Her clever little speech proves my point. Look how quickly she turns a room. Look how well she reads a crowd. Does that strike you as the confused, grieving, innocent she claims to be? Or does it strike you as exactly the kind of calculating woman her own family warned us about?
And there it was. The trap sprung neat. Eleanor had spoken well, and Charles had turned her own strength against her, twisted her courage into proof of her cunning, the same way Boston had twisted her survival into scheming. She felt the room tilt again, felt the doubt creep back in, and she understood with a cold lurch that she had no answer for it, that any woman who defended herself too well could always be called too clever to trust. It was Nathaniel who stood then.
He did it quietly, without waiting to be called, unfolding from his chair to his full height, and something about the plain solidity of him drew the room's eyes. "You want to know if she's calculating?" He said. I'll tell you exactly how calculating she is. His voice was rough, unpolished, nothing like the lawyers, and it landed all the harder for it.
Two days ago, this woman and I sat at my kitchen table, and I asked her if she'd let my daughter speak at this hearing. Clara wanted to. Clara begged to. My girl was ready to stand up in front of this whole county and tell you all what Eleanor means to her. He paused, and Eleanor said no.
She said she'd sooner lose this hearing than put a 10-year-old on trial to save her own place in my house. A calculating woman uses every weapon she's got. Eleanor put down the sharpest one she had because it would have cost my daughter something and she wasn't willing to make Clara pay it. The room was silent. You want to talk about that letter from Boston?
Nathaniel went on. I'll tell you what I know. I know a family that throws a grieving widow onto a train in December and then when she's finally found somewhere warm to land, reaches 1,500 milesiles across the country to try and take that away, too. I know which one of us that family is, and it isn't Eleanor. He turned to look at Charles directly.
And a man who'd pay to dig up that letter, who'd drag those people's cruelty back into the light and use it as a weapon. I know exactly what kind of man that is, too. Same kind that' take the water from under a valley's children to fatten his own accounts. Charles's face had gone hard. I didn't marry Eleanor for love, Nathaniel said, and the plainness of it silenced the room completely.
Everybody here knows it. I won't stand up and pretend otherwise because pretending is exactly what Charles wants me to do so he can catch me in the lie. I married her because my children needed a mother and my house was falling apart and she needed a home. That's the whole truth and I'm not ashamed of it. But here's the part Charles doesn't understand because I don't think he's got it in him to understand it.