Cain His Brother - Anne Perry [130]
“You’ll burn your feet,” Oliver said critically.
“Scorch the soles of my slippers, perhaps,” Henry argued. He did not ask why Oliver had come. He knew he would be told in time.
Oliver slid a little farther down in the armchair and accepted the claret from the manservant, who went out and closed the door with a quiet snick.
The ash settled in the fire and Henry reached forward and put on another log. There was no sound in the room but the flickering of the fire, no light but the flames and one gas lamp on the far wall. The wind outside was inaudible, as was the first beginning of the rain.
“I’m thinking of getting a new dog,” Henry remarked. “Old Edgemor has some retriever pups. One I like in particular.”
“Good idea,” Oliver said. He was going to have to open the subject himself. “This trial is troubling me.”
“So I gathered.” Henry reached for his pipe and put it in his mouth, but did not bother to light it. He seldom did. “Why? What is not as you expected?”
“Nothing, I suppose.”
“Then what is there to be distressed about?” Henry looked at him with his clear, light-blue eyes, so unlike Oliver’s own, which were very dark, in spite of his fairish hair. “You are off balance. Is it your mind, or your emotions? Are you going to lose when you should win, or win when you should lose?”
Oliver smiled in spite of himself. “Lose when I should win, I think.”
“Summarize the case for me.” He took the pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at Oliver absentmindedly. “And don’t address me as if I were the jury! Just tell me the truth.”
Oliver gave a jerky little laugh, and listed the bare, literal facts as far as he knew them, adding his feelings only as he believed they were relevant to some interpretation and not furnished by evidence. When he had finished he stared at his father waiting for his response.
“This is another one of Monk’s,” Henry observed. “Have you seen Hester again? How is she?”
Oliver found himself uncomfortable. It was not a subject he wished to contemplate, much less discuss.
“It is exceedingly difficult to get a jury to convict for murder without a body,” he said irritably. “But if ever a man did deserve to hang, it is Caleb Stone. The more I hear of Angus, the more I admire him, and the worse Caleb appears. The man is violent, destructive, sadistic, an ingrate.”
“But …” Henry raised his eyebrows, looking at Oliver with piercing gentleness.
“He seems to have not a shred of remorse,” Oliver went on. “Even looking at his brother’s widow, and knowing there are five children, and what will happen to them now—” He stopped.
“Do you doubt his guilt?” Henry asked, sipping his claret.
Oliver picked up his own glass. The firelight shone ruby in it, and the clean, slightly sharp aroma of it filled his head.
“No. He is just so vividly alive. Even when I am not looking at him, which is almost all the time, I am aware of his emotions, his rage … and his pain. And I am aware of his intelligence.”
“And if you win, he will be hanged.”
“Yes.”
“And that offends you?”
“Yes.”
“And if you lose, he will be a free man, guilty, and vindicated.”
“Yes.”
“I cannot help you, except to a quiet evening by the fire and another glass of claret. You already know everything I would say.”
“Yes, of course I do. I suppose I simply do not want to say them to myself alone.” He drank from the glass and the taste of it filled him. At least until it was time to leave, he could let the matter go.
Monk had not been in court. He would be called as a witness, so he could not attend until after he had given evidence, and he had no desire to wait around in corridors catching snippets of news.
He had no further word from Drusilla Wyndham. If she intended drawing the police into the matter of his alleged assault, she had apparently delayed her complaint. He thought it far more likely she knew the futility of such a prosecution, and would ruin him by innuendo, a slower, subtler form of torture, and far more likely to be successful. He would have to wait with the sword hanging over