Her chin lifted a little higher.
“Master Cassian. She said I was confusing the child by telling him his mother was not a wicked woman, and that she still loved him.”
In the dock Alexandra was so still it seemed she could not even be breathing. Her eyes never left Miss Buchan's face and she barely blinked.
“Is that all?” Rathbone asked.
Miss Buchan took a deep breath, her thin chest rising and felling. “No-she also said I followed the boy around too much, not leaving him alone.”
“Did you follow the boy around, Miss Buchan?”
She hesitated only a moment. “Yes.”
“Why?” He kept his voice level, as if the question were not especially important.
“To do what I could to prevent him being abused anymore.”
“Abused? Was someone mistreating him? In what way?”
“I believe the word is sodomy, Mr. Rathbone,” she said with only the slightest tremor.
There was a gasp in the court as hundreds of throats drew in breath.
Alexandra covered her face with her hands.
The jury froze in their seats, eyes wide, faces aghast.
In the front row of the gallery Randolph Carlyon sat immobile as stone. Felicia's veiled head jerked up and her knuckles were white on the rail in front of her. Edith, now sitting beside mem, looked as if she had been struck.
Even the judge stiffened and turned to look up at Alexandra. Lovat-Smith stared at Rathbone, his face slack with amazement.
Rathbone waited several seconds before he spoke.
“Someone in the house was sodomizing the child?” He said it very quietly, but the peculiar quality of his voice and his exquisite diction made every word audible even at the very back of the gallery.
“Yes,” Miss Buchan answered, looking at no one but him.
“How do you know that, Miss Buchan? Did you see it happen?”
“I did not see it this time-but I have in the past, when Thaddeus Carlyon himself was a child,” she said. “And I knew the signs. I knew the look in a child's face, the sly pleasure, the fear mixed with exultancy, the flirting and the shame, the self-possession one minute, then the terror of losing his mother's love if she knew, the hatred of having to keep it a secret, and the pride of having a secret-and then crying in the night, and not being able to tell anyone why- and the total and overwhelming loneliness…”
Alexandra had lifted her face. She looked ashen, her body rigid with anguish.
The jury sat immobile, eyes horrified, skin suddenly pale.
The judge looked at Lovat-Smith, but forpnce he did not exercise his right to object to the vividness of her evidence, unsupported by any provable fact. His dark face looked blurred with shock.
“Miss Buchan,” Rathbone continued softly. “You seem to have a vivid appreciation of what it is like. How is that?”
“Because I saw it in Thaddeus-General Carlyon-when he was a child. His father abused him.”
There was such a gasp of horror around the room, a clamor of voices in amazement and protest, that she was obliged to stop.
In the gallery newspaper runners tripped over legs and caught their feet in onlookers' skirts as they scrambled to get out and seize a hansom to report the incredible news.
“Order!” the judge commanded, banging his gavel violently on his bench. “Order! Or I shall clear the court!”
Very slowly the room subsided. The jury had all turned to look at Randolph. Now again they faced Miss Buchan.
“That is a desperately serious thing to charge, Miss Buchan,” Rathbone said quietly. “You must be very certain that what you say is true?”
“Of course I am.” She answered him with the first and only trace of bitterness in her voice. “I have served the Carlyon family since I was twenty-four, when I came to look after Master Thaddeus. That is over forty years. There is nowhere else I can go now-and they will hardly give me a roof over my head in my old age after this. Does anyone imagine I do it lightly?”
Rathbone glanced for only a second at the jury's faces, and saw there the conflict of horror, disgust, anger, pity, and confusion that he had expected. She was a woman caught between betraying her employers, with its irreparable consequences to her, or betraying her conscience, and a child who had no one else to speak for him. The jurors were of a servant-keeping class, or they would not be jurors. Yet few of them were of position sufficient to have governesses. They were torn in loyalties, social ambition, and tearing pity.
“I know that, Miss Buchan,” Rathbone said with a ghost of a smile. “I want to be sure that the court appreciates it also. Please continue. You were aware of the sodomy committed by Colonel Randolph Carlyon upon his son, Thaddeus. You saw the same signs of abuse in young Cassian Carlyon, and you were afraid for him. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And did you know who had been abusing him? Please be careful to be precise, Miss Buchan. I do mean
“I am aware of that, sir,” she said stiffly. “No, I did not know. But since he normally lived at his own home, not in Carlyon House, I supposed that it was his father, Thaddeus, perpetuating on his son what he himself endured as a child. And I assumed that that was what Alexandra Carlyon discovered, and why she did what she did. No one told me so.”
“And that abuse ceased after the general's death? Then why did you think it necessary to protect him still?”
“I saw the relationship between him and his grandfather, the looks, the touching, the shame and the excitement. It was exactly the same as before-in the past. I was afraid it was happening again.”
There was utter silence hi the room. One could almost hear the creak of corsets as women breathed.
“I see,” Rathbone said quietly. “So you did your best to protect the boy. Why did you not tell someone? That would seem to be a far more effective solution.”
A smile of derision crossed her face and vanished.
“And who would believe me?” For an instant her eyes moved up to the gallery and the motionless forms of Felicia and Randolph, then she looked back at Rathbone. “I'm a domestic servant, accusing a famous and respected gentleman of one of the most vile of crimes. I would be thrown out, and then I wouldn't be able to do anything at all.”
“What about Mrs. Felicia Carlyon, the boy's grandmother?” he pressed, but his voice was gentle. “Wouldn't she have to have some idea? Could you not have told her?”
“You are naive, Mr. Rathbone,” she said wearily. “If she had no idea, she would be furious, and throw me out instantly-and see to it I starved. She couldn't afford to have me find employment ever again, in case I repeated the charge to her social equals, even to friends. And if she knew herself-then she had decided not to expose it and ruin the family with the shame of it. She'd not allow me to. If she had to live with that, then she'd do everything in her power to keep what she had paid such a price to preserve.”
“I see.” Rathbone glanced at the jury, many of them craning up at the gallery, faces dark with disgust, then at Lovat-Smith, now sitting upright and silent, deep in concentration. “So you stayed in Carlyon House,” Rathbone continued, “saying nothing, but doing what you could for the child. I think we may all understand your position-and admire you for having the courage to come forward now. Thank you, Miss Buchan.”
Lovat-Smith rose to his feet, looking profoundly unhappy.
“Miss Buchan, I regret this,” he said with such sincerity it was palpable. “But I must press you a little more harshly than my learned friend has. The accusation you make is abominable. It cannot be allowed to stand without challenge. It will ruin the lives of an entire family.” He inclined his head towards the gallery, where now there was the occasional murmur of anger. “A family known and admired in this city, a family which has dedicated itself to the service of the Queen and her subjects, not only here but in the farthest parts of the Empire as well.”
Miss Buchan said nothing, but faced him, her thin body erect, hands folded. She looked fragile, and suddenly
