Defend and Betray

There was a rustle and a sigh around the court. A dozen people nudged each other. The expected revelation had not come… not yet.

Lovat-Smith rose and sauntered over to Edith, hands in his pockets.

“Mrs. Sobell, tell me honestly, much as you may sympathize with your sister-in-law, has any of what you have said the slightest bearing on the tragedy of your brother's death?”

She hesitated, glancing at Rathbone.

“No, Mrs. Sobell,” Lovat-Smith cautioned sharply. “Answer for yourself, please! Can you tell me any relation between what you have said about your nephew's very natural confusion and distress over his father's murder, and his momer's confession and arrest, and this diverting but totally irrelevant quarrel between two of your domestics?” He waved his hands airily, dismissing it, “And the cause at trial: namely whether Alexandra Carlyon is guilty or not guilty of murdering her husband, your brother? I remind you, in case after all this taradiddle you, like the rest of us, are close to forgetting.”

He had gone too far. He had trivialized the tragedy.

“I don't know, Mr. Lovat-Smith,” she said with a sudden return of composure, her voice now grim and with a hard edge. “As you have just said, we are here to discover the truth, not to assess it beforehand. I don't know why Alexandra did what she did, and I wish to know. It has to matter.”

“Indeed.” Lovat-Smith gave in gracefully. He had sufficient instinct to recognize an error and cease it immediately. “It does not alter facts, but of course it matters, Mrs. Sobell. I have no further questions. Thank you.”

“Mr. Rathbone?” the judge asked.

“I have no further questions, thank you, my lord.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Sobell, you may go.”

Rathbone stood in the center of the very small open space in front of the witness box.

“I call Miss Catriona Buchan.”

Miss Buchan came to the witness box looking very pale, her face even more gaunt than before, her thin back stiff and her eyes straight forward, as if she were a French aristocrat passing through the old women knitting at the foot of the guillotine. She mounted the stairs unaided, holding her skirts in from the sides, and at the top turned and faced the court. She swore to tell the truth, and regarded Rathbone as though he were an executioner.

Rathbone found himself admiring her as much as anyone he had ever faced across that small space of floor.

“Miss Buchan, I realize what this is going to cost you, and I am not unmindful of your sacrifice, nevertheless I hope you understand that in the cause of justice I have no alternative?”

“Of course I do,” she agreed with a crisp voice. The strain in it did not cause her to falter, only to sound a little more clipped than usual, a little higher in pitch, as if her throat were tight. “I would not answer did I not understand that!”

“Indeed. Do you remember quarreling with the cook at Carlyon House some three weeks ago?”

“I do. She is a good enough cook, but a stupid woman.”

“In what way stupid, Miss Buchan?”

“She imagines all ills can be treated with good regular meals and that if you only eat right everything else will sort itself out.”

“A shortsighted view. What did you quarrel about on that occasion, Miss Buchan?”

Her chin lifted a little higher.

“Master Cassian. She said I was confusing the child by telling him his mother was not a wicked woman, and that she still loved him.”

In the dock Alexandra was so still it seemed she could not even be breathing. Her eyes never left Miss Buchan's face and she barely blinked.

“Is that all?” Rathbone asked.

Miss Buchan took a deep breath, her thin chest rising and felling. “No-she also said I followed the boy around too much, not leaving him alone.”

“Did you follow the boy around, Miss Buchan?”

She hesitated only a moment. “Yes.”

“Why?” He kept his voice level, as if the question were not especially important.

“To do what I could to prevent him being abused anymore.”

“Abused? Was someone mistreating him? In what way?”

“I believe the word is sodomy, Mr. Rathbone,” she said with only the slightest tremor.

There was a gasp in the court as hundreds of throats drew in breath.

Alexandra covered her face with her hands.

The jury froze in their seats, eyes wide, faces aghast.

In the front row of the gallery Randolph Carlyon sat immobile as stone. Felicia's veiled head jerked up and her knuckles were white on the rail in front of her. Edith, now sitting beside mem, looked as if she had been struck.

Even the judge stiffened and turned to look up at Alexandra. Lovat-Smith stared at Rathbone, his face slack with amazement.

Rathbone waited several seconds before he spoke.

“Someone in the house was sodomizing the child?” He said it very quietly, but the peculiar quality of his voice and his exquisite diction made every word audible even at the very back of the gallery.

“Yes,” Miss Buchan answered, looking at no one but him.

“How do you know that, Miss Buchan? Did you see it happen?”

“I did not see it this time-but I have in the past, when Thaddeus Carlyon himself was a child,” she said. “And I knew the signs. I knew the look in a child's face, the sly pleasure, the fear mixed with exultancy, the flirting and the shame, the self-possession one minute, then the terror of losing his mother's love if she knew, the hatred of having to keep it a secret, and the pride of having a secret-and then crying in the night, and not being able to tell anyone why- and the total and overwhelming loneliness…”

Alexandra had lifted her face. She looked ashen, her body rigid with anguish.

The jury sat immobile, eyes horrified, skin suddenly pale.

The judge looked at Lovat-Smith, but forpnce he did not exercise his right to object to the vividness of her evidence, unsupported by any provable fact. His dark face looked blurred with shock.

“Miss Buchan,” Rathbone continued softly. “You seem to have a vivid appreciation of what it is like. How is that?”

“Because I saw it in Thaddeus-General Carlyon-when he was a child. His father abused him.”

There was such a gasp of horror around the room, a clamor of voices in amazement and protest, that she was obliged to stop.

In the gallery newspaper ru

“Order!” the judge commanded, banging his gavel violently on his bench. “Order! Or I shall clear the court!”

Very slowly the room subsided. The jury had all turned to look at Randolph. Now again they faced Miss Buchan.

“That is a desperately serious thing to charge, Miss Buchan,” Rathbone said quietly. “You must be very certain that what you say is true?”

“Of course I am.” She answered him with the first and only trace of bitterness in her voice. “I have served the Carlyon family since I was twenty-four, when I came to look after Master Thaddeus. That is over forty years. There is nowhere else I can go now-and they will hardly give me a roof over my head in my old age after this. Does anyone imagine I do it lightly?”

Rathbone glanced for only a second at the jury's faces, and saw there the conflict of horror, disgust, anger, pity, and confusion that he had expected. She was a woman caught between betraying her employers, with its irreparable consequences to her, or betraying her conscience, and a child who had no one else to speak for him. The jurors were of a servant-keeping class, or they would not be jurors. Yet few of them were of position sufficient to have governesses. They were torn in loyalties, social ambition, and tearing pity.

“I know that, Miss Buchan,” Rathbone said with a ghost of a smile. “I want to be sure that the court appreciates it also. Please continue. You were aware of the sodomy committed by Colonel Randolph Carlyon upon his son, Thaddeus. You saw the same signs of abuse in young Cassian Carlyon, and you were afraid for him. Is that correct?”