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The wardress gave her a filthy look, and it was several seconds before Hester realized why. Then as the constables closed in around her, and there was an angry shout from a few yards away, suddenly she understood. They were here not to prevent her escape but to protect her.
A woman screamed.
“Murderess!” someone yelled hoarsely.
“Hang ’er!” another shouted out, and a surge of bodies buffeted the constables and they lurched forward, unwittingly almost knocking Hester off her feet.
A dozen yards away a newsboy was calling out about the trial.
“Burn her!” a voice shouted quite clearly and chillingly, a woman’s voice, shrill with hatred. “Burn the witch! Put her to the fires!”
Hester felt herself chilled as if by ice. It was terrifying to feel such a passion thick in the air, it was a kind of madness. There was no reasoning with it, no logic, no pity. She had not even been tried yet.
A missile flew past her cheek and clattered against the carriage door.
“Now then, now then!” another constable’s voice said with rising panic barely suppressed. “Move along. You got no business here. Move along or I’ll have to take you in charge for disturbing the peace. You let the courts do their job. Time enough then for hanging. Move along….”
“Don’t stare there, stupid!” The wardress tugged at Hester again, bruising her wrists where the manacles dug into her.
“Come on, miss, we can’t stand about here,” the largest constable said, more gently. “We got to keep you safe.”
Hurriedly and awkwardly, still pushed and heaved by the crowd, now sullen, they made their way off the platform and up to the street.
They were driven in a closed van straight to the prison, where more wardresses awaited her, their faces hard, eyes angry.
She said nothing, asked no questions, and passed into the cell in silence, her head high, her thoughts islanded from them. She remained there until the middle of the afternoon, when she was escorted to another small room, bare but for a wooden table and two hard wooden chairs.
There was a man already there, tall and broad-shouldered, and to judge from his gray ha
ir and beard and from the lines around his mouth, he was nearer sixty than fifty, but there was a quality of intense vitality in him which dominated the room, even though he remained motionless.
“Good afternoon, Miss Latterly,” he said with courtesy, the irony of which reflected in his dark eyes. “I am James Argyll. Lady Callandra has retained me to represent you, since Mr. Rathbone cannot appear before the bar in Scotland.”
“How do you do,” she replied.
“Please sit down, Miss Latterly.” He indicated the wooden chairs, and as soon as she had taken one, he took the other. He was watching her with curiosity and some surprise. She wondered with self-mockery what he had expected of her—perhaps a big, rawboned woman with the physical strength to carry wounded men off the battlefield, like Rebecca Box, the soldier’s wife who had dared the shot and walked alone onto the field between the lines to bring back the fallen across her shoulders. Or maybe he had envisioned a drunkard, or a slut, or an ignorant woman who could find no better employment than emptying slops and winding bandages.
Her heart sank, and she found it difficult to control her sense of despair so it did not show in her face or spill in tears down her cheeks.
“I have already spoken with Mr. Rathbone,” Argyll was saying to her.
With a tremendous effort she mastered herself and looked back at him calmly.
“He has told me that Miss Nightingale is prepared to testify for you.”
“Oh?” Her heart leapt and without warning hope came back with a ridiculous pain. All sorts of things that she held dear seemed possible again, things for which she had already endured the parting, at least in her mind: people, sights, sounds, even the habits of thinking of tomorrow, having time for which to plan. She found her body shaking; her hands on the table trembled and she had to grip them so hard the nails dug into the flesh to keep them still enough that he would not see. “That must be good….”
“Oh it is excellent,” he agreed. “But showing the qualities of your character will not be sufficient if we cannot also show that someone else had both the opportunity and the motive to murder Mrs. Farraline. However, in discussing the matter with Mr. Monk…”
It was absurd how mention of his name made her stomach turn over and her breath catch in her throat.
He continued as if he had noticed nothing.
“… it seems as if Mr. Kenneth Farraline may have tampered with the company books in order to finance his affair with someone whom the family obviously consider unsuitable. How unsuitable and why, and how deeply he is entangled with her, whether there is a child or not, just what hold she has over him, we have yet to learn. I have dispatched Mr. Monk posthaste to uncover that. If he is as excellent as Mr. Rathbone assures me, it should not take him above two days. Though I confess I wonder why he has not made it his business to learn it before now.”
Her heart was tight in her throat. “Because unless you can prove that he has embezzled from the company, the fact that he has a mistress is irrelevant,” she said gravely. “A great many men do, especially young, well-bred men who have no other involvements. In fact, I would hazard a guess it is more common than not.”
His eyes widened in momentary surprise, then in undisguised admiration for her candor and her courage. He was a man whose admiration was not easily stirred.
