I. Madeleine Smith and the “Medium Quid”

The pampered daughter of a successful architect, Madeleine Smith was tried in July 1857 for the poisoning death of her working class lover, Emile D'Angelier. From 1855 to early 1857, Madeleine and Emile had sustained a romance; after her parents had expressed their strong disapproval, the relationship continued clandestinely, both in Glasgow and at the family's summer home in Row. In February 1857, Emile took ill – not for the first time – with a gastric complaint; his condition worsened rapidly and he died. An autopsy revealed a great deal of arsenic in his stomach. A search of his lodging house room revealed a bundle of letters from Madeleine. This correspondence made clear, among other things, that the two had had sex and were planning an elopement; Madeleine referred to herself as Emile's wife and he her husband. But it had turned out that a more suitable young man had proposed marriage and Madeleine, explaining to Emile that she had “cooled” on him, had asked for her letters back. Emile, however, had refused and threatened to give them to her father instead, at the very least hoping to keep her from leaving him, but perhaps with the idea of claiming an irregular marriage. Clearly very distressed, Madeleine had backed down from her request for the return of the letters. But in the same period, the winter of 1857, she was on record as having bought arsenic at local chemists' shop three times. In March 1857 she was arrested and charged with murder.

“The sensation of the summer of 1857” (Altick 178), the trial commanded international attention and substantial media commentary. Press accounts of the trial repeatedly linked it with popular novels and indeed it seemed to have many of the features that would characterize the sensation fiction that would become so popular in the next decade, most obviously a proper middle-class woman suspected of criminal deeds. The case against Madeleine Smith relied on circumstantial evidence in two ways. As the Lord Advocate – echoing judges in many poisoning cases – said to the Smith jury, “poisoning, which is almost always an offence secretly perpetrated. . . it seldom occurs that anyone has seen” the poison mixed or administered (Complete Report 173).Footnote ⁹ But not only were there no witnesses who saw Madeleine put poison in Emile's cocoa, the relationship itself had been clandestine. The prosecution had therefore to rely upon Madeleine's correspondence to establish the relationship and motive. In his study of novels and circumstantial evidence, Welsh highlighted prosecutors' use of such evidence to infer mental states; as he pointed out, stipulating the necessary mens rea for conviction in such instances requires the development of a coherent narrative. In the Smith case, the development of a coherent narrative of Madeleine's culpability relied less on observable actions, than on a clutch of letters, a one-sided correspondence found in Emile's drawer.

The only time Madeleine spoke in court was to answer the indictment with her plea of “Not guilty.” But, as Sheila Sullivan pointed out, her voice was heard in another way: on the fifth day of the trial, many of her rather racy letters to D'Angelier were put into evidence and were read in court (Sullivan). Newspapers went into multiple editions; after the letters were introduced, crowds gathered outside the Smith home, gawking in the windows (Gordon and Nair 133). In the courtroom, the spectacle of Madeleine Smith was perused in obsessive detail. Observers had repeatedly remarked through the nine-day trial, with small exceptions on the day of the letter-reading, Madeleine's demeanor in court had been serene. She seldom put her veil down and often leaned forward, hand on chin, to attend carefully to witness testimony; at other times, she glanced with apparent calm interest at courtroom audience, never using the smelling salts with which she had been supplied.Footnote ¹⁰ Her inscrutable demeanor no doubt contributed to journalists' intent focus on her appearance, noting her elegant attire – “a rich brown silk gown with a large brooch low-set on the breast” – as well as her hairstyle, height, weight, and features: “Her brow is of the ordinary size, and the face inclined to be oval.” (Courier, qtd. in Gordon and Nair 127). Clearly an allusion to the defense claim that she had purchased arsenic as a cosmetic remedy for a poor complexion and perhaps also a response to the pervasive sense among the public that Madeleine was not who she seemed to be, the Courier 's description continued: “Her cheeks are well-colored, and the insinuation that a rosy hue is imparted by artificial means, made by some portions of the press, does not seem to be well-founded.” The spectacle of middle-class girl from a fine family in the dock for murder was no doubt shocking but Madeleine's corporeal presence in the courtroom operated as a kind of evidence, as well. The figure of Madeleine seemed to press at the boundaries of the visible: the apparent disparity between the emotional, sexually explicit letters to a clandestine lower-class lover and the calm, stylish young woman who apparently penned them offered a compelling enigma. Who was Madeleine Smith? How to reconcile this writing with her contained public presentation? Even if she were in fact innocent of murder, her letters testified to the potential deceptiveness of even the most respectable of middle class appearances.Footnote ¹¹

In closing statements, both the prosecutor and Madeleine's defense attorney, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates John Inglis, attempted to contain and direct the emotions provoked by the defendant and the case, knitting them into apparently cogent narratives. The prosecution had read seventy-seven of Madeleine's letters to her lover into the evidence, noting among other things that the relationship had “assumed a criminal aspect” through the repeated “acts of improper connection” that the letters revealed. Madeleine, in other words, was already convicted of moral transgression. Thus it is difficult not to hear apophasis when, in his closing statement, the Lord Advocate promised the jury that he would not focus on “the incredible evidence of disgrace, of sin, of degradation, of social depravity which this case describes,” asserting that much more attention to “the commiseration and horror which the age, the sex, the condition of the prisoner suggest” might have a deleteriously ennervating effect on “the discharge of my painful public duty” (Complete Report 129). Nominally acknowledging the decoupling of moral culpability from juridical guilt, the prosecutor rhetorically associates them, implicitly encouraging the moral revulsion that jurymen might feel to push them toward a guilty verdict. Dean Inglis advanced the defense theory that a mentally unstable D'Angelier had committed suicide. But Inglis had clearly felt that it was necessary to retrieve Madeleine's image before the jury by claiming that the letters showed D'Angelier as a dangerous seducer who had exercised a “corrupting influence” upon a pliable young girl. In his closing statement, he sought to redirect the jury's sentiments away from moral condemnation toward empathy for a fallen daughter of the bourgeoisie. Encouraging the jury not to leave certain moral sentiments outside the deliberation room, he reminded them of a case some years before where an innocent girl had been sent to the gallows and cautioned them to “bring your fine moral instincts, and your guiding and regulating conscience. . . To determine guilt or innocence by the light of intellect alone is the exclusive prerogative of infallibility” (Complete Report 172).

Inglis's comments may be notable for their explicit encouragement of the role of sentiment in adjudication. But in the Smith case, both prosecution and defense acknowledged that a conception of law as excluding passion and affect from its proceedings was inoperative. Jacobson remarks that in the Smith trial, domestic passions “threatened to escape into the courtroom” (291). In fact, the courtroom seems to have been just as saturated in emotions as the world outside it, where citizens soaked up information about the case and tried to peer into James Smith's windows to figure out which were the ones through which Madeleine had allegedly handed a cup of poisoned cocoa to her lover. We might remark that the “escape” of private emotions into the sphere of law is part of the allure of a sensational criminal trial in any era. But, as Susan Bandes has pointed out, the conventional understanding of the place of emotion in legal proceedings is that it must be “narrowly delineat[ed]. . . so that emotion doesn't encroach on the true preserve of law, which is reason” (Bandes 2); the challenge for attorneys and judges is in regulating the affective environment in the courtroom. However, in the Smith trial, neither prosecution nor defense was entirely successful in their efforts to marshal the affective environment, either by turning moral condemnation into legal guilt or pity into full acquittal. Sullivan has credited the not proven verdict to confusion provoked by the figure of Madeleine, arguing that so thoroughly did she disrupt the reigning templates for Victorian bourgeois femininity that the jury was unable to make sense of what was presented to them. We might broaden the point: the mysterious figure of Madeleine resumed in her person a general sense that was already percolating in mid-Victorian urban culture, that appearances and civil identity were insufficient or inconclusive markers of identity. While Madeleine's appearance and her family background were all obsessively perused by the press and, no doubt, the jurors, she remained a surface; the depths below, ostensibly represented through her letters, could not be readily plumbed. Neither – or both – of the prosecution's and the defense's images of the young woman seemed to be anchored conclusively by the evidence offered.

For the meanings of her letters proved in fact no easier to regulate than Madeleine herself had been. The correspondence was one-sided; D'Angelier's letters to Madeleine were never found. And it is precisely the qualities of the love letter, presented as one side of a missing correspondence, that underscore the difficulty of even putting a provisional end to the play of meanings.Footnote ¹² Personal letters proved to constitute a particularly vexatious form of evidentiary document; while the material existence of the letters proved that Madeleine knew Emile rather well and wrote to him, anything further seemed open to interpretation. The defense attorney supplied a reading that portrayed Madeleine Smith as a vulnerable innocent, not dissimilar to soft clay impressed by a powerful external force; she had been seduced by a lower-class man who seemed, based on Inglis's readings of her responses to D'Angelier's missing letters, to be demanding and desirous of controlling of all aspects of her conduct. While not denying Madeleine's violation of the norms of propriety, he used the letters to suggest that she had been preyed upon and victimized, painting a picture of a young girl so vulnerable and susceptible to the opinions of others that she could not possibly plan and execute a murder. The prosecution, of course, had a different reading, attending to Madeleine's explicit references to sexuality and her expressions of anger and desperation when Emile had refused to return her letters. Here was a determined harpy who, having already transgressed many of the boundaries of established conduct for young women, would clearly not stop at murder. Which description of an interior state seemed most congruent with the young woman in the brown silk frock seated at the defense table?

Compounding the difficulties of imputing a criminally liable mental state to Madeleine based on her admittedly emotionally-wrought letters, it simply could not be proven with the available evidence that Madeleine had been with D'Angelier in sufficient proximity to his final illness in late February 1857 to administer that poisoned cocoa. Two earlier illnesses were cited in the evidence, but one seemed to have befallen him before the date upon which Madeleine first acquired the arsenic. She always claimed that she had not seen him for three weeks before his death; during that period, she had been away with her family. There was no evidence that she had returned from this trip before the appointed time, nor was there evidence that even after her return, on the same night that D'Angelier became ill for the last time, she had seen him. Whatever the members of the jury personally might have felt about this serene, well-dressed young woman's “disgrace, sin. . . and social depravity,” particularly after having heard her letters read aloud, it may have been that they simply could not put the two together at the right time for her to have poisoned him, based on the available evidence—including, of course, those letters, many of which were undated.Footnote ¹³

There was, however, another piece of writing that the jury never saw. Among D'Angelier's possessions had been found a small day book, in which there were penciled entries concerning the days and times of meeting with and hearing from “M” or “Mimi,” which appeared to be his pet name for Madeleine. The Lord Advocate sought to introduce these entries to the jury; Inglis was eager to block their introduction, for indeed they were detrimental to the defense. The first of Madeleine's three documented purchases of arsenic had been on February 21, 1857. Emile had fallen ill with serious gastric complaints twice in late February and for the last time on March 26. While there was no conclusive evidence of his meeting with Madeleine near that date, there was an entry in his day book for February 22 that read “saw Mimi in dining room. Promised me French Bible. Taken very ill” (MacGowan 107). Could the entries be admitted under an exception to the hearsay rule? The day book had raised the only point of law in the course of the trial; after a recess to evaluate its admissibility, one of the judges ruminated that “we have received no assistance from the Bar by any reference to any authority. No case has been stated for us bearing on the subject, and having taken some pains myself to search for authority and precedent, I have been unsuccessful in finding either” (Complete Report 112). Two out of the three judges agreed that the entries were inadmissible.

The arguments that the two judges put forward for the exclusion had principally to do with the fact that Emile D'Angelier could not be examined under oath about the entries; at the same time, the diary entries did not seem to fall under the dying declaration exception. In D'Angelier's absence, the judges pointed to the textual and material attributes of his writing. The entries were in pencil and thus could have been made at any time, regardless of the dates indicated; the day book might even have been tampered with, since the chain of evidence had not been secure in the aftermath of his death. Furthermore they were peculiar entries; Emile appeared to have begun them in early February and concluded them in early March and, as one judge noted, this practice was at odds with normal diary-keeping, which raised further unanswerable questions about their status. Of greatest moment for our purposes, however, were the claims about personal writing that were made by one of the judges as part of his argument for exclusion of the entries: private writing, such as diaries or journals, which are not intended for any audience beyond their author, Lord Handyside argued “may be an idle piece of writing, or it may be unfounded suspicion or ambiguous charges preferred by hostile and vindictive feelings in a moody and spiteful mind” (Complete Report 113). This may appear a great burden to lay upon a few schematic entries in a notebook, but the judges had also entertained the idea that a suicidal Emile D'Angelier could have made them, for all anyone knew, with an eye to some nefarious purpose toward Madeleine. The larger point here is that the judges seemed quite willing to acknowledge the private sentiments of the journal or diary-writer, placing a kind of interpretive cordon sanitaire around sentiments expressed in personal writing unintended for the eyes of others.

This theory of personal writing is intriguing, since so much of the defendant's personal correspondence had been admitted in evidence and read aloud in the courtroom. While the judges for the most part agreed that Emile's diary could not be read as having stable referents, the prosecution had wanted to interpret Madeleine's letters, as Rosanne Kennedy notes, as comprising “a documentary record of the affair” (74), even though many were undated and the prosecutor had had to make an arrangement of them that constructed, for the state's purposes, a plausible sequence. What remained were sharply opposed narratives about the mental state of Madeleine Smith, narratives that relied heavily on mutually constituting templates of Victorian womanhood: an innocent girl led astray versus an incubus whose desires knew no limits. And perhaps it was precisely the familiarity of these apparently opposed narratives which made so patent to the jury the multiple possibilities for interpreting a series of texts and events; perhaps, even, the jury felt that none of these images aligned entirely with either the young woman sitting before them or the information about her life that had been presented to them. Coupled with the deficits in other aspects of the evidence about time and place, the complexity of the textual evidence seemed to support the verdict that the jurymen returned, not proven. The spectators in the courtroom agreed; when the verdict was announced they cheered.

Scots law is the only jurisdiction that offers juries the possibility of the not proven verdict. The verdict functions more or less as an acquittal; the defendant may go free, however damaging the receipt of such a verdict might be to his reputation. This is one reason Walter Scott famously disparaged it as “that Caledonian medium quid.”Footnote ¹⁴ This verdict dates from a moment in Scottish legal history when the mandate of juries was constrained to evaluate whether individual charges against a prisoner had been proven, with the judge delivering the final verdict. In the early eighteenth century, juries acquired the power to render verdicts; not proven remained as a third option in addition to guilty and not guilty.Footnote ¹⁵ Writing in the early nineteenth century, however, Baron Hume, among the leading authorities on the Scottish criminal law, explained it thus: “Not uncommonly, the phrase not proven has been employed to mark a deficiency only of lawful evidence to convict the [defendant]” (2: 440). Baron Hume's explanation of the Scottish verdict of not proven can be read in terms of those rules of evidence which, by the time he was writing, were giving distinctly new shape to the criminal trial;Footnote ¹⁶ the not proven verdict in Hume's reading marks the exclusionary character of the rules of legal evidence.

Signaling the existence of a surplus, forms of evidence which do not meet the threshold of the lawfully admissible, Hume's proliferation of negations and insufficiencies marks law as defined by that which it excludes or silences. In other words, in Hume's description, the “medium quid” is legible as an indicator, not simply of a failure on the part of both prosecution and defense to present evidence that would enable a jury to reach a determinate verdict, but of the threshold of law's knowledge-producing apparatus. In his use of the limiting “only,” Hume situates the not proven verdict in relation to the divide between the courtroom and what Paul Gewirtz more recently referred to as “the tumult of ordinary life” (136) where there might be other forms of knowledge that could be disruptive to trial procedure. The indeterminacy represented by the not proven verdict on this view not only complicates the notion of a trial as productive of truth, but acknowledges a normative differential between the existential realms of “the tumult of ordinary life” and that of the courtroom, while at the same time suggesting that this differential may not always be completely sustainable.

While in The Law and the Lady, Valeria Woodville will join with Scott in cursing the “Scotch verdict,” in the Smith case, the positive reception of the verdict registered by the courtroom audience was more broadly shared. In fact, it was widely greeted as the only possible one. Gordon and Nair cite the “almost universal support for the verdict in the press,” noting that “for many papers, not only the verdict but also the way that the trial was conducted were evidence of the impartial nature of the law” (143).Footnote ¹⁷ The Manchester Guardian, for instance, avowing that “there was never a case where the usefulness of the not proven verdict was more demonstrated,” went further to suggest that the English legal system adopt its use (Manchester Guardian 2). In so far as the verdict marked the defeat of any definitive narrative of the events at issue, there were those who saw more in it than the admirable conduct of the Scottish legal process. The Smith verdict was interpreted by several editorialists as an admission of the limits, not just of law, but of human judgment more generally: “The rest,” wrote an editorialist in the Glasgow Citizen, “is between herself and her maker and man has done his duty in refusing to decide the question of innocence or guilt.” The writer represents his sentiment in terms that underscore a disarticulation between moral sentiments and juridical punishments, hoping that Madeleine's story “may be left to point its own sad moral for those who will heed a warning” (“Miss Madeleine Smith” 6).

The Saturday Review also lauded the ambiguity of the Smith verdict, although in slightly different terms in which the literary combined with the moral. With the verdict, the case “shifts from the actual to the ideal,” for if Madeleine had been found guilty, the case would have gone down as a “comparatively common event.” Instead, this writer argues, an aura of classical tragedy remains: “there are some things too terrible to be within the exact compass of human proof.” Rather than a simple morality play, a story from the Newgate Calendar, or even a detective novel, in which an evildoer is identified and subjected to punishment at the end, the lessons the Smith trial offered were among “the most solemn” which “require an element of mystery and doubt. . . in the face of such a deed, human authority retires. Even justice declines to interfere in the presence of something beyond our powers to deal with” (“Madeleine Smith,” 26).

In the reflections of this editorialist, Madeleine Smith and the entire affair take on a sublime quality. Part of the writer's affect here has to do with the apparently irresolvable contradictions inhering in the figure of Madeleine, capable of violating her culture's class and gender codes so freely, and expressing those violations in such vivid terms in her writing, while appearing before judge and jury, a possible murderess, in elegant brown satin and a trim white bonnet just as if she were heading out to go visiting of an afternoon. A good part of the sublimity of Madeleine Smith's trial has to do with the impossibility of reconciling the image she presented with that of a dedicated poisoner through the “human proof” available: “We by no means dispute the propriety of the verdict. It is legally, technically, even morally correct: the Murder was Not Proven.” Circumstantial evidence, the legal technology by which courts seek to determine events and actors which no one has seen, had in this case failed to yield a plausible conclusion, but this would not prohibit further reflection outside the courtroom: “The very nature of the verdict leaves us at full liberty to canvass the moral antecedents of the event and to reason about what is not disproved,” the editorial concludes (“Madeleine Smith,” 28).

In the popular reception of the verdict, we can hear a tonality that is latent in Hume's definition; the not proven verdict here performed a particular kind of cultural work. In refusing to return a not guilty verdict, the jury expressed an uncertainty about whether or not Madeleine had murdered Emile D'Angelier; but it also conveyed a moral censure of her conduct prior to D'Angelier's death. Madeleine left the courtroom a free woman, but her name would be thenceforward associated with sexual transgression and tainted with suspicion of worse. An individual case “beyond our powers to deal with,” she could nonetheless function as a monitory figure to others. At the same time, the twenty-two year old daughter of one of Glasgow's most eminent families would not go to the gallows, thus avoiding a horrific public spectacle that would have been a class affront as well.Footnote ¹⁸ Far from being read as a moment of juridical failure, the Smith verdict provided an effective resolution to a complex of competing interests that were potentially brought to a crisis by the trial. The case disrupted hegemonic images of the domestic as domain untroubled by “foreign invaders” and bourgeois femininity as free of undisciplined, and possibly violent, desires; but if the verdict satisfied so many onlookers, it did so by rearticulating these as moral concerns that were outside the reach of law's determinative capacity — and law's violence.

The resolution provided, however paradoxically, by the not proven verdict could also be read as eliding larger questions that bore on desire, violence, domesticity, gender, and even, in so far as D'Angelier was a Jersey man, micro-divisions between parts of the United Kingdom. A hint of this worry is visible in some commentators' reflections that, if the domestic space of a respected architect could conceal such goings-on, any good middle class family might have something to fear. As we've seen, the case posed the question of identity in other terms as well, terms that could upon reflection become deeply unsettling: could a lovelorn girl from a good family, whose letters to her illicit lover, for the most part, only expressed rather typical sentiments of romance, abruptly turn murderess? Perhaps “foreignness” — which was so prominently associated with Emile D'Angelier in the trial — could register in other ways than the terms of geographical origin, accent, cultural attitudes. Rearticulating the case as the moral failure of one young woman, while saving her from the ignominy of judicial punishment and those of her class from witnessing it, had the effect of displacing and papering over other concerns that the event of the trial might have raised.

This background helps to frame a reading of Collins's The Law and the Lady as a text that arises in the aftermath of the Madeleine Smith trial and, as it were, takes the Smith sensation as its precedent. Well-versed as he was in the common law, Collins could be said here to engage in a kind of precedential reasoning,Footnote ¹⁹ but a literary version in which the principles abstracted from the prior case turn out to be quite different from those that any common lawyer might take — or for that matter, from the conclusions drawn by the popular press. Or to invoke Rancière's “distribution of the sensible,” we could say that the trial had performed the function of rendering something briefly visible only to relegate it once more to darkness; Collins's novel engages with the conditions and ramifications of that visibility.Footnote ²⁰ The not proven verdict in the Smith case seems, paradoxically, to have had the effect of a finality; it restabilized identities and neutralized affects. But if the verdict can be read as resolving the threatening conflicts the case raised by simultaneously disentangling the moral and the juridical while papering over those uncomfortable questions of subjectivity, identity, and desire that a larger view of the case might invite, and for which at mid-century there was no available everyday language, The Law and the Lady acknowledges the kind of resolution offered by such a verdict while at the same time uncovering what might be excluded by that resolution.

II. Uncivil Identities

The Law and the Lady begins in an abortive domesticity, articulated through the problem of proper names and the civil identity that they denote. A bad omen marks Valeria's wedding day: she signs the wrong name in the register, inscribing her married instead of her maiden name. While still on her honeymoon, the new Mrs. Woodville discovers that her new name is an assumed one. Informed of the false name under which Valeria and her new husband are registered, the landlady of their hotel demands Valeria leave the premises immediately: “Your husband is not your husband. You are neither maid, wife, nor widow. You are worse than nothing. . .” (40). Paradoxically, her marriage has confused — in fact, as far as the landlady is concerned, effaced — Valeria's civil identity; and as a woman whose civil status is defined, as the landlady points out, in relation to men, her very personhood seems at risk. She soon learns that Eustace Woodville, the mysterious fellow whom she has precipitously married after a whirlwind and somewhat clandestine courtship, is really Macallan. After his sensational trial for the murder of his first wife, Sara, he has attempted to conceal a stigmatized civil identity by abandoning his home, assuming a fake name, and swearing his few remaining friends to secrecy. And as soon as Valeria uncovers this fact, Eustace abandons her as well, attempting unsuccessfully to persuade her to take a separation settlement.

The not proven verdict has the effect of exposing the fractures in an official identity, marked by a proper name, which sutures a subject to a social order. Eustace's assumption of a false name indicates as it occludes the ambiguity of the legal and social determinants of his identity; able neither to occupy his former place in the social order, nor to convince his new wife to take to the seas with him, he flees and spends most of the rest of the novel offstage, engaging in comically failed attempts to shore up a damaged masculinity. Technically married, but abandoned by her husband, Valeria's newly ambiguous identity, however, is represented as both authorizing and liberating. She determines she will review Eustace's case, taking on the assertive role of detective, precisely at the moment she was supposed to assume the role of wife, thereby becoming “a new woman, with a new mind” (182). The crisis in her social identity has paradoxically opened a strange space of freedom.

As she legitimates her activities through repeated avowals of her love for her husband and a desire to reconstitute his respectability and her own social position, Valeria's ambiguous status fosters a kind of sophisticated distance from the normative categories of class and gender. Not only does she go on to ask apparently feminine questions that “grave lawyers” might find naive, but in quick order she is deploying cosmetics and engaging in duplicitous behavior in order to garner information. As her vicar uncle disapprovingly reminds her that her endeavor constitutes a serious violation of gender norms, for she determines not only to read the report of her husband's trial, but to move freely through a variety of spaces of varying repute, meeting strangers and risking “whatever rough reception you may get in your travels” (121), Valeria herself repeatedly insists that her gender is an advantage: she is able, she says, “to ask all sorts of questions which grave lawyers might think it beneath their dignity to put” (121). Claiming femininity as an investigative tool, Valeria self-consciously marks appearances, behaviors, and dispositions as performances designed to provoke desired responses. For instance, this self-avowed Plain Jane asks a maid to help her rouge up as she prepares to solicit information from a dissipated libertine and later, she approaches her husband's defense lawyer alone, noting that while “my experience of this world is not a very large one. . . I have observed that, in nine cases out of ten, a man will make concessions to a woman if she approaches him by herself” (271). As the narrative progresses, Valeria will be associated with an array of other characters whose relations to femininity are varied and complex: her husband's first wife, Sara; his beloved Helena; and the legless and half-mad Miserrimus Dexter. Stripped of the clarifying and delimiting force of a civil identity, Valeria becomes not only wily, but fluid, challenging and exceeding the culturally-sanctioned limits for a middle-class woman.

Her liminal state with regard to the social and legal order plunges her into a series of encounters with characters whose identities seem likewise unstable or mysterious and with domestic spaces that range from peculiar to uncanny. Bourne Taylor points out that the novel is concerned with “marriage as a legitimation of feminine identity. . . founded on. . . masquerade” (ix); and in general here, law's capacity to legitimate identity is reinscribed as a somewhat creaky device designed to contain the excesses of subjectivity. Valeria's new husband is not who he seems to be and so it is unsurprising that Valeria initially encounters her mother-in-law “in the character of a stranger” (33), as the older woman seems to contrive to meet her without acknowledging her own identity. As Eustace remarks of his mother's behavior, “the women on the stage are not the only women who can act” (33) — an adage that will apply just as well to his new wife. Eustace's loss of an untainted civil identity produces a collapse into forms of weakness and passivity that drive him, literally, out of the narrative. Major Fitz-David's appearance is markedly enhanced by wigs and cosmetics. And not only does the bizarre character of Miserrimus Dexter assume the personae of Napoleon and Shakespeare, he also demonstrates for Valeria his cooking and needlework skills, while calling attention to his bracelets and pink silk outfit.

Dexter calls attention to the historically and socially contingent nature of gender norms; but the broader point may be the highlighting of civil identity, so inexorably gendered that Valeria's landlady can call her “nothing” and request that she leave the premises on suspicion that she is not a married woman, as a powerful fiction. That most of the characters Valeria meets in the course of her investigation exhibit such unstable and shifting identities points us to an excess, inscribed as a kind of otherness; this, the novel suggests, forms the surplus of civil identity. Far from being subject to surveillance or discipline, this surplus is what official identities cannot quite seem to regulate. It is also palpable, not only in Valeria's insistence on following a logic at odds with the modes of inference and deduction pursued by Eustace's lawyer, Playmore, but in her own repeated acknowledgements that she cannot, even in retrospect, account for her own thoughts and actions. “My thoughts. . . took a new direction, uninfluenced by any effort of my will,” she recounts at one point, underscoring the associative process by which her investigation is proceeding (304).

It is not only Valeria who is unsure of what she is doing. A truism of Collins scholarship that his novels exhibit a deep interest in unconscious states and an often-complex grasp of psychology. Here what is foregrounded is the intrication of the psychological and the juridical. The trial is a prime scene for the attempt to discern and reconstruct interiority. Like that of Madeleine Smith, Eustace Macallan's trial involves lawyers and jury in a process of attempting to infer mental states from the outside. Eustace's murderous intent toward his wife is evidenced through witness testimony, letters and Eustace's own diary — much as Madeleine's relied upon her letters and observations of her physical presence in the courtroom. As did the real-life trial of Smith, the fictional trial of Eustace Macallan will highlight the competing narratives of prosecution and defense, narrative itself a necessary means of constructing mental state from evidence and stipulating intention in order to argue for the probability of an action being performed. The inference of mental state from circumstantial evidence in order to prove mens rea was not anything new in either the real-life trial or the fictional one, certainly. In the Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Jeremy Bentham explains the common law requirements for proving guilt in criminal matters, noting that “to constitute a criminal act one or more are indispensably requisite: in most cases, the sentiment of consciousness, with relation to the existence of diverse exterior facts; in all cases, intentionality, viz. the intention of bringing about the obnoxious event, or at least of doing the physical act by which it is produced or endeavoured to be produced. . . . Unless stated by the individual himself in whose mind the act is considered as having place, the existence of any such psychological fact can only be a matter of inference” (qtd. in Welsh 38). Alexander Welsh, quoting this passage, highlights Bentham's use of the term “psychological,” and notes that “the process of ascertaining motive or intent from the outside held new implications for the way individuals were perceived and perceived themselves” (Welsh 38). Welsh argues convincingly that some of these implications were explored in realist novels.

But in Collins's novel, it is precisely this process, in so far as it is one of literally ascertaining, that is destabilized; the ability to determine psychological facts and their connections to actions from observation, from available evidence, is repeatedly shown to be by turns subjective and reliant upon conventions that appear themselves drawn from other narratives. As Valeria will indignantly remark after reading the summing-up of the judge in her husband's trial, “who is to decide what is a just inference? And what is circumstantial evidence but conjecture?” (181). If her constructions of the evidence, rooted in her own subjective dispositions and affects, are conjecture, those of the advocates in the courtroom are no less so, reliant as they appear to be on conventional assumptions about gender, marriage, and domestic life. In its continual challenge to efforts to infer motive or intent from behavior, expression, or action, The Law and the Lady implies questions about the construction of narratives, working to unsettle any assured way of connecting interior states to behaviors. If, after all, even our narrator, Valeria, is not sure why she has done what she's done, or when confronted with the results of her own actions, avows she has achieved them, as she says, “blindfold,” (396) then how can a court, or for that matter, any of us, presume to infer intentions from actions? Positing a challenge to Bentham's optimistic psychologism, the novel suggests a realm of interiority in excess of the links made by law.

III. Do You Like Reading Trials?

Unable to persuade her new husband to explain why he has married her under a false name, Valeria finds that his mother and his friend, Fitz-David, are also ominously silent on the subject of Eustace's past. At last she coerces from Fitz-David a strange bargain; he will leave her alone in the library of his home to hunt for the clue to Eustace's mystery. Warning her that “the discovery which follows will be a terrible one” (75), the Major leaves her alone to rummage among bookshelves and cabinets. As it is a room overstuffed with objects that allegorize romantic and domestic failure, Valeria moves around as if in a dreamscape, uncovering scrapbooks filled with strands of hair and love notes, photographs, and broken vases. The Major, who has been observing her through a crack in the door, casts a telling glance at a wall of bookcases, but it is not until the Major's protégé, a would-be opera singer, offers her assistance that the search is concluded: “I wonder whether that's the book you have been looking after? Are you like me? Do you like reading Trials?” (93).

Trials are already designated as something to be read, as texts. Like Fitz-David's protégé, Miss Hoighty (and like Collins himself), many Victorians liked reading these reports of famous trials, first recorded in daily newspapers and then often rushed into book form after the verdict. Echoing Tocqueville, Jonathan Grossman has argued that these reports “fostered a forensic subjectivity” and “created the. . . reader as an answerable member of a lawbound state” (33). Reading transcripts of trial proceedings, the Victorian reader learned the language of the courtroom, the roles played by prosecution and defense, the rudiments of the law of evidence. We might argue, then, that these central chapters of The Law and the Lady constitute a performance of forensic subjectivity, as Valeria narrates her reading of the report of her husband's trial, reordering the trial report into heuristic rubrics as she goes: “Did the Woman Die Poisoned? Who Poisoned Her? What Was the Motive?” Against the official narrative of the trial, Valeria produces her own counter-narrative, a production that entails re-analyzing testimony and evidence. As she tells Eustace early in the novel, “What the Law has failed to do for you, your Wife must do for you” (116). Law produced one narrative, the lady will produce one to compete with it, a companion book to the one represented by the trial report. Valeria's declaration will prove ironic, her quest legible as a refracting mirror for Collins's own practice. Valeria's recomposition of the Macallan trial involves remaking inferences, searching at the margins of what has been recorded, encountering as she goes that which the official story has misread, excluded, or smoothed over in the interests of a certain kind of clarity and coherence.

In the process, however, the idea of a normative forensic subjectivity, the training in argument and skills in the evaluation of evidence, is itself placed on trial. Rather than her consciousness of herself as a member of a lawbound state, Valeria's developing forensic subjectivity is marked by the intensification of an idiosyncratic apprehension of the facts and testimonies inscribed in the trial report; in some ways her near-merging with the report appears parodic of the very idea of a forensic subjectivity. At times, she seems to be reproducing what she reads for her own putative reader, using free indirect discourse to relay testimony and the contents of personal writing entered into evidence. At other times, however, she interjects her own editorial comments; and in yet other moments, her use of free indirect discourse to recount the scene in the courtroom positions her as a narratorial voice. Later she will admit that some of the details in her descriptions, particularly those of Miserrimus Dexter, a witness who will come to play a substantial role in her narrative, were added to her reproduction of the trial report from her own later impressions. In other words, the middle third of the novel, representing Valeria's reading of the report of her husband's trial, represents her subjective absorption of the text, a kind of identificatory reading more frequently associated with female readers of novels than with the kind of deliberative analysis we might associate with a forensic subjectivity.

The trial report is a whodunnit, “tremendously interesting,” as Miss Hoighty tells Valeria: “I believe he did it after all” (93). Without an unambiguous verdict to delimit officially the meaning of events and processes, the reader of the trial is free to engage imaginatively with the text in ways that underscore the potentially close similarities between forensic practice and what Catherine Gallagher called “fictionality.” Gallagher has pointed to the apparently paradoxical emergence of probability as the sign of the fictional, offering a redescription of the emergence of novelistic realism. In its association of narratives of the probable with trials, Collins's novel not only evokes the emergence of probability as part of a theory of evidence, but suggests the potential for collapse between discrete categories of reading practice. That is to say, the not proven verdict seems to expose a lack of distinction between the discourses of law and literature that most of the time law might prefer to obscure; with its development of competing narratives of interior life based on externally observable evidence and reliant upon there being commonly-held assumptions about probability, the adversarial trial and the novel share space, inviting similar kinds of techniques of reading and analysis. Not only does this suggest weaknesses in the state's apparatus for determining truth, weaknesses that were as good as admitted in the case of the not proven verdict, but it also suggests a broader set of questions concerning probability that bear on fiction as well. Valeria illustrates at least one possible consequence of the destabilization of the idea that there are any universally “irresistible” presumptions to be derived from a given group of circumstances: by the end of her reading, she is convinced that Sara Macallan was murdered by Helena Beauly, a former love interest of her husband's and a houseguest at the time of the poisoning. “It was, to my mind, the inevitable result of reading the evidence” (185), she declares, ironically echoing the judge whose assertions she scorns. What the novel suggests, then, is not only that there is no “inevitable” result of reading the evidence, but that this is the case in so far as evidence must be read, interpreted, assessed.

As was the case for the trial of Madeleine Smith, a substantial part of the prosecution's case against Eustace Macallan relies upon the inclusion in the evidence of various letters and his diary, found after his wife's death in his bedroom at their estate, Gleninch. But where D'Angelier's day book was cryptic and ultimately excluded from evidence, Eustace's diary is included — and it openly conveys his distaste for his wife and his despair that he will never be able to unite with his beloved Helena. Collins replicates and reverses the debate over the inclusion of D'Angelier's day book; after consideration of the legal question of whether the diary ought be produced, the judges decide “two to one” in favor of it. In its frank expression of emotion as well as its courtroom impact, however, the diary aligns itself more with Madeleine's letters than with Emile's excluded jottings. Eustace, too, is represented as a feminized figure: “deeply affected,” he cries out in protest over the possibility of the inclusion of his personal writings, “showing far less self-possession than the last prisoner tried in that Court — a woman. . .” (127). The scene of exposure functions at once to feminize Eustace, while challenging gendered stereotypes about affect and expression. In so doing, it also highlights the instability of determinations of mental states derived from what is externally observable. Indeed, the profusely detailed descriptions of his relation to his wife seem to support the prosecution's argument that he was motivated to be rid of a woman for whom he had no feelings and whose unattractiveness, especially compared to beautiful Helena, repelled him. The Lord Advocate characterizes Eustace's defense, that his wife accidentally overdosed, as without “the smallest fragment of probability” (184), while Eustace's mother, in words that echo one of the Smith trial judges, insists that he must have written these entries in low moments and “no just person judges hastily of a man in the rash words which may escape him in his moody and miserable moments” (160). Far from being transparent expressions of true feeling, the diary entries are as subject to interpretation as Madeleine's effusively passionate letters. Produced in a court of law, these private documents turn out unreadable as evidence of murder, but they do release a surplus of affect that cannot be contained within either the rules of legal procedure or the domestic sphere.

As it turns out, the diary is not so much an expression of mens rea, but the murder weapon itself. After reading it, Sara Macallan committed suicide — another echo of the Smith trial, where the matter in contention between Madeleine and her lover was not, as the prosecution and the newspapers indicated, the content of the letters, but their material existence. Through this novel, documents—books, diaries, letters—circulate, change hands, are lost and found, submitted into legal evidence, and even half-incinerated. The Trial Report itself has been used as a weapon during a domestic argument between Fitz-David and his protégé, Miss Doughty, causing it to end up behind a bookcase. Eustace's diary was surreptitiously removed from his room by Miserrimus Dexter, who hoped that he would win the love of Sara Macallan if she were to see how little her husband cared for her; for the fragile Sara, already in despair over her husband's dismissive behavior toward her, reading his diary is a psychic catastrophe. Sara Macallan's suicide letter is the ultimate piece of “excluded” evidence, stolen by Dexter and partially burned, and only discovered in the course of Valeria's investigation. Texts exist as objects, as items submitted in evidence, as weapons of intended or unintended harm. And it is their status as objects that, however momentarily, determines their meanings. Who is using the text and to what purpose? To the extent that they are such circulating objects, the attempt to fix their meanings with any finality, either in the law court or outside of it, is destined to be a vain enterprise.

The trial report itself is another such instance of a circulating text, the meaning of which is only apparently determinate. When Valeria initially turns to the Trial, she is gratified to discover

Valeria expresses her satisfaction that “at the outset that the Story of the Trial was, in every particular, fully and truly told,” but she soon encounters a substantial disparity between the trial report and the event itself. In the trial testimony, the articulate if quite unusual Dexter has come off, thinks Valeria, “like a true friend of my husband” (178). But her mother-in-law warns her from trying to talk to him, explaining to her that Dexter's trial testimony only seems reasonable because “the shorthand writers and reporters put his evidence into presentable language before they printed it” (199). The legal document, at first glance “the story of the trial, fully and truly told,” turns out to have been smoothed over in the interests of reason and clarity: Dexter's testimony, Mrs. Macallan senior tells Valeria, “mixed up sense and nonsense in the strangest confusion; he was called to order over and over again; he was even threatened with fine and imprisonment for contempt of Court” (199). But if it seems as if the report has successfully expelled all moments of irrationality and incoherence, the very fact that Valeria focuses in on Dexter and his testimony, however mistaken her initial impression, is another iteration of a pervasive theme in the novel. Identities and documents alike, while delimited by law, are not entirely governable by it.

A characteristic of many of Collins's novels is the proliferation of documents: letters, diaries, written testimonies, such as those gathered for their various purposes by Walter Hartright in The Woman in White and Frederick Blake in The Moonstone. As Nicholas Dames has argued, written texts often serve within these narratives as a form of prosthetic memory; without the supplement of writing, memory readily fails. Yet, if like these earlier fictions, The Law and the Lady is a narrative interspersed with various forms of writing, the function of this writing is here quite different: in this novel, writing conceals as much as it records. While documents are intended to create a transparent record and supplement the potential failing of memory, whether private, as in the case of a diary, or public, as in the official report of a celebrated trial, they invariably are shown to betray those aims in one way or another. The central document, the trial report, with its reconstruction of Miserrimus Dexter as a lucid, if theatrical, witness, draws this problematic out in slightly different way than do the intimate writings.

Trial reports, after all, circulate under the sign of the much-vaunted transparency of the law to its subjects;Footnote ²¹ they also constitute, as Collins himself knew well, a form of public legal memory. While law reports gnomically record the treatment of legal questions and serve an audience of lawyers and judges, trial reports constitute a form of history, written to the moment, documenting the trial, detailing its participants' actions and words, whether they pertain to technically legal questions or not, and permitting potentially evanescent events to enter into cultural memory. In emphasizing the way in which the trial report is constructed to elide or exclude circumstances deemed irrelevant or disruptive details, the novel points to this form of cultural memory-production as itself a form of institutionally-sanctioned forgetting, something akin to what Dames intends by “nostalgic remembrance,” a term he uses to describe the working of much Victorian fiction, whose narrative “machinery,” he argues, “operates to slowly and gradually erase” the proliferation of detail in which it commences in order to “replace that field with a diluted, stable and carefully-selected set of details” (10). We might contest Dames's argument that in narrative fiction this gesture of erasure goes unacknowledged; the exposure of this process of dilution often seems to be at the very heart of the narrative project in fiction. But this description of the machinery of proliferation followed on by dilution seems quite apt for trial processes, whereby a profusion of detail needs to be pared down through the jury's evaluation of the evidence. Collins's novel undoes this machinery as it operates in the trial report, exposing that claims to an “absolute correctness” can be produced only through exclusion and silencing.

IV. “Mr Dexter Lets Out the Secret”

Valeria's encounters with the “strange and startling creature,” Miserrimus Dexter, are thus encounters with what the official record has forgotten, disowned, or repressed. Born without legs, his head and torso mark him as “an unusually handsome, and an unusually well-made man,” whose blue eyes and delicate hands are like those “of a beautiful woman. . . he would have looked effeminate, but for the manly proportions of his throat and chest” (173). Indeterminately gendered, Dexter will also liken himself to a frog and be described by Fitz-David as “a mixture of the tiger and the monkey” (191). Blurring the lines of gender and ontology, Dexter also combines human and machine, ancient and modern. Meeting him in person for the first time, Valeria sees “the fantastic and frightful apparition, man and machinery blended in one — the new Centaur, half man, half chair” (206).

Even his home is marked with ambiguity and hybridity; located in an area outside London “which seemed to be neither town nor country” (201), it is a crumbling old manor house surrounded by a half-built suburb, an archaic domestic space turned museum of horrors, where photographs “representing the various forms of madness taken from life” are hung opposite a shelf lined “with casts (after death) of the heads of famous murderers.” Elsewhere in the mansion, Valeria will encounter a “frightful little skeleton of a woman” and a shirt apparently fabricated from the “Skin of a French Marquis” (247). Wunderkammer, or eerie archive, it forms a companion space to FitzDavid's drawing room in which Valeria initially obtained the trial report; both are dream-spaces where Valeria goes hunting for answers law didn't provide. Obviously, Dexter's collection of objects thematizes the macabre and the weird, while the Major's objects referred to affairs of the heart. Perhaps more importantly, the drawing room objects operate as an allegory, inviting Valeria and the reader alike to read in them an abstract tale of love's labors lost. But while in the aggregate, Dexter's objects seem to invoke madness and death, the objects themselves don't knit into a coherent narrative for either the reader or Valeria. Instead they evoke a series of isolated historical moments, hinting at forgotten suffering or barely-recalled histories of violence.

Dexter embodies a kind of temporal hybridity as well, something he underscores when later in the narrative, flaunting a pink silk jacket and jewelry, he informs Valeria that he has dressed for her visit “in the prettiest clothes I have,” going on to explain, “Except in this ignoble and material nineteenth century, men have always worn precious stuffs and beautiful colors as well as women. . . . Fifteen hundred years ago, the patricians of the classic times wore bracelets exactly like mine” (232). Dexter's embodied presence forms its own kind of strange archive. A volatile and fluid subject, he is given to flights of fancy where he sings songs, recites poetry, and imagines himself Napoleon and Shakespeare: “I play the parts of all the heroes that ever lived. I feel their characters. I merge myself in their individualities” (210). Appearing at one moment aggressive and frightening, at another crumbling before his fireplace and crying for pity, Dexter horrifies and repels Valeria at first, but ultimately exercises a kind of fascination upon her which she will represent as sympathy, but which also has erotic overtones, which become explicit in a passage where he makes a pass at her.

His figurative role in the text is made clear. When her mother -in-law asserts her opinion of his madness, Valeria disagrees: “It seems to me that he openly expresses. . . thoughts and feelings which most of us are ashamed of as weaknesses, and which we keep to ourselves accordingly. . . Mr. Dexter lets out the secret. . . and if that is madness he certainly is mad” (221). Dexter is indeed a repository of secrets, only some of which he yields up willingly. As Jenny Bourne Taylor has pointed out, Miserrimus Dexter “overturns all rational and coherent ways of making sense of him and thus acts out the investigation of the boundaries of consciousness at work in the novel” (“Introduction” xxii). While rationality and logic are identified very overtly with law and legal proceedings, Dexter literally figures that which law excludes. But all exclusion is complex. Not incidentally has his presence been rewritten in the report of the trial, after all; and his location in a gothic mansion at the edges of the metropolis might initially suggest that he is to be understood as in some sense outside of law, the locus of a truth that is resolutely a-legal. But his presence in the courtroom, where his theatrical self-exposure and mad testimony worked to conceal his knowledge of how Sara Macallan died as well as his own role in that event, complicates that reading, positioning him in the heart of law's procedures and, I want to argue, integral to them. Jacobson notes that, on the witness stand, Dexter is represented as a competitor to law (308n.27): Valeria relays that “the cross-examination resolved itself. . . into a mental trial of strength between the witness and the Lord Advocate; the struggle terminating. . . in favor of the witness” (178). Dexter not only challenges the project of making sense of him; he also challenges legal sense-making that is so centrally thematized in the novel, articulating the link between the sense-making practices of law and the complexities of subjectivity. He figures “an unstable, disrupting, indeterminate, yet constitutive relation — the relation between that which is imagined as law and that which is withheld or masked as something other than law in order to produce that imagining” (Umphrey et. al. 2). But this something other than law is, like all repressed material, always threatening to return, with increasing force and autonomy, to disrupt the clear and coherent image of rationality that law has labored to produce of itself.

Thus, the redaction of Dexter's appearance and testimony in the trial report itself plays a central role in the project of imagining law for its subjects. Paradoxically, Valeria's appeal to Dexter in her efforts to exonerate her husband of murder reaffirms her attachment to law, underscoring her hopes of legitimizing her own identity as well as that of her husband, in other words, of silencing precisely that alterity he represents and constituting a domestic space under the sign of regulated civil identity. And so it will be no surprise that he must be expelled by the end of the text, incarcerated in a madhouse where he dies. Dexter is associated with the dark side of the putatively well-regulated domestic space; it will turn out that not only has he been the catalyst for Sara Macallan's suicide but that he had been, throughout the trial, in possession of the key piece of exonerating evidence, her suicide note, which he later attempted to burn. As Jacobson has argued, this quite literally is an example of Freud's uncanny, the unfamiliar that is only so because it is so deeply heimlich, homely, familiar, private. But it is not solely a case of the return of repressed domestic secrets or desires. The link between the law and the domestic is articulated here, with unsettling effect. We might put it this way: while it might be tempting to envision the law and the domestic as two distinct realms, with the law intervening in the latter only when drawn there by, in this case, the suspicion of criminal activity, it is in fact the case that the law determines and constitutes the classic liberal privileges of the realm of civil privacy, naming those privileges and stabilizing them through the regulation of identity, a central dimension of which is marital status. But that stable identity, that identity that is simultaneously before the law and guaranteed by it, can only function smoothly, can only assert its own freedom from the juridical, to the extent that law and the spheres it names can exclude and silence that which is named as other than law, other than normative domesticity.

When the “obstinate” Valeria first visits Dexter's home, she finds her perception immediately challenged; in “obscure and shadowy light,” she cannot discern the subjects of the paintings on the walls; Valeria recounts entering a large room in which she “saw (or fancied I saw in the obscurity). . . a high chair on wheels. . . carrying a shadowy figure with flowing hair. . . working the machinery that propelled the chair at the utmost rate of speed” (206). Like the collection of macabre objects that surrounds him, Dexter is difficult to identify, except to note that he moves with a raging autonomy and in a way that is, to Valeria's first glance, eerily unfamiliar. Questing after clarity with regard to an inconclusive legal procedure, our heroine only finds herself in a Gothic space, where the demarcation between perception and imagination are blurred, where this “shadowy figure” works his machinery. Dexter's tenebrous relation to temporality and history is hinted at already; in a mansion that, Valeria learns, he purchased on a whim and to which he has, as her mother-in-law notes, “no old family associations,” (202) he combines the feudal with the technological, the market with the antique. Possessor of the fragments of half-forgotten, half-denied histories, imaginatively possessed by historical figures while wildly careering through the grand hall of a crumbling manor house, Dexter articulates the strange connections between the domestic unconscious and the legal one.

Appropriately enough, then, Dexter controls much of the plot machinery. It is his desire for Sara Macallan that precipitates her demise by exposing to her Eustace's equally undisciplined desires. His influence on the investigation of her death and his accompanying performance in the trial court suggest that it was he who managed the trial, both by withholding key evidence and offering that feisty testimony which, if not precisely perjury, left a great deal to the side. The uncanny figure of a half-man, half-machine, half-animal — and not the rules of legal procedure or the story-making skills of prestigious lawyers — controlled the trial's outcome. Dexter is himself a storyteller, continually spinning tales designed to mislead. But Valeria will, at least momentarily, wrest control of the story back from him. During her final visit to his strange manor house, a weakened Dexter begins to tell a story in the style of a fifteenth-century romance; Valeria initially perceives that his goal is to once again to misdirect her, answering her objections to his latest theory of the crime. But as he begins his story, she realizes that “Dexter's memory of the true events might show itself reflected in the circumstances of the fiction” (337). Dexter becomes progressively confused; memory trumps invention and his fragmented, incoherent discourse reveals to Valeria information that leads her to understand his role in the death of the first Mrs. Macallan.

That he is the only one who has the key piece of information and that the coherence of his fictions is undone by the insistence of memory differentiates him from the law while at the same time, associating him with it; that is, the encounter with Dexter performatively unravels that relation between law and its others. Dexter's pastiche of a fifteenth-century romance only serves to highlight the equally-constructed nature of apparently more plausible narratives. It is the incoherent fragments of discourse that he produces that reveal to Valeria his role in the events. And if Valeria is by now a much more astute reader than she was at the start of her quest, it is because she has learned to locate the irrationalities in the form of narratives that pretend to coherence, to find the gaps in well-linked chains of circumstance.

V. The Insufficiency of Lawful Evidence: From Collins to Madeleine Smith

Collins, as Kent argued, advances a subjectivist notion of probability; the likelihood of a given narrative is contingent upon those who hear or read it, presenting a challenge not only to the courts' ability to determine truth, but to the broader assumption of a socially-shared reality. Calling attention to a kind of merge between legal and literary narratives, the novel questions those criteria of probability at another level, suggesting ways in which they have come to draw off of each other in a feedback loop. As Madeleine Smith's story will resemble the sensation fictions that become so prominent in the sixties, Collins's novel of the seventies will take on the sensational trials that he, and other sensation novelists, drew from to initiate the genre. There is a self-consciousness here about the reliance of literature on legal events, but that self-consciousness is pressed into the service of an exploration of the operation of forms of exclusion that sustain meaning in both legal and literary discourses. Feeding each other, both tend to seek a kind of verdict, the expulsion of ambiguity that permits the story to end.

The Law and the Lady permits no such finality. When the half-burnt pieces of Sara Macallan's final letter are excavated from the dustheap at the Scottish estate, they are painstakingly and elaborately reconstituted with the assistance of a young chemist “who had distinguished himself. . . in a recent case of forgery” (380). But upon reading Sara Macallan's recounting from beyond the grave of her final days, Valeria has reason to wish that it had remained with the other domestic refuse from her husband's earlier life: She “[curses] the day which had disinterred the fragments of [the letter] from their foul tomb” (396). Valeria's quest produces double-edged results: on the one hand, it reveals information that leads to Eustace's exoneration; but on the other, the revelation that Sara Macallan killed herself in despair over her husband's behavior toward her effectively affirms the Scottish verdict. In so far as that affirmation seems to entail a displacement from the juridical to the moral sphere, it evokes in a rich and curious way Baron Hume's “insufficiency of lawful evidence,” simultaneously acknowledging the efficacy of the law and discerning the arena of psychic interiority where both modern legality and normative domesticity expose their limits.

Writing about twentieth-century trials and literature, Felman claims that “the purpose of the literary text is to wrench apart what was precisely covered over. . . by the legal trial. . . . the literary text enacts. . . a repetition of the story that the court has missed or misunderstood or that the trial could not tell” (95). In exploring the workings of the not proven verdict, The Law and the Lady uncovers the anxieties that verdict, and what it says about juridical evidence, was able to silence. In a sense, then, we can read Valeria's apperception about Dexter's storytelling as an abyssal acknowledgement of the relation to the novel itself to the real-life trial: the “true events show [themselves] reflected in the circumstances of the fiction” (337). But the conclusion of the novel seems to emphasize another point, this time about novels, by providing the reader with an anatomical view of the conventional ending. Valeria, by now reconciled with her wayward husband and a new mother, concludes her narrative from a position of conventional domesticity. She offers Eustace a choice about whether to read his first wife's letter. Peculiarly, Valeria tucks the letter under the hand of her sleeping newborn and, although Eustace has been told the letter is potentially the means of his full exoneration, encourages him not to read it — out of consideration for his dead wife's memory. “With a heavy sigh, he lays the child's hand back again on the sealed letter, and by that one little action, says (as if in words) to his son: ‘I leave it to You!’” (413). Thus the letter is once more encrypted in the heart of the domestic, this time left as a legacy for the next generation, a signifier of a kind of guilt that law does not redress and with it, the constitutive excess produced by the law's delineation of civil identity.

The ending of novel ironizes Baron Hume's explanation of the not proven verdict. There is indeed an insufficiency of lawful evidence to convict Eustace of murder. The conclusion of The Law and the Lady, then, reiterates the not proven verdict in the Smith trial — after all, Eustace will not seek official exoneration and the Scottish verdict in his case will stand as a legacy to his heirs. The putative opposition between English law, as a locus of transparency and determinacy, and Scots law as “barbaric” is collapsed. By deterritorializing the not proven verdict, the novel also reframes the epistemological questions at stake. What constitutes evidence? And more importantly, what is a given piece of evidence evidencing? The letter, after all, simultaneously functions to acquit Eustace of legal guilt while casting a shadow on him as a moral person. Evidence is what is interpreted and in closing Valeria, still in defense lawyer mode, begs her audience for a generous reading of the evidence for her husband: “Please think kindly of Eustace, for my sake” (Collins 413). If in Madeleine Smith's case what was uncovered was papered over as quickly as possible, the novel exposes this process of covering over, exposing in the process the questions of identity and affect that the verdict foreclosed interrogating. The novel recalibrates the not proven verdict; if in the real-life trial, it functioned as a convenient form of finality that protected the community as much as it did the defendant, in the novel it functions as a both a sign of ambiguity that signals the limits not only of legal narratives but of literary ones, suggesting that, at least in certain cases, the two have a shared participation in the enabling exclusions and repressions that characterize the bourgeois interior.