worked even with Pitt! He melted like a complete fool! She had watched it happen in her own parlor! Eugenie, in her own simpering, self-deprecating, flattering way, was socially quite as clever as Emily! If she had started from as good a family and had been as pretty as Emily, perhaps she too might have married a title.
What about Pitt? The thought sent a chill throughout her body. Would Pitt have preferred someone a little softer, a little subtler at playing games; someone who would remain at least partly a mystery to him, demanding nothing of his emotions but patience? Would he have been happier with someone who left him at heart utterly alone, who never really hurt him because she was never close enough, who never questioned his values or destroyed his self-esteem by being right when he was wrong and letting him know it?
Surely to suspect Pitt of wanting such a woman was the most supreme insult of all. It assumed he was an emotional child, unable to stand the truth. But we are all children at times, and we all need dreams-even foolish ones.
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Perhaps she would be wiser if she bit her tongue a little more often, let truth-or her understanding of the truth-wait its time. There was kindness to consider-as well as devotion to honesty.
The court was now full. In fact, when she turned around there were people being refused entrance. Curious faces crowded at the doorways, hoping for a glimpse of the prisoner, the man who had murdered an aristocrat's son and stuffed his naked body down a manhole to the sewers!
The proceedings began. The clerk, somber in old black, wearing a gold pince-nez on a ribbon around his neck, called for attention in the matter of the Crown versus Maurice Jerome. The judge, his face like a ripe plum beneath his heavy, horsehair wig, puffed out his cheeks and sighed. He looked as if he had dined too well the evening before. Charlotte could imagine him in a velvet jacket, with crumbs on his waistcoat, wiping away the last remnants of the Stilton and upending the port wine. The fire would be climbing the chimney and the butler standing by to light his cigar.
Before the end of the week, he would probably put on the black three-cornered cap and sentence Maurice Jerome to be hanged by the neck until he was dead.
She shivered and turned to look for the first time at the man standing in the dock. She was startled-unpleasantly so. She realized what a precise mental picture she had built of him, not so much of his features, but of the sense of him, the feeling she would have on seeing his face.
And the picture vanished. He was larger than her pity had allowed; his eyes were cleverer. If there was fear in him, it was masked by his contempt for everyone around him. There were ways in which he was superior-he could speak Latin and considerable Greek; he had read about the arts and the cultures of ancient peoples, and this rabble below him had not. They were here to indulge a vulgar curiosity; he was here by force, and he would endure it because he had no choice. But he would not descend to be part of the emotional tide. He despised the vulgarity, and in his slightly flared nostrils, his pursed mouth that destroyed any lines of softness or sensitivity, in the slight movement of his shoulders that prevented him from touch-
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ing the constables at either side, he silently made it understood.
Charlotte had begun with sympathy for him, thinking she could understand, at least in part, how he could have come to such a depth of passion and despair-if he was guilty. And surely he was deserving of every compassion and effort at justice if he was innocent?
And yet looking at him, real and alive, only yards away, she could not like him. The warmth faded and she was left with discomfort. She must begin all over again with her feelings, build them for an entirely different person from the one her mind had created.
The trial had begun. The sewer cleaner was the first witness. He was small, narrow as a boy, and he blinked, unaccustomed to the light. The counsel for the prosecution was a Mr. Bartholomew Land. He dealt with the man quickly and straightforwardly, drawing from him the very simple story of his work and his discovery of the corpse, the body surprisingly unmarked by injury or attacks by rats-and the fact that, remarkably, it had kept none of its clothes, not even boots. Of course he had called the police immediately, and certain!? not, me lud, he had removed nothing whatsoever-he was not a thief! The suggestion was an insult.
Counsel for the defense, Mr. Cameron Giles, found nothing to contest, and the witness was duly
