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Rathbone smiled back at him. “Cold feet?” he asked wryly.
“Going to hold them to the fire,” Coniston replied. “Yours, I mean.”
“Really?” Rathbone shrugged with confidence he did not feel, and they went into the courtroom.
Twenty minutes later, Coniston rose to question his first witness of the day, Dinah’s sister-in-law, Amity Herne.
Rathbone watched as she walked across the open space toward the witness box. With one hand delicately lifting her skirt so she did not trip, she climbed up the steps to the top and stood facing the body of the court.
Rathbone would like to have looked across at Dinah to see her expression, but he did not want to draw the jury’s attention to her, when they were all watching Amity Herne so closely. He could not imagine the pain of seeing your own family testify against you. Did they blame her for Lambourn’s death? For any degree of the unhappiness that they believed had led to his suicide? He might soon know. He realized his hands were knotted in his lap beneath the table where they could not see them, his muscles aching already, at the very beginning of the morning.
Amity Herne swore to her name, and to tell the truth, all of it, and nothing but. She acknowledged that she was the sister of the accused woman’s late husband, Joel Lambourn.
“I offer my condolences for the recent loss of your brother, Mrs. Herne,” Coniston began. “And I apologize for being obliged to open up so publicly a subject that must be additionally painful to you in the recent tragedy that has afflicted your family.”
“Thank you,” she said graciously. She was an attractive woman, although not beautiful, and now appeared a little too unemotional for Rathbone’s taste. Perhaps in the circumstances a certain stiffness was the only defense she had to preserve any composure at all, when all privacy was denied her. There was some
thing in the dignity with which she stood waiting for Coniston to open up the wounds that reminded him of Margaret. He should have admired her more. How much was his own disillusion warping his views of the people around him?
Surely Coniston, standing gracefully and even a little deferentially, realized that the jury would not take kindly to anyone who was unnecessarily rough with Amity Herne. He would begin gently, set a pattern Rathbone would have no choice but to follow.
“Mrs. Herne,” Coniston began, “were you aware of the nature of the work that your brother, Dr. Lambourn, was doing for the government?”
Rathbone sat up a little straighter. Surely Coniston was not going to allow that subject to be raised?
“Only in the vaguest terms,” Amity replied calmly, her voice soft and very precise. “It was a medical investigation of some kind, that is all he would say.”
“Confidential?” Coniston said.
“I imagine so,” she agreed. She kept her gaze fixed on him, never allowing it to wander toward the gallery and not once even glancing over to the dock, where Dinah sat between her jailers.
“But I did not ask him further anyway,” she continued. “I do know that it troubled him. He felt very deeply about it, and I was concerned that he was allowing himself to become too involved in it.”
Rathbone rose to his feet. “My lord, Mrs. Herne has just said that she has very little idea what the work was concerned with. How, then, could she judge whether his involvement was too great?” He would like to have argued that it was also completely irrelevant to Zenia Gadney’s death, but he intended to introduce the exact point later on, and this opened the door for him nicely.
Coniston smiled. “She might not have known specifically what the work was, but she can judge if it had bearing on the state of his mind. And if it bears on his state of mind, my lord, it will automatically bear on the state of mind of the accused.”
“My lord!” Rathbone was still on his feet. “How can Dr. Lambourn’s concern for his work have been on the accused’s state of mind two months after he was dead? Is my learned friend suggesting there was some kind of communicable madness involved?”
There was a ripple of nervous laughter around the gallery. One juror sneezed and put his handkerchief up to his face, hiding his expression.
“I will permit this kind of questioning,” Pendock said, clearing his throat, “on condition that you reach some relevance very soon, Mr. Coniston.” He did not look at Rathbone.
“Thank you, my lord.” Coniston turned again to Amity Herne. “Mrs. Herne, was Dr. Lambourn more involved with this task, whatever it was, than was usual for him?”
“Yes,” she said decisively, a look of grief shadowing her face. “He became completely absorbed in it.”
“What do you mean by that, Mrs. Herne? What is unusual about a doctor being absorbed in his work?” Coniston was still overly polite.
“When the government did not accept his conclusions he was distraught. At times he was almost hysterical. I …” She looked uncomfortable. Her hands gripped the rail in front of her and she gulped, as if to control tears. “I believe that was why he took his own life. I wish I had been more aware how serious it was. Perhaps I could have said or done something! I didn’t realize that everything he valued in his life was disintegrating in front of him. Or he believed it was.”
Coniston stood perfectly still in the middle of the floor, an elegant figure, even kindly. “Disintegrating, Mrs. Herne? Isn’t that rather extreme? Because the government did not accept his views on … whatever it was?”
“That and …” Her voice dropped so low it was difficult to hear her. No one in the room moved. The crowd in the gallery were still, as if frozen.
Coniston waited.
“That, and his personal life,” Amity finished in no more than a murmur.
