Marrying The Mistress: an irresistible and gripping romantic drama from one of Britain’s best loved authors, Joanna Trolloper - Couverture souple

Chapter One

‘It would be advisable,’ the court official said to the security guard, ‘just to keep the laddie up here for half an hour.’

They both looked along the courtroom waiting area at the defendant. He was smoking rapidly. He was also head and shoulders taller than the little group of women clustered round him, like hens preening a cockerel, clucking and soothing and flattering.

The security guard rattled the bunch of keys chained to his belt.

‘Trouble downstairs then?’

‘Not exactly trouble,’ the court official said, ‘but there’s a few of the girl’s friends and family waiting. Just waiting. Like they do.’

The security guard sighed.

‘Wish he hadn’t got bail. Wish I could just take him back inside. At least I’d know where he was then.’

The court official glanced again at the defendant. Good-looking chap, in a f lashy, come-and-get-it-girls way. But not reliable-looking; not reliable, at least, where his stepdaughter had been concerned.

‘He won’t skip.’

’I’d still rather have him behind bars.’

A young woman went past, a briskly-walking, black-clad young woman with reddish-brown hair tied back behind her head with a black ribbon. She was carrying a square black attaché case and she had a black coat over her arm. She nodded to the court official as she passed.

‘Night,’ she said.

The security guard watched her go. He’d been watching her all day in court, Miss Merrion Palmer, counsel for the prosecution, and admiring the way the tail of her wig sat so precisely above the tail of her natural hair.

‘Nice legs,’ he said.

The court official blew out a little breath and heaved at the slipping shoulders of his black gown.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘nice all right.’

He glanced along the waiting area to right and left, then said, sotto voce, ‘Know our judge?’

‘Come on,’ the security guard said, ‘I’m here half the month, aren’t I? Course I know the judge.’

The court official leaned closer.

‘What’s just gone past,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the glazed door at the end of the waiting area that led to the judges’ corridor, ‘is not just an advocate, any old lady advocate. What’s gone past is His Honour’s totty.’
Back in his room the other side of the glazed door, Judge Guy Stockdale took off his wig and hung it on its wooden stand. Both wig and stand had belonged to his father, as had the pocket watch in his waistcoat pocket which he carried every day out of a superstitious apprehension that he might make a public fool of himself if he didn’t, and the silver pencil with which he made his meticulous notes up there, alone, on the Bench.

He then took off his robe — purple, claret and black silk — and hung it on the plastic hanger from a nationwide dry-cleaning chain that seemed to have replaced the heavy, curved wooden one he had brought in especially for the purpose. Then he removed his black coat and put it over the back of a grey vinyl armchair and sat in the chair, leaning his head in his hands and putting the heels of his hands into his eye sockets.

‘Would you like me to take off my wig?’ he’d asked the girl-child witness over the courtroom’s video link at ten-thirty that morning. ‘Would it be easier for you?’

She’d stared back at him, a clever little foxy face framed in a fake-fur coat collar.

‘I don’t mind,’ she’d said. She hadn’t seemed daunted. She hadn’t seemed daunted by anything, all that day, except, occasionally, by the miserable intensity of remembering what she had felt, what had happened to her. ‘You suit yourself.’

Oddly, he had rather wanted to take his wig off. He didn’t usually. Usually, he was so conscious of being an upholder of an office and a representative of justice, rather than Guy Stockdale aged sixty-two, height six foot one, shoe size ten, no need yet — impressively — for spectacles or false teeth, that he was happy to have his wig and gown remove him from the particular to the impersonal. But today had been different. Today had been different because he had come, without particularly intending to, to a point when he had to implement a choice; he couldn’t go on just looking at it and thinking about it and laying it carefully to one side to act upon some other day when the light was clear and courage was high. This knowledge had made him look at the girl on the video link not just as an abused child — there were thirteen charges against her stepfather, six of indecent assault, five of unlawful sexual intercourse, two of rape — but as something of a fellow traveller in a world where things you wanted and needed began to conflict badly with the things you already, acceptably, had.

There was a light knock and the door opened. Penny Moss, a young clerk who had come to work at tanborough Crown Court as a school-leaver, came in with a file. Guy took his hands away from his face and blinked at her. She took no notice of having found the Resident Judge with his head in his hands. She took no notice, ever, of anything except the immediate matter she had in hand at any given moment. She put the file down on the desk.

‘It’s Mr Weaverbrook of the animal sanctuary, Judge.’

Guy looked at the file. Mr Weaverbrook ran a so-called animal sanctuary as inadequate cover for dealing in stolen farm machinery and horse-boxes. When required to come to court, he pleaded acute anxiety levels. His wife usually came instead and sat shaking in her seat, worn out with the effort of trying to divide her loyalty between Mr Weaverbrook and the need for law-abiding conduct. Guy felt pity and admiration for Mrs Weaverbrook.

‘Do you want the case reserved to you, Judge?’

‘Yes, Penny, I do.’

‘And Mrs Mitchell and the order concerning her children?’

Guy shut his eyes again. Mrs Mitchell was a nymphomaniac with sado-masochistic tendencies whose three children, by three different fathers, were being removed, with difficulty, from her nominal care.

‘That, too, Penny. I’d like an earlier date for that case.’

‘Judge–’

‘Penny,’ Guy said, ‘I’m not delaying. I have the future of an eight year old to consider.’

Penny opened her mouth. She was going to say, as she always said when asked to do something she didn’t want to do, ‘Martin won’t like it.’ Martin was the court manager.

Guy stood up.

‘Goodnight, Penny. And thank you.’

She picked up Mr Weaverbrook’s file. He noticed that she wore, on her wedding finger, a band made of two little gold hands clasping one another. It looked vaguely Celtic.

‘Night, Judge,’ she said.
Outside, in the early spring dark, the narrow court car park was bathed in a weird orange glow from the street lights beyond its wall. The buildings that ringed the court were as modern and uncompromising as the court itself, mixtures of blood-red brick and concrete, with a lot of glass set into brushed metal frames. They managed to look, without exception, profoundly inhuman, with elements even of menace, such as the great steel doors that slid shut across the court entrance at night. Guy was all for the impressive in architecture, and especially in architecture pertaining in any way to the rule of law, but not for threat, not for anything that suggested pitilessness, inclemency.

His car was one of only three left. The other two belonged to the two regular district judges who, like him, were inclined to work on until six most evenings, even though the courts rose at four-thirty.

‘I work,’ he said often, and meaning it, ‘with lovely people.’

He opened one of the car’s rear doors and put his work bag on the back seat. Then he climbed into the driving seat and turned the engine on. Then he turned it off again, and sat looking at the neat little red lights on the dashboard, bright, precise little lights that knew what their business was and how to do it.

I do not, Guy thought, want to go home. He took his hands off the steering wheel and put them on his knees. I do not want to go home and confront the fact that I have finally decided and must now implement that decision. What I hate, he told himself, closing his eyes, is the inevitable infliction of pain. Whatever I do, I’ll cause that, to myself as well as to everyone else. In fact I am already, have been for years. It’s just that they haven’t all known.

Merrion had looked at him — when she did infrequently look at him — very directly that day. She had never appeared in court before him until today, and he had thought, and said, that she never should. But she had accepted this case, had indeed never considered doing otherwise, and when it became plain that they two would be in public together professionally and for the first time, she’d said he wasn’t to make anything of it.

‘It’s no big deal,’ she said. ‘A three-day trial and I won’t even be staying in Stanborough. You know my feelings about Stanborough.’

He did. He knew her feelings about most things. It was one of the elements of her character that charmed him most, her directness, her candour, her capacity (and courage) to see and describe things as they were, and not as they might have been or as she wished they were.

‘You’re married,’ she’d said. ‘You’ve been married for over thirty years. You’ve got two sons and you’ve got grandchildren. I’m young enough...

'Clever, clever, clever...probes right to the heart of a typically modern dilemma' Daily Mail

Merrion Palmer has been Judge Guy Stockdale's mistress for the last seven years and his wife and two grown-up sons know absolutely nothing about her. Guy and Merrion have enjoyed a blissfully uncomplicated relationship in stolen moments in Merrion's flat, and to the rest of the world, Guy has played the part of model husband, father and grandfather.

But now the time has come for things to change. Conscious of the passing years, Guy doesn't want to keep Merrion a secret any more. He wants to share her with the world.He wants, dammit, to marry her.Yet he is quite unprepared for the storm that will follow...

'A swift and riveting read' The Times

'This is Trollope at her best' Woman and Home