“Six or seven years is quite close enough.” Rathbone smiled, trying to reassure her. “Approximately how often do you see him?” Her face clouded and he hastened to help. “Every day? Or once a week, perhaps? Or once a month?”
“ 'E comes and goes,” she said guardedly. “Sometimes le's around fer two or free days, then 'e'll be gorn again. Mebbe gorn for weeks, mebbe back sooner. I'm reg'lar.”
“I see. But over the years, you have come to know him well?”
“Yer could say-”
“Is he your lover, Miss Herries?”
Her eyes slid to Caleb, then away again quickly.
There was no readable expression in his face. A juror frowned. Someone in the crowd sniggered.
“May I rephrase the question?” Rathbone offered. “Are you his woman?”
Caleb grinned, his green eyes bright. It was impossible to read his thoughts, or even whether his tense, almost wolfish expression was amusement or unworded threat.
Selina's chin came up a fraction. She avoided meeting the glance of anyone in the crowd beyond Rathbone.
“Yeah, I am.”
“Thank you for your candor, ma'am. I think we may take it that you do know him as well as anyone may be said to?”
“I s'pose.” She remained careful.
There was almost silence in the room, but one or two people stirred. This was of little interest. She was acknowledging the obvious.
Rathbone was aware of it. She was his final witness, and his last chance.
But for all her fear of the court, she would not willingly betray Caleb.
Not only were her emotions involved, and whatever memories she might have of moments of intimacy, but if he were to be found not guilty, then his vengeance would be terrible. Added to that, she lived on the Isle of Dogs; it was her home and they were her people. They would not look with tolerance on a woman who sold out her man, whether for gain or from fear for herself. Whatever price the law exacted for loyalty, the punishment for disloyalty must be worse. It was a matter of survival.
“Have you met his brother Angus as well?” Rathbone asked, his eyebrows raised.
She stared at him as she would a snake.
“Yeah.” It was a qualified agreement, made reluctantly. There was warning in her voice that she would go little further.
Rathbone smiled. “Mr. Arbuthnot has testified that you called at his place of business and saw him on the day of his disappearance. Is he correct?”
Her face tightened with anger. There was no way out.
“Yeah…
“Why?”
“WOt?”
“Why?” he repeated. “Why did you call upon Angus Stonefield?”
“ 'Cos Caleb told me ter.”
“What passed between you?”
“Nuffinkl”
“I mean what did you say to him, and he to you?”
“Oh. I don' 'member.” It was a lie, and everyone knew it. It was there in the low mumble from the onlookers, the slight shaking of the heads of the jurors, the quick shift of the judge's eyes from Selina to Rathbone.
Selina saw it too, but she assumed she had beaten Rathbone.
Rathbone pushed his hands into his pockets and looked at her blandly.
“Then if I were to say that you gave him a message that Caleb wished to see him urgently, that day, and wished him to go immediately to the Folly House Tavern, or the Artichoke, you would not be able to recall differently?”
“I…” Her eyes blazed with defiance, but there was no way out. She was loath to entrap herself by argument, or excuses which might rebound on her again. She had been caught once.
“Perhaps that has stirred your memory?” Rathbone suggested, carefully ironing all the sarcasm out of his voice.
She said nothing, but he had scored the point, and he knew it from the jury's faces. Once she had established that she was prepared to evade, or even lie, to protect Caleb, it would prejudice anything she might say in his defense.
“Did you see Angus Stonefield later that day, Miss Berries?” Rathbone resumed.
She said nothing.
“You must answer the question, Miss Berries,” the judge warned. “If you do not, I shall hold you in contempt of court. That means that I can sentence you to prison until such time as you do answer. And of course the jury are free to take any meaning they will from your silence. Do you understand me?”
“I saw 'im,” she said huskily, and swallowed hard. She stared straight ahead of her, her head rigid so she could not, even in the corner of her eye, see Caleb leaning over the railing of the dock, his eyes on her.
Rathbone affected interest, as if he had no idea what she was going to say.
Now there was total silence in the room.
“At the Folly House Tavern,” she said sullenly.
“What was he doing?”
“Nuffink.”
“Nothing?”
“ 'E were standin' around, waitin' fer Caleb, I s'pose. That's Were I told ' im ter be.”
“Did you see Caleb arrive also?”
` No.”
“But he told you earlier that he intended to be there?”
“Not that time special. That's where 'e said Angus were to go for 'im always. Same place. I didn't even see 'em together, an' I never saw 'em quarrel, an' that's the truth, whether yer believe me or not!”
“I do believe you, ma'am,” Rathbone conceded. “But did you see Caleb later on that day?”
“No, I didn't.”
One of the jurors shook his head, another coughed into his handkerchief.
There was a rustling in the public benches.
Rathbone turned away from the witness stand, and his glance caught Ebenezer Goode's and saw him smile ruefully. The case still hovered on the knife's edge, but however unwillingly, Selina's evidence might be all it needed to topple it against Caleb. Goode had very little with which to fight, and they both knew it. It would be a desperate gamble to call Caleb himself.
Even Goode could not know what he might say. There was a recklessness in the man, a well of emotion too dangerous to tap.
Rathbone turned the full circle before he faced Selina again. His eye caught Hester, near the front of the crowd, and beside her, Enid Ravensbrook, looking pale and tense. Her face was strained with pity and the terrible waiting for the evidence to unfold as they came nearer and nearer to the moment when the hatred and jealousy of years must finally explode in murder. Caleb had already left home when she had married Ravensbrook, but she must still have inherited some feeling for him, sensitive to her husband's long involvement, to all he had given, the years of struggle and finally the failure.
Certainly she knew both Angus and Genevieve, and was only too familiar with their loss.
Milo Ravensbrook sat on the other side of her, his face so pale he seemed bloodless, his dark eyes and level brows like black gashes on gray-white wax. Could a man see a more hideously painful revelation than that one child had killed the other? He would be left with nothing.
And yet from the moment that Angus's bloodstained clothes had been identified, was there anything else they could have done, any other course to follow?
Enid turned to him, her expression a mixture of anguish and almost an expectation of hurt, as if she already
