It all happened so quickly. In moments everything that had been so right went wrong. I remember sinking to my knees in the sand, putting my hands under my man’s head, trying to lift his face to mine with some misguided thought of breathing life back into his lifeless mouth.
A group rapidly surrounded us, silent, shocked. “She shot him,” I heard someone say. “She shot the woman, then she shot him And isn’t she Jerusha? And isn’t he Walter Matthews? Iron Man Matthews? Oh my God,” I heard them saying, the words sounding as though they were in capital letters. And then, “Call the gendarmes immediately,” they cried.
Police sirens wailed as half a dozen cars, blue lights flashing, screeched onto the beach. What seemed like a dozen uniformed men spilled out. Two of them pried me off my dead lover. Others checked the body of the woman I had shot.
“She shot him,” I heard people saying. “But she shot the woman first. He’d gone to help her.” Jerusha was jealous. He’d been having an affair; the woman was known in the local cafés and bars and she’d told everybody about her famous lover. Nobody believed her, until now. Because how could Jerusha’s lover want another woman? They had mocked the girl, at first. But now they saw it was true, and I had taken my revenge, the way all betrayed women did. I was, they said, a classic case.
I heard it all through a haze of grief as the gendarmes took me, unhandcuffed as a tribute to my fame and for the benefit of the photographers that clamored around as they walked me from the beach to the police car, pushing my head down to get me into the backseat, a cop sitting to either side, both smiling for those same photographers. That photograph went around the world. It was my epitaph.
I told them I was three months pregnant and was afraid I’d lose my baby, so they took me back to the Villa Romantica and summoned a doctor. It was thought the hospital was too public a place and privacy was essential if the case was not to be tainted. For when I went to court, they meant. Accused of two murders.
I was healthy. I was famous. I wasn’t even a widow because we had not been married, though I’d meant to propose to him when I told him about our happy event, that was no longer so happy. I had killed my baby’s father. I had no right to that baby. Iron Man Matthews had given me his heart and I had taken his life.
How does one live with such a burden on one’s soul? How do you come to terms with the death of the man you loved, when you were the cause of his death? Of course, there was no way.
It was Rex, my ex-lover, my honorable man, who came to my aid, who mapped out my defense and exactly why I would never have shot any man, especially one I loved. I was not just “any woman,” I remember him telling the courts. I was Jerusha. It would be impossible for any man to cheat on me. And, he added, he should know.
Stunned, the court took him at his word. They respected his courage in standing up in court, a man like him, with his background, for a woman like me, with my background. Jerusha was already a household word, and now he became one.
After it was over, I thanked him, of course, briefly, in private, in a small bleak room behind the court that smelled of stale coffee and cigarettes. The walls were institutional green, the overhead lighting harsh and unflattering, but still Rex told me I was beautiful.
“I’ll never forget,” he said as he kissed me first on one cheek, then the other, and then a third time, as we did in the South of France.
“That one is for memory,” he said, smiling as he departed.
I shall always love him for that.
In a quick decision, a judge found me guilty of the murder of the unknown woman and of my lover. But, this was France and this was a crime passionelle, a “love crime,” where it is believed the balance of one’s mind is disturbed. Add to that, not only was my lover said to have been cheating on me, I was also carrying his child.
They were lenient. I would not die for my crime. I would not even go to jail. I would be taken to some safe place in the country where I would bear my baby in secret. It would then be taken from me and given to the sorrowing members of the father’s family, to raise, in England. I would never be allowed to see my child again.
It was the cruelest punishment they could ever have thought of. No woman could ever have done this to me. This was men’s justice.
She was beautiful, my tiny baby. Well, at least I thought so, but then doesn’t every woman on first seeing her newborn, exclaim how beautiful she is? I named her for her beauty. Jolie. French for pretty. She was always, forever after to be known as Jolly. And I never did see her again.