There was an empty chair next to Vanstone’s. The mayor was clearly the one in charge, with important-looking papers and documents scattered on the table in front of him. He made a halfhearted show of giving up his place to Sebastian, who said easily, “No, no, stay where you are, I’m fine here,” and sat down in the third chair.
Vanstone indicated he wanted a conference; the other two men leaned toward him, and the mayor spoke in a confidential undertone. “Lord D’Aubrey, the case we’re presently hearing is that of Hector Pennyways, miller’s assistant, charged with lewd conduct and being a public nuisance.” He inclined his head toward a fellow standing eight feet away behind a waist-high wooden bar. Dressed in a smock-frock of dirty white drabbet, the accused looked unrepentant but harmless; he had a large, full moon face, and he waited for his punishment with the stolid vacancy of some bulky farm animal. “To wit,” Vanstone went on, “he became intoxicated at the George and Dragon, went outside and relieved himself in the river—in full view of several passersby, including a woman—and finally fell unconscious against the Maypole on the green, where he remained until the constable was summoned.”
The image of it had a coarse, Rabelaisian charm that made Sebastian chuckle—inappropriately, he saw at once, as Vanstone and the captain looked identically unamused, civically dismayed, and judicially set on dealing with this affront to public decency without delay, and certainly without levity.
Without mercy, either. “Sixty days in the lockup and a guinea fine for damages,” decreed the mayor, and Carnock nodded in agreement. They glanced perfunctorily at Sebastian, taking his concurrence for granted.
His long legs wouldn’t fit comfortably under the table; he swung them to the side and idly tapped his walking stick against the toe of his left boot. “Sixty days?” he mused. It seemed harsh for a crime that wasn’t vicious, only inelegant. But Vanstone had the look of a man who knew exactly what penalty matched what crime, plus he had two thick, intimidating law books on the table in front of him. Sebastian shrugged his shoulders, and the case of Hector Pennyways was closed.
The parish constable, a man called Burdy, was tall and rawboned, with an enormous pink nose inked with a map of purple capillaries. He took the defendant by the elbow and hustled him toward a closed door at the back of the room, presumably leading to a holding area of some sort. Minutes later, he reemerged with a new prisoner, a woman this time, accused of stealing her neighbor’s laundry from their shared wash line. After her came a few civil suits, boundary disputes and the like, and then they went back to criminal matters: two more public inebriates, a suspected Peeping Tom, a brawler. Nobody had a lawyer, which made self-defense all but impossible; under English jurisprudence, the accused wasn’t allowed to speak on his own behalf. An indefensible system, Sebastian had always thought, and one on which the Americans had clearly improved.
The caliber of crime in Wyckerley was nonviolent, venial, and definitely not worth repeating in humorous anecdotes for the delectation of his jaded friends. What surprised him was that he wasn’t altogether bored. No matter how trifling or ludicrous the offenses, the people who had perpetrated them were interesting, in their way—at least to look at and speculate upon; closer acquaintance would probably not be edifying, and Sebastian was a firm believer in the axiom that familiarity breeds contempt. But from this distance, and for a little while, their stories entertained him, and he even got an old moral lesson hammered home anew: the poor go to gaol for the same crimes with which the rich aren’t even charged.
Eventually the sameness began to wear on him, though. Under the mayor’s subtly reproachful eye, Sebastian brought out his watch for the second time in ten minutes. Only four o’clock? This game wasn’t fun anymore. Then, too, he and Lili had had champagne instead of food for lunch, and what he could really use right now was a little nap. “How much longer?” he inquired bluntly of the mayor, who leaned toward him and murmured, sotto voce, “Only one more now, my lord.”
He grunted, watching the constable make his last trip to the prisoners’ waiting room. Behind the gallery railing, the woman with all the black knitting began to roll up her handiwork and stuff it into her workbasket with nervous, jerky movements. Around her, the other spectators sat up straighter, whispering or clearing their throats.
Aha, thought Sebastian, it’s the last prisoner they’ve come to see. He turned to Vanstone to ask why. But before he could speak, the door in the back of the room opened and the constable came through, ushering a woman before him.
II
“ACCUSED IS RACHEL Wade, Your Worships, widow, charged with indigence and no fixed abode. She was released six days ago from Dartmoor Convict Prison, whereupon she made her way to Dorset, the county of her birth. In her home parish of Ottery St. Mary, she was detained on the twelfth of this month and taken before the magistrate, who declared her an undesirable and ordered her to quit the county. Accused came to Devon, on account of it being the county where her marriage took place. On sixteen April, she was taken up again, in Wyckerley, St. Giles’ parish, for not having a place.”
The constable stopped reading from his writ and added on his own, “She were found in Jack Ratteray’s root barn, claiming all ’er money was stole in Chudleigh. Four apples was found in ’er effects; accused admitted she stole ’em, but she weren’t charged.”
The room had gone absolutely still, every eye trained on the tall, slight woman standing alone at the bar. Sebastian peered at her more closely, trying to discover what about her unremarkable form could have elicited such fascination. She was dressed in a gown of grayish worsted, shapeless, styleless, essentially colorless except for the mud stains at the hem. No hat or bonnet. Her figure was youthful, but he judged her to be middle-aged because of the silver in her dark, too-short hair. She kept her head bowed and her eyes on the floor, shoulders slightly hunched. Nevertheless, in spite of her posture, the aura she projected wasn’t abject or furtive; only hopeless. She struck him as a woman beaten down so thoroughly that even servility had gone beyond her.
“Will anyone speak for her, Constable?” queried Vanstone. A few of the defendants had had witnesses to testify for them.
“No, Your Worship.”
The mayor cleared his throat importantly. “Then the court has no—
“What was Mrs. Wade in gaol for?” Sebastian asked negligently, never taking his eyes from the woman. He thought she might look up at him then, but she didn’t. The room grew even quieter.
Vanstone leaned toward him and murmured, “My lord, she served a ten-year sentence for the crime of murder.”
His cane stopped its restless tapping on the toe of his boot. If Vanstone had said she’d gone to prison for flying around the village green on a broomstick, he couldn’t have been more surprised. Murder. He narrowed speculative eyes on her again, trying to believe it.
“Court orders the accused remanded to the Tavistock lockup until her case can be taken up at the May assize.” The mayor bunched his fist, preparatory to smacking it lightly on the table like a gavel, an affectation Sebastian suddenly found irritating.
“Wait,” he commanded softly, halting the judicial fist in midair. “If no one will speak for her, how can she answer the charge?”
“My lord,” the mayor began with careful deference, “it’s not our concern. If she has a representative, she can answer, but that’s in due time. This hearing is not evidentiary, you see. Our powers are prima facie; in most cases we arraign, we don’t try.”
“I know that,” Sebastian snapped, and the mayor’s sleek, clean-shaven cheeks reddened. He softened his tone. “But you see, I don’t feel sufficiently conversant with the case in order to adjudicate it responsibly,” he said, enjoying the turgid, magisterial sound of the words. “And I’m sure you would want me to adjudicate it responsibly.”
“Of course, certainly, my lord,” Vanstone raced to assure him, and Captain Carnock echoed his agreement, both men nodd
ing vigorously.
“Then you’ll give me leave to address the accused?” He felt Vanstone bristle, but didn’t look at him; his attention was on the woman again. Unlike the majority of her predecessors, she didn’t hang onto the bar with nervous, white-knuckled fingers; she stood a full foot behind it with her hands at her sides. A center part made a straight white arrow down the crown of her head, which remained bowed. He wanted to see the face of a convicted murderess. “Mrs. Wade.”
“My lord?” she answered in a low but clear voice, audible in the farthest corner of the hushed room.
“Mrs. Wade, look at me.” His tone was sharper than he’d intended, but she didn’t jerk her head up in startled obedience. She lifted it slowly, with unconscious drama—he assumed it was unconscious—and looked him full in the face.
For one awful, shocked instant, he thought she was blind. Her eyes, so pale they looked like crystal, were wide and unblinking, almost unreal, like a doll’s luminous, painted-on eyes. She had a high, pale, intelligent forehead, sharp cheekbones, a small nose. An intriguing mouth, full but stern, the lips compressed in a defensive straight line, as if to keep in check any wayward utterance not absolutely required for survival.
She was younger than he’d thought, and yet her unlined, unblemished lace was, strangely not youthful; it seemed more blank than young, and not innocent but . . . erased. She might be twenty-five or thirty-five, it was impossible to tell, the criteria by which he judged people’s ages were simply missing in her case, irrelevant. He took note of her long, angular body, more thin than slender, her femininity all but eradicated by the ugly dress. All but. But it was her eyes that drew him, again and again, back to her extraordinary face.
A whole minute had passed since she’d spoken. Vanstone began to tap the end of his pen against one of his law books in a soft pat, pat, pat, discreetly restive.
Sebastian asked the question uppermost in his mind, although a dozen others seethed under the surface. “How old are you?
“Twenty-eight, my lord.”
Twenty-eight. The bloom was definitely off the rose, then. With a slight shock, he realized she’d been in prison since the age of eighteen. “And whom did you murder, Mrs. Wade?”
They both ignored the quick, stifled gasps around them. She didn’t drop her eyes, but she was rhythmically clutching and unclutching small handfuls of skirt at her sides. “I was sentenced for the murder of my husband,” she replied, in the same low but carrying voice.
He waited, assuming she would add that she was innocent. She didn’t. He laid his stick on the table and leaned back, folding his arms across his chest. “Have you any family here?” There was a broken-off exclamation from somewhere in the gallery of onlookers, but he didn’t look away from the woman to see the source.
“No, my lord.”
“Friends?”
“No, my lord.”
“There’s no one who can help you?”
“No, my lord.” Her voice had absolutely no inflection; no defiance, no hope, no self-pity, not even matter-of-factness. Just—nothing. She bent her head; immediately she was anonymous again, a tall, slight nonentity, and he was left to wonder what about her had been so compelling only a second ago.
He asked, “Can you read and write, Mrs. Wade?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“You’ve searched for employment, have you?”
“I have.”
“And?”
She looked up. Her unearthly gaze riveted him again. “I could not find a place,” she answered, still without any emphasis, weighting all the words equally.
“How much money was stolen from you?”
“Nine pounds, four shillings, my lord.”
“Indeed? And how did you come by such a princely sum?”
“I earned it in prison, my lord.”
“Doing what?”
She took an audible breath, as if all this vocalizing were wearing her out. “I worked most recently in the tailor’s shop.”
“You’re a seamstress?”
“No, I was the bookkeeper.”
“The bookkeeper.” He raised his brows to show that he was impressed, but it didn’t persuade her to say more. “But no one would engage you in that capacity upon your release?”
“No, my lord.”
“Did you try for other employment?”
“Yes, my lord.”
He made an impatient gesture with his hand, telling her to keep going.
“I sought employment as a clerk in a dressmaker’s shop, a draper’s, a—tobacconist’s. After that, I tried for work as a domestic servant and then as a laundress. But I could not get a place.”
“Because of your past, is that it?”
She bowed her head in assent.
He watched her, brooding, aware that time was passing. Her passivity irked him. He thought of Hester Prynne, facing down the indignation of her Puritan judges. The two women were in roughly similar straits, both confronting a community’s censure and abandonment; but Mrs. Wade lacked the adulteress’s cold, fierce, trampled dignity. Mrs. Wade had simply erased herself.
He felt pity for her, and curiosity, and an undeniably lurid sense of anticipation. Against all reason, she interested him sexually. What was it about a woman—a certain kind of woman—standing at the mercy of men—righteous, civic-minded men, with the moral force of public outrage on their side—that could sometimes be secretly, shamefacedly titillating? He thought of the hypocritical justices from England’s less than glorious past, men who had taken a lewd pleasure in sending women to the stake for witchcraft. Watching the pale, silent, motionless figure behind the bar, Sebastian had to admit a reluctant but definite kinship, not with their sentencing practices but with their prurient fervor.
“If the vicar were here,” Vanstone spoke up, “something might be done for her. But as you know, Reverend Morrell is in Italy and not expected to return for several more weeks.”
“Isn’t there anyone else who can help her?”
“Help her?” The mayor chose his words carefully. “We are not an adjudicatory body—as you know, my lord,” he tacked on hastily, “—and as such our task is not to find places for the indigent or the luckless who come before us. Our mandate regarding the deserving as well as the undeserving poor is simply to uphold the law.
“And what law was it Mrs. Wade broke?”
Vanstone blinked rapidly. “Beyond murdering her husband, you mean? She is indigent, she has no address—”
“Yes, but what—”
“I beg your pardon—and she is not the responsibility of St. Giles’ parish, my lord. Her own village in Dorset expelled her to save the drain on their poor law allotment, and now she’s here, asking to be a drain on ours. She’s unemployed and unemployable; in my view she ought to have been transported after her conditional release, not dumped on the tax rolls of citizens who aren’t legally responsible for her in the first place.”
Captain Carnock nodded his large head several times and said, “Quite right, sir, quite right.”
“We don’t judge this woman,” the mayor went on in more modulated tones, seeing he was carrying the day. “We only propose to remand her to the county gaol in Tavistock until the assize judges sit next month. No doubt they’ll determine her appropriate residence. If it’s here, we will, of course, take her into our charity house, assuming no alternatives present themselves in the interim. But for now, I think we must do our duty . . .”
Sebastian stopped listening. He’d seen something in the woman’s face when Vanstone spoke of the Tavistock gaol, and he thought it was fear. No, more than fear; panic. But it was so fleeting, replaced so quickly by the blind-eyed mask, that afterward he felt confused, almost disoriented. Had he imagined that look of terror? No. All his preconceptions vanished. She’d piqued his interest before because she appeared to have only one dimension: nerv
elessness, emotional torpor, impassivity to the point of numbness. Now she fascinated him because—maybe—that was a lie. She had her head down again, shoulders hunched in the chary, wounded posture of self-effacement that seemed second nature to her. But he knew what he’d seen, and the quick flick of panic in her disturbing eyes somehow changed everything. He stood up.
Vanstone broke off in the middle of a sentence, gaping up at him; Carnock’s mouth fell open in surprise. They thought he was leaving. “My lord,” Vanstone began, but Sebastian ignored him and walked across the short space of dusty floor between the magistrates’ bench and the prisoner’s bar.
Mrs. Wade kept her eyes on his feet; when he was within an arm’s length of her, she looked up briefly, lashes fluttering with nerves, as if she expected some affront, a curse or a slap. Otherwise she stayed still, palms pressed to the sides of her thighs. While he studied her, a faint pink flush began to bloom in her prison-pallid cheeks. At the base of her throat, above the narrow collar of her cheap dress, a fast, erratic pulse hammered. Still, despite her physical vulnerability, she managed to convey an attitude of remoteness. You won’t touch me, her body said, because I am untouchable.
“What were you before you went to prison, Mrs. Wade?”
She hid her confusion by keeping her eyes on his knees. “I was . . . a girl. That is, I had finished my studies and I—was living with my family. I was . . .” She drew a shaky breath. “My lord, I don’t quite know what you mean.”
“Quite” sounded extravagant on her lips; until now she’d limited her short, declarative sentences to nouns and verbs. “Were you a respectable girl?”
“My lord?”
“Were you a lady?”
Inquisitive murmuring sounded all around them. But after only a slight hesitation, and in a tone of voice that was, for once, adamant, Mrs. Wade answered, “Yes. I was.”
“Yes,” Sebastian agreed. He let his gaze roam over the length of her tall frame, rather enjoying her reaction, which was to stop breathing. “So. You can keep books, you say?”