A sudden, fearful death (43 page)

Lovat-Smith sat down again, his
mouth tight, avoiding Rathbone's glance.

Rathbone smiled, but with no
satisfaction.

Lovat-Smith called Jeavis to the
stand. He must have testified in court many times before, far more frequently
than anyone else present, and yet he looked oddly out of place. His high, white
collar seemed too tight for him, his sleeves an inch too short.

He gave evidence of the bare facts
as he knew them, adding no emotion or opinion whatever. Even so, the jury drank
in every word and only once or twice did any one of them look away from him and
up at Sir Herbert in the dock.

Rathbone had debated with himself
whether to cross-examine or not. He must not permit Lovat-Smith to goad him
into making a mistake. There was nothing in Jeavis's evidence to challenge,
nothing further to draw out.

"No questions, my lord,"
he said. He saw the flicker of amusement cross Lovat-Smith's face.

The next prosecution witness was
the police surgeon, who testified as to the time and cause of death. It was a
very formal affair and Rathbone had nothing to ask of him either. His attention
wandered. First he studied the jurors one by one. They were still fresh-faced,
concentration sharp, catching every word. After two or three days they would
look quite different; their eyes would be tired, muscles cramped. They would
begin to fidget and grow impatient. They would no longer watch whoever was
speaking but would stare around, as he was doing now. And quite possibly they
would already have made up their minds whether Sir Herbert was guilty or not.

Lastly before luncheon adjournment
Lovat-Smith called Mrs. Flaherty. She mounted the witness box steps very
carefully, face white with concentration, black skirts brushing against the
railings on either side. She looked exactly like an elderly housekeeper in
dusty bombazine. Rathbone almost expected to see a chain of keys hanging from
her waist and an expense ledger in her hand.

She faced the court with offense
and disapproval in every pinched line of her features. She was affronted at the
necessity of attending such a place. All criminal proceedings were beneath the
dignity of respectable people, and she had never expected in all her days to
find herself in such a position.

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
Banymore 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, pate, 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.

"Just factual this morning.
Callandra Daviot recounted how she found the body. The police and the surgeon
gave the facts of death and the time and manner, nothing new or startling.
Lovat-Smith played it for all the drama and sympathy he could, but that was to
be expected."

Henry nodded.

"I suppose it was this
afternoon," Oliver said thoughtfully. "The first witness after
luncheon was the matron of the hospital—a tense, autocratic little woman who
obviously resented being called at all. She made it quite obvious she
disapproved of 'ladies' nursing, and even Crimean experience won no favor in
her eyes. In fact, the contrary—it challenged her dominion."

"And the jury?" Henry
asked.

Oliver smiled. "Disliked
her," he said succinctly. "She cast doubt on Prudence's ability.
Lovat-Smith endeavored to keep her quiet on that but she still created a bad
impression."

"But ..." Henry prompted.

Oliver gave a sharp laugh. "But
she swore that Prudence pursued Sir Herbert, asked to work with him and spent
far more time with him than any other nurse. She did admit, grudgingly, that
she was the best nurse and that Sir Herbert asked for her."

"All of which you surely
foresaw." Henry looked at him closely. "It doesn't sound sufficient
to account for your feelings now."

Oliver sat in thought. Outside the
evening breeze carried the scent of late-blooming honeysuckle in through the
open French windows and a flock of starlings massed against the pale sky, then
swirled and settled again somewhere beyond the orchard.

"Are you afraid of
losing?" Henry broke the silence. "You've lost before—and you will
again, unless you prefer to take only certain cases, ones so safe they require
only a conductor through the motions?"

"No, of course not!"
Oliver said in deep disgust. He was not angry; the suggestion was too absurd.

"Are you afraid Sir Herbert is
guilty?"

This time his answer was more
considered. "No. No, I'm not It's a difficult case, no real evidence, but
I believe him. I know what it is like to have a young woman mistake admiration
or gratitude for a romantic devotion. One has absolutely no idea—beyond
perhaps a certain vanity—I will confess to that, reluctantly. And then suddenly
there she is, all heaving bosom and melting eyes, flushed cheeks—and there you
are, horrified, mouth dry, brain racing, and feeling both a victim and a cad,
and wondering how on earth you can escape with both honor and some kind of
dignity."

Henry was smiling so openly he was
on the verge of laughter.

"It's not funny!" Oliver
protested.

"Yes it is—it's delicious. My
dear boy, your sartorial elegance, your beautiful diction, your sheer vanity,
will one day get you into terrible trouble! What is this Sir Herbert like?"

"I am not vain!"

"Yes you are—but it is a small
fault compared with many. And you have redeeming features. Tell me about Sir
Herbert."

"He is not sartorially
elegant," Oliver said a trifle wasp-ishly. "He dresses expensively,
but his taste is extremely mundane, and his figure and deportment are a trifle
portly and lacking in grace.
Substantial
is the word I would
choose."

"Which says more about your
feeling for him than about the man himself," Henry observed. "Is he
vain?"

"Yes. Intellectually vain. I
think it very probable he did not even notice her except as an extremely
efficient adjunct to his own skills. I would be very surprised if he even gave
her emotions a thought. He expects admiration, and I have been led to believe
he always gets it."

"But not guilty?" Henry
wrinkled his brow. "What would he have to lose if she accused him of
impropriety?"

"Not nearly as much as she. No
one of any standing would believe her. And there is no evidence whatever except
her word. His reputation is immaculate."

"Then what disturbs you? Your
client is innocent and you have at least a fighting chance of clearing
him."

Oliver did not answer. The light
was fading a lhtle in the sky, the color deepening as the shadows spread across
the grass.

"Did you behave badly?"

"Yes. I don't know what else I
could have done—but yes, I feel it was badly."

"What did you do?"

"I tore Barrymore to
shreds—her father," Oliver answered quietly. "An honest, decent man
devastated by grief for a daughter he adored, and I did everything I could to
make him believe she was a daydreamer who fantasized about her abilities and
then lied about them to others. I tried to show that she was not the heroine
she seemed, but an unhappy woman who had failed in her dreams and created for
herself an imaginary world where she was cleverer, braver, and more skilled
than she was in truth." He drew in a deep breath. "I could see in his
face I even made him doubt her. God, I loathed doing that! I don't think I have
ever done anything for which I felt grubbier."

"Is it true?" Henry's
voice was gentle.

"I don't know. It could
be," Oliver said furiously. "That isn't the point! I put dirty,
irreverent fingers over the man's dreams! I dragged out the most precious thing
he had, held it up to the public, then smeared it all over with doubt and
ugliness. I could feel the crowd hating me—and the jury— but not as much as I
loathed myself." He laughed abruptly. "I think only Monk equaled the
hold of me as I was leaving and I thought he was going to strike me. He was
white with rage. Looking at his eyes, I was frightened of him." He gave a
shaky laugh as the shame of that moment on the Old Bailey steps came back to
him, the frustration and the self-disgust. "I think if he could have got
away with it, he might have killed me for what I did to Barrymore—and to
Prudence's memory." He stopped, aching for some word of denial, of
comfort.