and she squeezed back and did not let her face change. When the lawyer finished, he set the letter down gently as though it were something precious. This, your honor, is the character of the woman before you, not our words.
The words of the family that knew her best. The room was silent. Judge Puit looked at Eleanor over his spectacles, his tired eyes unreadable. The letter makes serious claims, Mrs. Carter.
Do you wish to answer them? And Eleanor stood. She had not planned to speak first. Their lawyer, a plain country attorney named Hollis that Nathaniel had hired, no match for Charles's gray suited man, had meant to build their case slow. But Eleanor stood before Hollis could rise because she had spent 3 weeks in Boston, being spoken about while she sat silent, being decided over, being disposed of.
And she would be damned if she'd sit silent now, while a room full of strangers decided who she was. I'll answer them, she said. Everyone. Judge Puit gestured for her to go on. That letter's true, Eleanor said, and a ripple of surprise moved through the room.