Chapter 9 - The Court of Clean Hands
The chamber was not a courtroom with an elevated bench or a jury box. It was a library with three thousand volumes of law reports bound in sheepskin, a Turkey carpet that smelled of cigar smoke, and a mahogany table twelve feet long, around which five men were already seated.
Arthur Henderson sat at the center.
He was sixty, perhaps sixty-five, with iron-gray hair parted precisely in the middle and brushed flat against a skull as round and solid as a cannonball. He wore a three-piece suit of charcoal wool with a gold watch-chain looped across his vest, from which hung a heavy seal cut from bloodstone.
Beside him sat two younger men with identical haircuts and identical yellow legal pads—his associates.
Marcus was not there.
I had expected him. For four months, through every turn of the screw, I had imagined the moment when Marcus would have to look across a room and see what his telephone cord and his duffel bag had left behind.
I had rehearsed the look I would give him—not hatred, not tears, but that terrible, silent clarity that makes a coward look at his own fingernails.
He hadn't come. He had sent his father. Or rather, his father had left him in the carriage, or in the club, or in the lecture hall at the business college, where nothing ugly could touch the hem of his trousers.
At the head of the table sat Judge Vane.
He was an old man with skin like parchment that had been scrubbed with pumice, watery blue eyes, and two small white tufts of hair behind his ears that looked like rabbit fur. He had a gold pen in his hand, and he was using the cap to tap the rim of an inkwell with a slow, hypnotic cadence.
*Tink. Tink. Tink.*
“Mr. Henderson,” the judge said without looking up from his blotter. “We are ten minutes behind the list. Is this the matter of the infant Miller?”
“It is, Your Honor,” Arthur Henderson said. His voice was beautiful—deep, resonant, and cultured, the voice of a man who gave five thousand dollars to the hospital board and read the first lesson in the Episcopal church every Trinity Sunday. “We are here upon the petition for an interim wardship, filed under Section Twelve of the Chancery Act. As Your Honor is aware, the biological mother has demonstrated an inability to maintain an independent domiciliary status, and the putative father—my ward, Marcus—is currently completing his professional education without independent estate.”
He paused, his eyes moving across the table until they found me.
He didn't look at me with disgust. He looked at me with the cool, measured appraisal of an architect examining a chimney that had been built six inches out of plumb.
“We have offered,” Arthur Henderson continued, his voice dropping into that tone of sorrowful civic duty that makes every injustice sound like an act of mercy, “a very generous settlement. Twelve hundred dollars in discharge of all accrued obligations, together with an annuity of eight hundred dollars for the maintenance of the maternal grandparents, upon the entry of a decree of voluntary surrender to the Diocesan Board.”
Judge Vane nodded slowly. His gold pen continued its rhythm against the inkwell.
*Tink. Tink.*
“A very proper disposition,” the judge murmured. “The court is familiar with the Diocesan Board. Excellent people. The Home for Little Wanderers on Prospect Street has three vacancies, I believe. Has the mother signed the acknowledgment?”
“She has not, Your Honor,” Dunstan said.
The old man had not sat down. He stood three paces behind my chair, his carpetbag resting on the carpet between his boots, his three-fingered hand resting on the back of my seat.
Judge Vane’s eyes lifted from the blotter for the first time. They rested on Dunstan’s black sleeve-protector, lingered for a second on the greasy collar of his coat, and then moved to the clerk.
“Who is this gentleman?”
“Caleb Dunstan, Your Honor,” the old man said before the clerk could answer. “Of the Bar of the Fourth District. Admitted Michaelmas Term, 1889. Appearing for Bridget Mary Miller, the natural mother, who is present with the infant.”
Arthur Henderson’s left eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch. He didn't look at Dunstan; he looked at his senior associate, who immediately began turning through a green binder.
“The Fourth District?” Judge Vane’s voice had lost its smooth, velvet cadence. It had acquired the dry, papery rustle of an official whose routine has been interrupted by an unlicensed cart in the carriageway. “Mr. Dunstan, this is a summary proceeding in chambers. We do not require coastal practitioners to instruct us on Section Twelve. The petition alleges moral endangerment and fiscal insolvency. The maternal grandfather—who I see sitting at the rear of the room—has already executed an affidavit of insolvency in connection with the lease-guaranty.”
“He has,” Dunstan said. “And Arthur Henderson bought that note for sixty cents on the dollar from the University Realty Company on January fourteenth.”
Dunstan reached into his carpetbag, pulled out a single sheet of paper—yellowed, damp-cockled, and smelling faintly of dried herring—and laid it flat on the mahogany table.
Arthur Henderson didn't reach for it. His senior associate picked it up with two fingers, glanced at the bottom, and whispered something in Henderson’s ear.
Henderson’s jaw hardened. The velvet dropped from his eyes, leaving two gray marbles that looked as though they had been dug out of a frozen gravel-pit.
“That is an internal business memorandum,” Henderson said coldly. “It has no relevance to the fitness of the mother.”
“It has relevance to the fraud,” Dunstan said. His voice was not loud, but it had the salt-air rasp that carried through a gale on the upper deck. “Section Twelve requires that the petition be brought by a disinterested relator or by the public almoner. Arthur Henderson is not a relator. He is an assignee of a simple contract debt, who has used the threat of immediate execution upon a residential homestead to extort an acknowledgment of bastardy from a twenty-one-year-old girl.”
“Mr. Dunstan!” Judge Vane’s hand came down on the table with a sharp, flat *thwack*. “You will moderate your language. Mr. Henderson is an officer of this court and a member of the Chancery Committee.”
“He can be the Archangel Gabriel with a gold trumpet, Your Honor,” Dunstan said, his good hand coming down on the paper beside the yellow sheet, “but he cannot sign a verification under Section Twelve while his son’s name remains on the university registry as the joint tenant of the room where this child was conceived.”
Dunstan turned to me.
“Bridget,” he said. “Put the book on the table.”
I didn't hesitate. I reached into the pocket of my coat, pulled out *The Ledger*—the blue school notebook with the curled corners and the grease-spots from Mrs. Gable’s lard-lamp—and laid it beside the legal folios.
It looked ridiculous on the mahogany. It looked like a dead sparrow dropped on a banquet table.
“What is that?” Judge Vane asked, his spectacles slipping down his nose as he peered over the rim.
“That is the accounting, Your Honor,” I said.
My voice didn't shake. I looked directly at Arthur Henderson—not at his watch-chain, not at his charcoal suit, but into the flat, gray eyes that had never seen Maeve’s toes or smelled the vinegar on her skin.
“On November fourteenth,” I said, “Marcus took his clothes. He took his radio. He took three shirts that I had washed on Monday morning, and he took his telephone charger from the socket beside the kitchen table.”
Arthur Henderson made a small, impatient sound in his throat and looked at his watch.
“I kept the receipts,” I continued. “They are all there. The four dollars for the milk. The two dollars for the clinic registration. The sixty cents for the flannel. The eight dollars I earned at the sorting tables between January and the week the child came. There is no public relief in that book, Mr. Henderson. There is no diocesan charity. There is no money from your firm, and there is no money from the man who couldn't find his way down the stairs to this room today.”
I opened the blue cover.
On the first page, beneath the title I had written four months before, was the entry for March eighteenth.
*Maeve born. Eight pounds. Both survived.*
“Marcus Henderson is her father,” I said. The words fell into the library like stones dropped into a cistern. “I don't want his money. I don't want his father’s twelve hundred dollars, and I don't want his family name on her birth certificate. But I will not sign a lie to clear his title for a Kennebec paper mill.”
The silence in the room became absolute.
You could hear the gas-brackets humming on the walls. You could hear the horses stamping in the alley below, their iron shoes ringing on the wet cobbles.
Judge Vane looked at the blue notebook. He looked at Arthur Henderson.
Henderson’s face had turned the color of cold tallow. He did not look at his associates, and he did not look at my father. He looked at the window, where the soot-clouds from the lower yards were beginning to drift across the sun.
“Arthur,” Judge Vane said. His voice was very quiet now—not the judge’s voice, but the voice of an old man who has seen a horse slip on the ice and knows that the wagon is going to follow it over the bank. “Is Marcus prepared to submit to an examination under oath regarding the tenancy?”
Henderson didn't move.
“Marcus,” Henderson said, his words coming through teeth that were clamped so tight the muscles at his jaw stood out like walnuts, “is currently in Boston. He has examinations.”
“Then this petition is defective,” Judge Vane said. He picked up his gold pen, but he didn't tap it. He laid it flat across the groove of his inkstand, where it clicked once and lay still. “Section Twelve cannot be used as an adjunct to a commercial debt collection. If your office wishes to proceed upon the lease-guaranty against Thomas Miller, the law side of the court is open to you on forty days’ notice. The Chancery will not enter an order of wardship upon a contested parentage where the alleged father fails to appear.”
He drew a clean docket sheet toward him, dipped an iron pen into the black ink, and wrote three words across the face of the Henderson petition.
*Dismissed without day.*
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He didn't look at Arthur Henderson. He didn't look at Dunstan. He pushed his chair back, stood up with a dry rustle of his silk gown, and walked through the small green-baize door into his inner study, letting the latch fall behind him with a hollow, wooden *clack*.
***
