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By Root 892 0

Caleb might have loved her?” Hester said, raising her eyebrows. “So much that after he had killed Angus, for having taken her away from him, he now felt such remorse, on looking at her face in the courtroom, that he killed himself halfway through the trial? And Lord Ravensbrook allowed him to, and is prepared to conceal it? No.” She shook her head sharply. “She told me she was never Caleb’s woman, and I believe her. She had no reason to lie, and I don’t think she did. Anyway, it makes no sense. If what you are saying were true, he would have written whatever it was he sent for the paper and ink to say. Unless, of course, you think Lord Ravensbrook took it? But why would he?”

Rathbone regarded his port, shining ruby red in the candlelight, but did not touch it.

“You’re right,” he conceded. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“And I don’t see Caleb Stone taking his own life out of remorse, honestly,” Monk added. “There was more than hatred in him. I don’t know what, a terrible emotion that clawed at his heart or his belly, or both, but there was a wild humor in it, a kind of pain that was far subtler than remorse. And does it matter now?” He looked from one to the other of them, but the shadow in his eyes and the sense of unhappiness in him answered the question more vividly than words could have done.

No one bothered to affirm it. It was tangible in the air, the quiet candlelight of the dinner table gleaming on unused silver and winking in the blood-red colors of the untouched port glasses.

“If it was not suicide, then either it was accident or murder,” Rathbone stated. He looked at Hester. “Was it exactly as Ravensbrook said?”

“No.” She was quite positive. “It may have been an accident, but if it was as he said, then why didn’t he cry out when Caleb first attacked him?”

“He didn’t,” Rathbone said slowly. “He can’t have. And according to his own account, he struggled with him for several moments, seconds perhaps, but there was obviously a struggle.”

“In which Lord Ravensbrook tried to save himself from injury,” Monk took up the thread. “And was, in principle, successful. His wounds are minor. But Caleb was killed, by a freak mischance.” He pulled a face.

“If Caleb attacked him, why did he not cry out straightaway?” Hester asked.

“I don’t know. In some desperate hope of ending the matter without the gaolers needing to know?” Rathbone suggested. “It could be damning evidence if it were revealed in court, and even if no one introduced it, Ravensbrook’s injuries would allow the conclusion easily enough.”

“Irrational, in the circumstances,” Monk argued.

“People frequently are irrational,” Hester said. “But I don’t think they work out a chain of thought as complicated as that in the heat of an unexpected attack. Would you, if you were leapt upon when you least thought of such a thing? Would you think of anything more than defending yourself? If there were a weapon involved, and the attacker were younger and stronger than you, and you knew he had already killed one man, and was in danger of being hanged, so he had nothing to lose, even if he were caught, would you even think at all, or just fight for your life?”

Rathbone bit his lip. “If Caleb Stone attacked me, there’d be nothing in my mind but surviving,” he admitted. His face twisted. “But I am not his father.…”

Monk shrugged, but there was a tightness of wounded enthusiasm in his eyes. “When I was chasing him down the river, I didn’t think at all. There was nothing in my mind but a blind determination to catch him. I hardly even felt my own wrenches and bruises until afterwards.”

Rathbone looked at Hester. “Are you sure he didn’t cry out almost immediately, after the initial shock of the attack? It might take a moment in time to ward him off, and collect his wits.”

“He had six separate wounds,” she answered. “But they were all clean. He may well have bruises come up in the next day or two as well, and his clothes were torn a little, as if in a struggle. But Caleb had only one real wound, and that was the slash across his throat which killed him.”

“What are you saying?