'That is the wedding itself, Arthur. Afterwards there is the reception.'
The unofficial Englishman looks at his unofficial fiancée. 'Did anyone ever tell you that apart from being the most adorable of women, you are also pre-eminently wise, and much more able to see what is right and necessary than the poor oaf you will be taking as a husband?'
'I shall be at your side, Arthur, always at your side. And therefore looking in the same direction. Whatever that direction may prove to be.'
George amp; Arthur
As the summer began to pass, as conversation turned to cricket or the Indian crisis, as Scotland Yard no longer required monthly confirmation by registered post of George's address, as the Home Office remained silent, as even the indefatigable Mr Yelverton failed to come up with a new stratagem, as George was informed that an office awaited him at 2 Mecklenburgh Street until such time as he found his own premises, as Sir Arthur's communications diminished to brief notes of encouragement or rage, as his father returned more full-mindedly to parish work, as his mother judged it safe to leave her elder son and only daughter in one another's care, as Captain the Honourable George Anson failed to announce any renewed investigation into the Great Wyrley Outrages despite their now having no official author, as George learned to read a newspaper again without one eye constantly snagging at a mention of his name, as yet another animal was mutilated in the Wyrley district, as interest nevertheless dribbled away and even the anonymous letter writer grew weary of his abuse, George realized that the final, official verdict on his case had been given, and was unlikely ever to be changed.
Innocent yet guilty: so said the Gladstone Committee, and so said the British Government through its Home Secretary. Innocent yet guilty. Innocent yet wrong-headed and malicious. Innocent yet indulging in impish mischief. Innocent yet deliberately seeking to interfere with the proper investigations of the police. Innocent yet bringing his troubles upon himself. Innocent yet undeserving of compensation. Innocent yet undeserving of an apology. Innocent yet fully deserving of three years' penal servitude.
But that was not the only verdict. Much of the Press had been on his side: the Daily Telegraph had called the Committee's and the Home Secretary's position weak, illogical and inconclusive. The public's attitude, as far as he could gauge it, was that he never once had fair play. The legal profession, in great numbers, had supported him. And finally, one of the greatest writers of the age had loudly and continually asserted his innocence. Would these verdicts in time come to outweigh the official one?
George also sought to take a wider view of his own case, and the lessons it contained. If you could not expect the police to be more efficient, or witnesses more honest, then you must at least improve the tribunals where their words were tested. A case like his should never have been conducted by a Chairman with no legal training; you would have to improve the qualifications of those on the bench. And even if the Quarter Sessions and the Assize Courts could be made to function better, there must still be recourse to finer and wiser legal minds: in other words, to a court of appeal. It was an absurdity that the only way to overturn a wrongful conviction such as his was by petitioning the Home Secretary, that petition to arrive with hundreds – no, thousands – of others each year, most of them from manifestly guilty occupants of His Majesty's prisons, who had little better to occupy their time with than confecting memorials for the Home Office. Obviously, futile and frivolous appeals to any new court should be weeded out; but where there had been a serious dispute of law or fact, or where the conduct of the lower court had been prejudicial or incompetent, then a higher court must reconsider the case.
George's father had hinted to him on various occasions that his sufferings had a higher purpose to them. George had never wanted to be a martyr, and still saw no Christian explanation of his travails. But the Beck Case and the Edalji Case had between them produced great stirrings among his profession, and it was entirely possible that he might turn out to have been a kind of martyr after all, if of a simpler, more practical kind – a legal martyr whose sufferings brought about progress in the administration of justice. Nothing, in George's view, could possibly make up for the years stolen in Lewes and Portland, and the year of limbo following his release; and yet, might it not be some consolation if this terrible fracture in his life led to some ultimate good for his profession?
Cautiously, as if aware of the sin of pride, George began to imagine a legal textbook written a hundred years thence. 'The Court of Appeal was originally set up as the result of numerous miscarriages of justice which aroused public discontent. Not the least of these was the Edalji Case, whose details need no longer concern us, but whose victim, it should be noted in passing, was the author of Railway Law for the "Man in the Train", one of the first works to clarify this often confusing subject, and a book which is still referred to…' There were worse fates, George decided, than to be a footnote in legal history.
One morning, a tall oblong card arrived for him. It was printed in silver copperplate hand:
Mr amp; Mrs Leckie
request the pleasure of
Company
at the Whitehall Rooms
Hotel Metropole
on Wednesday September 18th
at 2.45 o'clock
on the occasion of
the marriage of their daughter
Jean
with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Glebe House,
Blackheath
R.S.V.P.
George was touched beyond expression. He set the card on his mantelpiece, and replied immediately. The Incorporated Law Society had readmitted him to the Rolls, and now Sir Arthur had readmitted him to human society. Not that he had any social ambitions – not to such high reaches anyway; but he recognized the invitation as a noble and symbolic gesture to one who just a year previously had been keeping himself sane in Portland Gaol with the novels of Tobias Smollett. George thought for a long time as to what might be a suitable wedding present, and eventually decided on well-bound, one-volume editions of Shakespeare and Tennyson.
Arthur is determined to throw any damn reporters off the scent. There is no announcement of where he and Jean are to be married; his wedding-eve dinner at the Gaiety is a discreet affair; and at St Margaret's Westminster the striped awning is put out at the very last minute. Only a few passers-by gather at this drowsy, sun-dusted corner beside the Abbey to see who might be getting married on a discreet Wednesday rather than an ostentatious Saturday.
Arthur wears a frock coat and white waistcoat, with a large white gardenia in his buttonhole. His brother Innes, on special leave from autumn manoeuvres, makes a nervous best man. Cyril Angell, husband of Arthur's youngest sister Dodo, will officiate. The Mam, whose seventieth birthday has recently been celebrated, wears grey brocade; Connie and Willie are there, and Lottie and Ida and Kingsley and Mary. Arthur's dream of gathering his family around him under one roof has never come to pass; but here, for a brief while, they are all assembled. And for once Mr Waller is not of the party.
The chancel is decorated with tall palms; groups of white flowers are arranged at their base. The service is to be fully choral, and Arthur, given his Sunday preference for golf over church, has allowed Jean to choose the hymns: 'Praise the Lord, ye Heavens adore Him' and 'O, Perfect Love, all human thought transcending'. He stands in the front pew, remembering her last words to him. 'I shall not keep you waiting, Arthur. I have made that quite clear to my father.' He knows she will be as good as her word. Some might say that since they have waited ten years for one another, an extra ten or twenty minutes will do no harm, and may even improve the drama of the event. But Jean, to his delight, is quite devoid of that supposedly appealing bridal coquetry. They are to be married at a quarter to three; therefore she will be at the church at a quarter to three. This is a sound basis for a marriage, he thinks. As he stands looking at the altar, he reflects that he does not always understand women, but he recognizes those who play with a straight bat and those who don't.