toward my mother's feelings. If you have some business with us, please conduct it as briefly and circumspectly as you can. Then leave us, for pity's sake.'
Monk controlled himself with an effort. He could remember doing this before, sitting opposite stunned and frightened people who did not know what to say and could only sit mesmerized by their grief. He could see a quiet woman, an ordinary face devastated by tormenting loss, white hands clenched in her lap. She too had been unable to speak to him. He had been filled with a rage so vast the taste of it was still familiar in his mouth. But it had not been against her, for her he felt only a searing pity. But why? Why now, after all these years, did he remember that woman instead of all the others?
Nothing came, nothing at all, just the emotion filling his mind and making his body tense.
'What can we do?' Lady Stanhope asked again. 'What can we say to help Herbert?'
Gradually, with uncharacteristic patience, he drew from them a picture of Sir Herbert as a quiet, very proper man with an ordinary domestic life, devoted to his family, predictable in all his personal tastes. His only appetite seemed to be for a glass of excellent whiskey every evening, and a fondness for good roast beef. He was a dutiful husband, an affectionate father.
The conversation was slow and tense. He explored every avenue he could think of to draw from either of them anything that would be of use to Rathbone, better than the predictable loyalty which he believed was quite literally the truth but not necessarily likely to influence a jury. What else could a wife say? And she was not a promising witness. She was too frightened to be coherent or convincing.
In spite of himself he was sorry for her.
He was about to leave when there was a knock at the door. Without waiting for a reply, a young woman opened it and came in. She was slender-in fact, thin-and her face was so marked with illness and disappointment it was hard to tell her age, but he thought probably not more than twenty.
'Excuse my interruption,' she began, but even before she spoke Monk was overcome by a wave of memory so vivid and so agonizing his present surroundings became invisible to him, Lady Stanhope and Arthur merely blurs on the edge of his vision. He knew what the old case was, violently and with sickening immediacy. A girl had been molested and murdered. He could still see her thin broken body and feel the rage inside himself, the confusion and the pain, the aching helplessness. That was why he had driven his constables so hard, worried and harassed his witnesses, why his contempt had scalded Runcorn without mercy or patience.
The horror was back inside him with all the freshness it had had when he was twenty. It did not excuse the way he had treated people, it did not undo anything, but it explained it. At least he had had a reason, a passion which was not centered upon himself. He was not merely cruel, arrogant, and ambitious. He had cared-furiously, tirelessly, single-mindedly.
He found himself smiling with relief, and yet there was a sickness in his stomach.
'Mr. Monk?' Lady Stanhope said nervously.
'Yes-yes, ma'am?'
'Are you going to be able to help my husband, Mr. Monk?'
'I believe so,' he said firmly. 'And I shall do everything within my power, I promise you.'
'Thank you. I-we-are most grateful.' She held Arthur's hand a little more tightly. 'All of us.'
Chapter 9
The trial of Sir Herbert Stanhope opened at the Old Bailey on the first Monday in August. It was a gray, sultry day with a hot wind out of the south and the smell of rain. Outside the crowds pressed forward, climbing up the steps, eager to claim the few public seats available. There was an air of excitement, whispering and pushing, an urgency. Newsboys shouted promises about exclusive revelations, prophesies of what was to come. The first few heavy drops of rain fell with a warm splatter on oblivious heads.
Inside the wood-paneled courtroom the jury sat in two rows, their backs to the high windows, faces toward the lawyers' tables, behind whom were the few public benches. To the jurors' right, twenty feet above the floor, was the dock, like a closed-in balcony, its hidden steps leading down to the cells. Opposite the dock was the witness box, like a pulpit. To reach it one crossed the open space of the floor and climbed the curving steps up, then stood isolated, facing the barristers and the public. Higher still, and behind the witness box, surrounded by magnificently carved panels and seated on plush, was the judge. He was robed in scarlet velvet and wigged in curled white horsehair.
The court had already been called to order. The jury was empaneled and the charge had been read and answered. With immense dignity, head high and voice steady, Sir Herbert denied his guilt absolutely. Immediately there was a rustle of sympathy around the body of the court.
The judge, a man in his late forties with brilliant light gray eyes and a clean-boned, lean-cheeked face, flashed his glance around but refrained from speech. He was a hard man, young for such high office, but he owed no one favors and had no ambitions but the law. He was saved from ruth-lessness by a sharp sense of humor, and redeemed by a love of classical literature and its soaring imagination, which he barely understood but knew he held to be of immense worth.
The prosecution was conducted by Wilberforce Lovat-Smith, one of the most gifted barristers of his generation and a man Rathbone knew well. He had faced him frequently across the floor of the court, and held him in high regard, and not a little liking. He was of barely average height, dark-complexioned with a sharp-featured face and heavy-lidded, surprisingly blue eyes. His appearance was not impressive. He looked rather more like an itinerant musician or player than a pillar of the establishment. His gown was a fraction too long for him, indifferently tailored, and his wig was not precisely straight. But Rathbone did not make the mistake of underestimating him.
The first witness to be called was Callandra Daviot. She walked across the space between the benches toward the witness stand with her back straight and her head high. But as she climbed the steps she steadied herself with her hand on the rail, and when she turned to Lovat-Smith her face was pale and she looked tired, as if she had not slept well for days, even weeks. It was apparent that either she was ill or she was carrying some well-nigh- intolerable burden.
Hester was not present; she was on duty at the hospital. Apart from the fact that financially she required the employment, both she and Monk believed she might still leam something useful there. It was a remote chance, but any chance at all was worth taking.
Monk was sitting in the center of the row toward the front, listening and watching every inflection and expression. He would be at hand if Rathbone wanted to pursue any new thread that should appear. He looked at Callandra and knew that something was deeply wrong. He stared at her for several minutes, until well into the beginning of her evidence, before he realized what troubled him about her appearance even more than the gauntness of her face. Her hair was totally, even beautifully tidy. It was quite out of character. The fact that she was in the witness box did not account for it. He had seen her at far more important and formal occasions, even dressed before departing to dine with ambassadors and royalty, still with wisps of hair curling wildly out of place. It touched him with an unanswerable unhappiness.
'They were quarreling about the fact that the laundry chute was apparently blockedT' Lovat-Smith was saying with affected surprise. There was total stillness in the courtroom, although everyone in it knew what was coming. The newspapers had screamed it in banner headlines at the time, and it was not a thing one forgot. Still the jurors leaned forward, listening to every word, eyes steady in concentration.
Mr. Justice Hardie smiled almost imperceptibly.
'Yes,' Callandra was offering no more than exactly what she was asked for.
'Please continue, Lady Callandra,' Lovat-Smith prompted. She was not a hostile witness, but she was not helpful either. A lesser man might have been impatient with her. Lovat-Smith was far too wise for (hat. The court sympathized with her, thinking the experience would have shocked any sensitive woman. The jurors were all men, naturally. Women were not considered capable of rational judgment sufficient to vote as part of the mass of the population. How could they possibly weigh the matter of a man's life or death as part of a mere twelve? And Lovat-Smith knew juries were ordinary men. That was both their strength and their weakness. They would presume Callandra was an average woman, susceptible, fragile, like all women. They had no idea she had both wit and strength far more than many of the soldiers her husband had treated when he was alive. Accordingly he was gentle
