When Trick failed to raise his hand, the prisoner next to him did it for him.
“What be your name?” the clerk demanded.
Trick stared blindly ahead. A long silence stretched.
“What be your name?”
He hung his head, looking too weak to lift it. Too weak to answer.
A speculative murmur rose from the onlookers. The guard prodded Trick with his pike, and Trick stumbled to his knees, taking the prisoners on either side down with him. With a rattle of chains, they hoisted him back up.
“Black Highwayman, what be your name?”
Inside her, Kendra was screaming. He was too ill to defend himself; couldn’t they see it? Couldn’t they wait for another day?
“Black Highwayman, what be your name?”
“Can you not see he’s ill?” she called out. A gasp of disapproval rose from the crowd, and the clerk glared in her direction.
Trick’s gaze snapped to meet hers.
Recognition lit his eyes. But from where Kendra stood, they looked black, not golden. Dilated and dark, filled with regret and defeat.
She’d lost her amber highwayman already.
The clerk tried another tack. “Black Highwayman, what do you plead?”
Trick’s gaze was still locked on hers. One hand reached into his pocket, and he slowly drew out a piece of paper, crumpling it in his fist. Something was written upon it in black ink, but much too far away to see.
“The press!” The crowd began to chant. “The press! The press!”
“What is that?” Kendra asked, afraid she didn’t want to know.
“They call it peine forte et dure,” Ford whispered. “Prisoners who refuse to plead are stripped and laid on their backs, a wooden plank placed upon them and piled with stones.”
“Stones?” It was even worse than she’d imagined. Salty blood flowed into her mouth, and she realized she was chewing the inside of her cheek.
“Yes, stones.” Ford’s fingers tightened on her shoulders. “Three hundred pounds or more. And they add another fifty pounds every half-hour until the man agrees to plead.”
“The press! The press! The press!”
They couldn’t. They couldn’t do that to an ill prisoner. How could this mob demand such a thing? What kind of barbarous riffraff were they?
“The press! The press! The press!”
“Silence!” The clerk’s bellow rattled the very air, and the chant abruptly cut off.
Soft rain pattered in the sudden stillness as he looked to the man in red robes.
“Guilty,” the judge declared, doubtless thinking his decision merciful since the prisoner was too weak to plead.
Ford squeezed Kendra’s shoulders so tightly, it was a wonder her bones didn’t snap. He succeeded in quelling her outcry. But inside, every fiber of her being was howling.
Though Trick had been spared the press, she had no doubt what the sentence would be for a highwayman when she’d just seen a man sent to the gallows for stealing a piece of fruit.
“Death by hanging.” The judge banged his gavel. “Tomorrow at noon.”
Trick’s gaze remained on hers, his eyes imploring. His mouth moved, but no words came out. Her fingers worried the amber bracelet, and she could see on his face that he noticed. A single tear welled and rolled down his cheek, making her own tears flow faster.
Suddenly he looked away and began scraping with a fingernail at one of the crusty scabs on his wrist.
Another queue of accused prisoners were brought clanking into the dock, and Trick’s group began moving out. She watched in a haze of pain as he drew a red-tipped finger across the crumpled paper in his other hand.
“He’s writing something,” she whispered in horror to Ford. “He’s trying to write something. In blood.”
His hand with the paper shaking, he reached it toward her as he was dragged by. She pressed against the rail, straining to get closer, their fingers nearly touching. She moaned when he was jerked back, the look in his eyes anguished but unreadable.
Seconds later, he was tugged through an archway and out of sight.
“He’s ill.” She sobbed, tears running freely down her face to mix with the miserable cold rain. “He was trying to tell me something, wasn’t he?”
“He was too weak.” Ford tried to enfold her in his arms, but she clung to the rail for all she was worth, her gaze trained on the archway. “Kendra, there’s nothing you can do.”
“He tried to give me a message in blood.” Her eyes burned and her heart was cracking. Trick had only preyed on Roundheads—the real criminals in her eyes—and for the good of orphan children. No matter that he was a liar and an adulterer, he didn’t deserve to die.
And she couldn’t bear it.
She leaned far over the rail and shouted to the guard who was closing the gate. “Where are they being taken?”
“Newgate Prison,” the man said as the iron bars banged shut.
SEVENTY-SIX
“KENDRA, YOU cannot go to Newgate.” At the Chase town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Jason pushed her onto the drawing room’s burgundy brocade couch and handed her a large goblet of Rhenish wine. “It’s a nightmare. And you cannot help him anyway.”
“I must see him.” Perhaps she could smuggle him out. At least she could say good-bye. “I’m going.” She set down the wine and rose.
He took her by the shoulders, his bright green gaze determined. “You cannot go.”
Equally determined, she wrenched from his grasp. “You cannot stop me.”
“We’ll go to King Charles,” Ford said.
She whirled to him. “What?”
“We’ll go to Charles and ask for a pardon.”
Hope fluttered in her chest. “Could…could that work?”
He shrugged. “It’s certainly within his power. I saw him pardon Swift Nicks.”
“Who?” Massaging her brow, she dropped back onto the couch.
“The infamous highwayman, Jack Nevison.” Ford began pacing. “Early one morn he robbed a fellow in Kent who recognized him and threatened to turn him in. To give himself an alibi, he rode for York, arriving the same evening—”
“Impossible,” she burst out, never mind that she didn’t care to hear this since it had nothing to do with Trick. The ride to York took at least four days, more likely a week.
“Apparently not impossible when his life was
