'In Seven Dials? Abaht twen'y-odd, as I knows of. They went on ter St. Giles 'Thank you, Mrs. Hopgood,' Rathbone interrupted. 'Please tell us only your own experience.”
Goode rose again. 'All we have heard so far is hearsay, my lord. Mrs.
Hopgood has not been a victim herself, and she has not mentioned Mr.
Rhys Duff. I have been extraordinarily patient, as was your lordship.
All this is tragic, and abhorrent, but completely irrelevant.”
'It is not irrelevant, my lord,' Rathbone argued. 'The prosecution's case is that Rhys Duff went to the area of St. Giles to use prostitutes there, and that his father followed him, chastised him for his behaviour, and in the resulting quarrel, Rhys killed his father, and was severely injured himself. Therefore what happened to these women is fundamental to the case.”
'I have not claimed that these unfortunate women were raped, my lord,”
Goode contradicted. 'But if they were, then that only adds to the brutality of the accused's conduct, and the validity of the motive. No wonder his father charged him with grievous sin, and would have chastened him severely, possibly even threatened to turn him over to the law.”
Rathbone swung around to face him. 'You have proved only that Rhys used a prostitute in the area of St. Giles. You have not proved violence of any sort against any women, in St. Giles, or in Seven Dials!”
'Gentlemen!' the judge said sharply. 'Sir Oliver, if you are determined to prove this issue, then you had better be absolutely certain you are aiding your client's cause, and not further condemning him, but if you are satisfied, then prove your point. Proceed with dispatch.”
'Thank you, my lord.' He dismissed Vida Hopgood, and one by one called half a dozen of the women of St. Giles whom Monk had found. He began with the earliest and least severely injured. The court sat in uncomfortable near- silence and listened to their pathetic tales of poverty, illness, desperation, journeys out on to the streets to pick up a few pence by selling their bodies, and the cheating, then the violence which had followed.
Rathbone loathed doing it. The women were grey-faced, almost inarticulate with fear, and in some cases also shame. They despised themselves for what they did, but need drove them. They hated standing in this handsome courtroom facing exquisitely gowned and wigged lawyers, the judge in his scarlet robes, and having to tell of their need, their humiliation and their pain.
Rathbone glanced at the jurors' faces and read a sense of different emotions in them. He watched how much their imaginations conceived of the lives that were being described. How many of them, if any, had used such women themselves? What did they feel now? Shame, anger, pity or revulsion? More than half of them looked up to the dock at Rhys whose face was twisted with emotion, but what aroused his anger it was impossible to say, or the revulsion which was so plain in his features.
Rathbone looked also at Sylvestra Duff and saw her lips puckered with horror as a world opened up in front of her beyond anything she had imagined, women whose lives were so utterly unlike her own they could have belonged to a different species. And yet they lived only a few miles away, in the same city. And her son had used them, could even, for all she knew, have begotten a child upon them.
Beside her Fidelis Kynaston looked pale, but less shocked. There was in her already a knowledge of pain, of the darker side of the world and those who lived in it. This was only a restatement of things she already knew.
On her other side, Eglantyne Wade was motionless as wave after wave of misery passed over her, things she had never imagined were rehearsed before her in sickening detail.
The following day the stories became more violent. The witnesses still carried the marks of beatings on their blackened and swollen faces, showed their broken teeth.
Ebenezer Goode hesitated before questioning each one. None of them recognised their assailants. Every brutal act only added to his case.
Why should he challenge any of it? To demonstrate that the women were prostitutes anyway was unnecessary. There was not a man or woman in the room who did not know it, and feel their own emotions regarding their trade and its place in society, or in their own personal lives. It was a subject of emotion rather than reason anyway. Words were only a froth on the surface of the deep tide of feeling.
A particular wave of revulsion and anger swelled when the thirteen-year-old Lily Barker testified, still nursing her dislocated shoulder. Haltingly she told Rathbone how both she and her sister had been beaten and kicked. She repeated the grunted words of abuse she had heard, and how she had tried to crawl away and hide in the dark.
Fidelis Kynaston looked so ashen Rathbone thought she suffered more in hearing it than Sylvestra beside her.
The judge leaned forward, his own face tight with distress.
'Have you not established all you need, Sir Oliver? Surely no more can be necessary. This is a horrifying matter of escalating violence and brutality. What more do you require to show us? Make your point!”
'I have one more victim of rape, my lord. This one was in St.
Giles.”
'Very well. I realise you need to establish that your assailants have moved into the relevant area. But make it brief.”
'My lord.' Rathbone called the woman who had been raped and beaten on the night before Christmas Eve. Her face was bruised purple and swollen. She had difficulty speaking through her broken teeth. Slowly, her eyes closed as she refused to look at the people who were watching her as she rehearsed her terror and pain and humiliation. She began to describe being accosted by three men, how one of them had taken hold of her, how all three had laughed, then one had thrown her to the ground.
In the dock Rhys was grey-skinned, his eyes so hollow one could almost visualise the skull beneath the flesh. He leaned forward over the rail, his splinted hands stiff, shivering.
The woman described how she had been taunted by the men, called names.
One of them had kicked her, told her she was filth, should be got rid of, the human race cleansed of her sort.
In the dock Rhys started to bang his hands up and down on the railing.
One of the warders made a move to stop him, but the muscles of his body were knotted so hard he did not succeed. His face was a mask of pain.
No one else moved.
The woman in the witness stand went on speaking, slowly, each word forced between her lips. She told how they had knocked her over till she was crouching on the cobbles.
'They were 'and, an' wet,' she said huskily. 'Then one of'em leaned on top o' me. 'E were 'cavy, and 'e smelled o' sum mink funny, sort o' sharp. One o' the others forced me knees up and tore me dress.
Then I felt 'im come in terme It was like I were tore inside. It 'urt sum mink terrible. I…”
She stopped, her eyes wide with horror as Rhys wrenched himself from the warders, his mouth gaping, his throat tortured with the sound it could not make, as if inside himself he screamed again and again.
A warder made a lunge after him and caught one arm. Rhys lashed at him, his face a paroxysm of terror and loathing. The other warder made a grab and missed. Rhys overbalanced, hysterical with fear, teetered for a moment on the high railing, then swivelled and fell over the edge.
A woman shrieked.
The jurors rose to their feet.
Sylvestra cried out his name and Fidelis clasped her arms around her.
Rhys landed with a sickening crash and lay still.
Hester was the first to move. She rose from her seat in the back of the gallery, on the edge of the row where she could be reached were she needed, and ran forward, falling on her knees beside him.
Then suddenly there was commotion everywhere. People were crying out, jostling one another. Others had been hurt, two of them badly. Press reporters were scrambling to force their way out to pass on the news.
Ushers were trying helplessly to restore some form of order. The judge was banging his gavel. Someone was shouting for a doctor for a woman whose leg had been broken by an overturned bench.
Rathbone swung around to make his way towards where Rhys was lying.
Where was Corriden Wade? Had he been seized to tend to the woman?
Rathbone did not even know if Rhys was still alive or not. With the height of the fall he could easily be dead. It is not difficult to break a neck. The thought crossed his mind that perhaps it would be a merciful escape from a
