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Lovat-Smith was obviously amused by it. There was nothing but respect in his face, and his manners were flawless, but Rathbone knew him well enough to detect it in the angle of his shoulders, the gestures of his hands, even the way he walked across the polished boards of the floor toward the stand and looked up at her.
“Mrs. Flaherty,” he began quietly. “You are a matron of the Royal Free Hospital, are you not?”
“I am,” she said grimly. She seemed about to add something more, then closed her lips in a thin line.
“Just so,” Lovat-Smith agreed. He had not been raised by a governess nor had he been in hospital. Efficient middle-aged ladies did not inspire in him the awe they did in many of his colleagues.
He had told Rathbone, in one of their rare moments of relaxation together, late at night over a bottle of wine, that he had gone to a charity school on the outskirts of the city before a patron, observing his intelligence, had paid for him to have extra tutelage.
Now Lovat-Smith looked up at Mrs. Flaherty blandly. “Would you be good enough, ma’am, to tell the court where you were from approximately six in the morning of the day Prudence Barrymore met her death until you heard that her body had been discovered? Thank you so much.”
Grudgingly and in precise detail she told him what he wished. As a result of his frequently interposed questions, she also told the court the whereabouts of almost all the other nurses on duty that morning, and largely those of the chaplain and the dressers also.
Rathbone did not interrupt. There was no point of procedure he quarreled with, nor any matter of fact. It would have been foolish to draw attention to the weakness of his position by fighting when he could not win. Let the jury think he was holding his fire in the certainty that he had a fatal blow to deliver at some future time. He sat back in his chair a little, composing his face into an expression of calm interest, a very slight smile on his lips.
He noticed several jurors glancing at him and then at Lovat-Smith, and knew they were wondering when the real battle would begin. They also took furtive looks at Sir Herbert, high up in the dock. He was very pale, but if there was terror inside him, or the sick darkness of guilt, not a breath of it showed in his face.
Rathbone studied him discreetly as Lovat-Smith drew more fine details from Mrs. Flaherty. Sir Herbert was listening with careful attention, but there was no real interest in his face. He seemed quite relaxed, his back straight, his hands clasped in front of him on the railing. It was all familiar territory and he knew it did not matter to the core of the case. He had never contested his own presence in the hospital at the time, and Mrs. Flaherty excluded only the peripheral players who were never true suspects.
Judge Hardie adjourned the court, and as they were leaving Lovat-Smith fell in step beside Rathbone, his curiously light eyes glittering with amusement.
“Whatever made you take it up?” he said quietly, but the disbelief was rich in his voice.
“Take what up?” Rathbone looked straight ahead of him as if he had not heard.
“The case, man! You can’t win!” Lovat-Smith watched his step. “Those letters are damning.”
Rathbone turned and smiled at him, a sweet dazzling smile showing excellent teeth. He said nothing.
Lovat-Smith faltered so minutely only an expert eye could have seen it. Then the composure returned and his expression became smooth again.
“It might keep your pocket, but it won’t do your reputation any good,” he said with calm certainty. “No knighthood in this sort of thing, you know.”
Rathbone smiled a little more widely to hide the fact that he feared Lovat-Smith was right.
The afternoon’s testimony was in many ways predictable, and yet it left Rathbone feeling dissatisfied, as he told his father later that evening when he visited him at his home in Primrose Hill.
Henry Rathbone was a tall, rather stoop-shouldered, scholarly man with gentle blue eyes masking a brilliant intellect behind a benign air and a rich, occasionally erratic and irreverent sense of humor. Oliver was more deeply fond of him than he would have admitted, even to himself. These occasional quiet dinners were oases of personal pleasure in an ambitious and extremely busy life.
On this occasion he was troubled and Henry Rathbone was immediately aware of it, although he had begun with all the usual trivial talk about the weather, the roses, and the cricket score.
They were sitting together in the evening light after an excellent supper of crusty bread, pâté, and French cheese. They had finished a bottle of red wine; it was not of a particularly good year, but satisfaction lent to the tongue what the vintage did not.
“Did you make a tactical error?” Henry Rathbone asked eventually.
“What makes you ask that?” Oliver looked at him nervously.
“Your preoccupation,” Henry replied. “If it had been something you had foreseen you would not still be turning it over in your mind.”
“I’m not sure,” Oliver confirmed. “In fact, I am not sure how I should approach this altogether.”
Henry waited.
Oliver outlined the case as he knew it so far. Henry
listened in silence, leaning back in his chair, his legs crossed comfortably.
“What testimony have you heard so far?” he asked when Oliver finally came to an end.
