He thought for a moment. You could all but see the parts of his mind in motion, there behind the stone stillness of his face.
“This woman claims that I forced myself upon her,” he said at last. “As I see it, there is no other charge against me.”
“You caused her body harm,” I reminded him, shaking my head. “You caused-”
“Not if I did not force myself upon her.”
“Then you are still guilty of doing sexual harm to a girl of barely nineteen!”
“Then I am guilty of showing little care to a serving girl. I promise you that, if every peer was to be begrudged for a lack of concern about his domestics, there would be no man nor woman from the Channel to the Hebrides unnamed by the warrant.”
“This is no matter about which to be flippant.”
“On the contrary, my dear boy-”
“I am not your dear boy.”
“-I am not at all being flippant. You charge me with treating roughly a person in the privacy of her bedroom. If I was there by her request, then any difficulty she suffered thereafter were her own responsibility. Not that of her blackguard partner, not that of her white knight rescuer, none but her own.”
“Buy you did not-”
“Did not enter at her request. Yes, I heard the charge you made. I deny it wholeheartedly. What occurred may have been a poor representation of the honor of an officer and a gentleman, but it was no crime, no unwonted violation of the lady.”
“The lady begged to differ.”
He allowed himself, finally, a smile.
“Most ladies do,” he said. “Afterwards.”
“Most ladies do not end a rendez-vous by running demented into the woods.”
“Oh, do you really think that?”
“It is immaterial. You forced yourself on her.”
“I did nothing of the sort. I knocked on her door. She let me in. I moved towards her. She stepped aside, and let me into her room. I closed the door. She made no objections. I kissed her. She made no objections. I took down her clothings. She made no objections. Nor did she ever raise her voice at any time during our coupling.”
“And how could she have done so?”
“It is no trial to speak out loud. She had every opportunity to do so.”
“But it was not fair to her!” I said.
“And why not?”
He let the question hang there, as the carriage jostled and rolled.
He pressed the matter further. “My young man, is there any situation you could conceive wherein someone like me could ever bargain on equal footing with someone like her? Do you really think that a tryst between a Baron and a barmaid could ever be one between equals?”
“You were not a Baron, only some weeks before.”
“Some weeks before I was the commander of a British expeditionary force, halfway across the world, in the middle of a heathen desert, beneath the brunt of a heathen charge. I was the lord and master of tens of thousands of British and territorial soldiers. To say nothing of being governor-general of some millions in Egypt. To say nothing of being a general in Her Majesty’s Imperial Army.
“My young, young man,” he said, leaning forward ever so slightly, “could a man such as that ever be refused by a girl such as she?”
Again, I had no answer to give to him.
After a time I found one, though it sounded hollow even to my own ears.
“Then you should not have pursued her,” I said. “She was not your equal. Not worthy of you. You should have left her alone.”
He did not respond to this, not at once. I could see him sitting there before me, no large man, no giant as he should have been.
“Perhaps,” he said. “That would be the noble behavior, I suppose. Perhaps it would be nobler for equals only to pursue each other. Only the strongest wolves to attack each other, leaving the weak to themselves. Only the strongest nations to attack each other, letting the weakest form a league of their own. Perhaps, instead of fighting the Mahdi savages, we should have waged war upon some European power. Perhaps instead of fighting in the Imperial territories we should bring our fighting to the continent. That would be far more sporting. There might be none left alive to see the truce made, but at least we could be content in knowing that it had been a fight between equals.”
“That is different,” I said.
“No,” he said, “it is not. No fight is between equals. The weak are the weak because someone else is stronger. If he restrains himself from pursuing what is otherwise his to take, he is not favoring them, certainly he does not favor himself. To sacrifice the advantage which I have worked my entire life to achieve would be as comic an exercise as the First Lord ordering the Channel Fleet to sea, and scuttling it, so as to give us equal position when fighting with France or Russia.”
“It is different,” I said. “People are not nations.”
“No, they are not. Every nation is different, yet every person is the same. Every person has what I want and can give it to me. It does not matter if it be the daughter of a Duchess, fresh down from Girton, or the son of a stable boy, two years shy of going to sea. They all have what I want. Therefore it would be stupid of me to lay siege to the Duchess when the stable-boy would surrender himself without a shot fired.”
I stared at him.
He stared back. “Don’t you think?”
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