Cain His Brother - Anne Perry [145]
“I …” Her eyes blazed with defiance, but there was no way out. She was loath to entrap herself by argument, or excuses which might rebound on her again. She had been caught once.
“Perhaps that has stirred your memory?” Rathbone suggested, carefully ironing all the sarcasm out of his voice.
She said nothing, but he had scored the point, and he knew it from the jury’s faces. Once she had established that she was prepared to evade, or even lie, to protect Caleb, it would prejudice anything she might say in his defense.
“Did you see Angus Stonefield later that day, Miss Hernes?” Rathbone resumed.
She said nothing.
“You must answer the question, Miss Herries,” the judge warned. “If you do not, I shall hold you in contempt of court. That means that I can sentence you to prison until such time as you do answer. And of course the jury are free to take any meaning they will from your silence. Do you understand me?”
“I saw ’im,” she said huskily, and swallowed hard. She stared straight ahead of her, her head rigid so she could not, even in the corner of her eye, see Caleb leaning over the railing of the dock, his eyes on her.
Rathbone affected interest, as if he had no idea what she was going to say.
Now there was total silence in the room.
“At the Folly House Tavern,” she said sullenly.
“What was he doing?”
“Nuffink.”
“Nothing?”
“ ’E were standin’ around, waitin’ fer Caleb, I s’pose. That’s w’ere I told ’im ter be.”
“Did you see Caleb arrive also?”
“No.”
“But he told you earlier that he intended to be there?”
“Not that time special. That’s where ’e said Angus were to go for ’im always. Same place. I didn’t even see ’em together, an’ I never saw ’em quarrel, an’ that’s the truth, whether yer believe me or not!”
“I do believe you, ma’am,” Rathbone conceded. “But did you see Caleb later on that day?”
“No, I didn’t.”
One of the jurors shook his head, another coughed into his handkerchief. There was a rustling in the public benches.
Rathbone turned away from the witness stand, and his glance caught Ebenezer Goode’s and saw him smile ruefully. The case still hovered on the knife’s edge, but however unwillingly, Selina’s evidence might be all it needed to topple it against Caleb. Goode had very little with which to fight, and they both knew it. It would be a desperate gamble to call Caleb himself. Even Goode could not know what he might say. There was a recklessness in the man, a well of emotion too dangerous to tap.
Rathbone turned the full circle before he faced Selina again. His eye caught Hester, near the front of the crowd, and beside her, Enid Ravensbrook, looking pale and tense. Her face was strained with pity and the terrible waiting for the evidence to unfold as they came nearer and nearer to the moment when the hatred and jealousy of years must finally explode in murder. Caleb had already left home when she had married Ravensbrook, but she must still have inherited some feeling for him, sensitive to her husband’s long involvement, to all he had given, the years of struggle and finally the failure.
Certainly she knew both Angus and Genevieve, and was only too familiar with their loss.
Milo Ravensbrook sat on the other side of her, his face so pale he seemed bloodless, his dark eyes and level brows like black gashes on gray-white wax. Could a man see a more hideously painful revelation than that one child had killed the other? He would be left with nothing.
And yet from the moment that Angus’s bloodstained clothes had been identified, was there anything else they could have done, any other course to follow?
Enid turned to him, her expression a mixture of anguish and almost an expectation of hurt, as if she already knew he would reject such intimacy, yet she could not help offering herself. She put her hand on his arm. Even from where Rathbone stood, he could see how thin her fingers were. It was only three and a half weeks since she had passed the crisis of her