Raven's Bride (16 page)

Anna felt a hot tide of shame wash over her. She would not, for all the world, have it known he had visited her, in her house, that night. Her sin was between her and God—not for the greedy ears of those who wished her and her betrothed harm.

Lord Ravensbourne’s eyes sought Anna’s. His look caressed her and promised her his silence. “That is my own affair.”

The justice motioned to the constable, who brought forth a richly chased dagger. He took it in his hand and held it out for Lord Ravensbourne’s inspection, before passing it to the members of the jury. They looked with some interest at the patterned hilt and the bloodstains on the blade and passed it back again.

“
Is this your dagger?”

Even at the distance she was, Anna recognized her betrothed’s dagger, the gold-wrought hilt crusted with darkened blood.

He gave it a cursory glance. “It looks like mine, indeed, but I was carrying no weapon that night.”

The justice continued firing questions with his staccato voice. “It was found in the body of the murdered man. How did it get there?”

“I do not know.”

“And you will not say why you were out that night?”

“I will not, but my purpose was innocent, and naught to do with this matter.”

“You fought with this man. Your dagger was found in his body. And yet you persist in telling me of your innocence? I grow tired of these games. Have you any witnesses to call in your defense?”

“I am innocent. I need no witnesses to attest to the fact.”

“Have you nothing more to say in your defense?”

“The squire deserved to die many times over, but I am innocent of his death.”

A dead silence hung in the room when Lord Ravensbourne finished speaking. Anna could not breathe. With desperate eyes, she watched the members of the jury put their heads together and confer briefly.

Their decision was soon made.

The foreman of the jury, a working man in his smock, spoke the sentence. “Any man could have done the deed,” he said stoutly. “Besides, the murdered man had no proper business in the vicinity that we know of. We mislike his loitering in the darkness and have concluded it was for no honest purpose. We find Lord Ravensbourne not guilty of the foul murder of Squire Grantley. Even if he struck the fatal blow, we find that it was justified in self-defense, and so find him not guilty.”

Charlotte gave a squeal of joy. Mrs. Woodleigh sighed happily. Anna wanted to rush over and kiss the foreman of the jury, but she contented herself with clapping her hands together in joyous agreement.

The justice was less impressed with their verdict. He leaped from his seat, his face contorted so with fury that Anna, despite her joy, winced under his onslaught. “You find what?”

“We find the accused not guilty, neither in word nor in deed.”

The justice sat again, steepled his hands together, and took several deep breaths. “This is a travesty of justice,” he said, in a voice that shook with suppressed anger. “I will not allow it. Constable take the jury away to prison. They can reconsider their verdict from the comfort of their cells until they are prepared to do what is just and right.”

There was a chorus of protest from the jury. One of them stood up and shook his fists at the justice, shouting furiously at him.

The justice stood firm. He waved on the hesitant constable and his band. “Take them away.”

The members of the jury growled a protest, but started to move along after the constable, throwing dark looks at the justice as they went.

“And one other thing,” the justice said, as they reached the door, “sequester them together in one cell apart from the other prisoners, and do not give them any food or water. That way we will ensure a speedy end to this rebellion against law and order.”

The growls of protest became roars of outrage. The jury broke away from the constable and his men, and huddled together in a corner, where a furious debate took place. Anna held her breath as they argued, hoping against hope they would stand up for what they believed in and let Lord Ravensbourne go free.

Her hopes were dashed when the foreman of the jury stepped out from the others. “We would like to reconsider our decision.” Two of the jury voiced a furious protest, but were quickly hushed by the others. “After due consideration of the weighty evidence against the prisoner, we find him guilty as charged.”

“Good.” The justice’s voice was oily in its unctuousness. “You may go sit down again. You have saved yourselves much pain by acting righteously in this matter. Constable, escort the jury back to their seats.”

He turned to Lord Ravensbourne again, spit dribbling down his chin in his eagerness to pass judgment. “Through due process of the law, you have been found guilty by this jury of upright and honest men. We have no other course open to you but to pronounce you guilty of the crime of murder. You shall be hanged by the neck until dead. Constable, take him away.”

Anna felt as though she would die to have him snatched away from her again, when, just moments before, she had rejoiced in his safety. She could not hold her tongue for another moment. She stood up and called out in the middle of the court. “As God is my witness, he was with me last night in my chamber,” she cried, as the constable began to wind a coil of rope around Lord Ravensbourne’s wrists, pinning his hands behind his back so tightly that the rope cut cruelly into his skin. “Last night we were betrothed. He was bent on marriage, not murder. He did not kill the squire.”

The justice dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Silence. The jury has spoken, and sentence has been passed. I will not revoke it on the word of a self-confessed strumpet.”

Lord Ravensbourne moved as if to strike the justice, but the constable’s men held him so tightly he could not budge an inch. “She is no strumpet,” he hissed between his teeth. “She is my wife.”

The justice grinned, showing his rotten, blackened stumps of teeth. “And will soon be your widow.

Chapter Eight

Lord Ravensbourne sat alone in his ice-cold cell as darkness fell around him, preparing himself for death. Outside his cell he heard a bottle smash against the stone floor and some drunken shouts of protest. His guards were certainly enjoying themselves, but he was in no mood to sympathize with them in their revelry. The prospect of death, he had recently discovered, had a remarkably chilling effect on one’s soul.

He held out no hope that his sentence would be reversed. Justice was dealt with swiftly in this part of the country. He had but a few days to live—ten or twelve at the most, he reckoned. The death Squire Grantley demanded that a man be hanged for his murder. Unfortunately, justice didn’t demand the right man hang.

He had begged pen and ink from the constable and written to the king that afternoon, asking him for a pardon, but more to go through the motions of trying to save his own life than from any real hope. The king had much on his mind and tended to be forgetful of his friends when they weren’t immediately in front of him and ready to joke and carouse with.

The king would probably never bother to read his letter. Or if he did, it would likely be too late, and his corpse would already be rotting on a gibbet somewhere on a crossroads to frighten travelers and feed the crows.

He shivered in the icy air of his cell. He was only scantily dressed and he had no blanket to wrap himself in, or fire to warm himself by. He had not even been allowed a rush taper to keep him company and lighten the gloom. The cold and the night bothered him little, though, when compared to the prospect that lay before him. Death was colder and blacker by far than the darkest midwinter night, and after death, there was no morning.

He got to his feet and paced up and down his tiny cell. Three strides, halt, turn, and three strides back again. He was lucky he had it to himself. The last batch of law-breakers had been turned off only a few days ago, he had been told, and he had the honor of being the first new occupant.

Not for long, though. Once enough death sentences had been passed to make their turning-off worth the hangman’s hire, he, too, would go his way with all the rest, to be wedded to the ropemaker’s daughter.

Damn it, but he was not ready for death to come a-calling. He had too much to live for.

He needed to make sure Charlotte married well and was settled in life. She was too inclined to let her heart rule her head, and her caprices to rule her heart. He needed to oversee the planting of the southern-facing field at the eastern end of his lands—the rogue of his steward last season had left stones as big as a man’s fist in the way of the plough, and the harvest had been a scanty one, when it should have been more bountiful than that from any two of his other fields together.

Most of all, he needed to see Anna. He needed to touch her, to hold her in his arms and to feel the beating of her heart against his own. He had only just discovered the joy of truly loving, and of being loved in return, and his need for her warmth and her joy was a like a craving in his mind and in his heart and in every part of his body, which he could not ignore.

Were it not for Anna, he might almost be able to reconcile himself to his death, unjust though it may be. But to die before he had held Anna in his arms one more time, before he had truly made her his own in word and in deed? Surely God could not be so cruel as to demand such a sacrifice from him.

Little did the justice care that he had been falsely accused and wrongly sentenced. The justice had
wanted
to believe in his guilt. After all, who makes a better murderer to a frugal and pious merchant than a landed lord and a courtier to a dissolute and spendthrift king?

He would not go tamely to his death to satisfy any man’s jealousy and lust for revenge. If only he knew who had borne false witness against him, he would take that knave on the journey to the afterlife with him and be content.

There could be no witnesses to an attack which never happened. The so-called witness was a liar and a knave. And, most probably, he was also the one who had struck the fatal blow himself and thrown the blame for the murder elsewhere to save his own skin.

His own dagger had been used to kill the man, to add credence to the real murderer’s story. It must have been part of a deliberate plan and plotted by a member of his own household or one of his neighbors. Any number of people could have stolen his dagger from his chamber on the night of the ball and used it for the murder.

To have any hope of saving his own neck, he needed to find out who had done it, and what they had hoped to gain by his discredit or his death.

But in the meantime, he would prepare to meet his Maker with as good a grace as he could muster.

It had been pitch black in his cell for some time before he fell into a fitful sleep, punctuated by nightmares of bodies covered in blood and the wrathful finger of God accusing him of all manner of horrors.

He was awakened when the door to his cell swung open and a shaft of light from a lantern held by a lad in tattered breeches and a jerkin several sizes too large for him fell directly on to his eyes. He sat up with a start, cursing and rubbing his eyes.

“Hush,” said a voice he knew only too well. “Do not make a sound, or we are all lost.”

He was seeing visions. Either that, or he was already dead and in heaven with his love. “Anna?” he asked, barely moving the air with his soft whisper. “Is it really you? Here?”

She held her finger to her lips. “Hurry. We do not have long.”

He needed no further urging, but jumped instantly to his feet and wrapped the thin woolen cloak on which he had been lying around his shoulders.

She pressed the hilt of a sword into his hand, and he grasped it tightly in his fist. “Just in case our plans go awry. Use it to save yourself, if you can.”

He took pleasure in the feel of the cold steel in his hand. God’s blood, but he would not be taken again now he had the taste of freedom again in his mouth. He would rather die an honest death as a man of valor, with his love at his side, than hang alone as a thief and a rogue.

“The guards?” he whispered, as she hesitated just outside the door. “Where are they?”

Anna gestured along the corridor to the right. “Charlotte took them wine early this evening. They have been drinking for hours.”

His sister, too, had joined in the plot to rescue him? If he ever made it out alive, he would buy her as many bonnets as she could ever want, and not begrudge her a single one. “Charlotte is drinking with them?”

Anna grinned. “She makes a fine, strapping, young lad. She swaggers just like George, the stable boy, does, and can hold her liquor with the best of them.”

There was a sudden noise of footsteps, and they stopped still, before shrinking back into a dark doorway to hide themselves as best they could.

A guard staggered drunkenly by them and out through the door at the end of the corridor. They heard him relieve himself against the wall and then stumble back in again. The two of them kept as still as church statues, and he passed by them again, without seeing them.

They waited until all sound of his footsteps had died away before creeping into the corridor again. Lord Ravensbourne’s heart was still pounding with fear—not for himself but for Anna and Charlotte. If they were caught helping him break out of jail, they would hang alongside him, despite their sex. “You have risked your lives to come here.”