Defend and Betray - Anne Perry [183]
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 for once 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 runners tripped over legs and caught their feet in onlookers’ skirts as they scrambled to get out and seize a hansom to report the incredible news.
“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 Randolf. 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 lighly?”
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 Randolf 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?”
“Yes.”
“And did you know who had been abusing him? Please be careful to be precise, Miss Buchan. I do mean know, supposition or deduction will not do.”
“I am aware of that, sir,” she said stiffly. “No, I did not know. But since he normally lived at his own home, not in Carlyon House, I supposed that it was his father, Thaddeus, perpetuating on his son what he himself endured as a child. And I assumed that that was what Alexandra Carlyon discovered, and why she did what she did. No one told me so.”
“And that abuse ceased after the general’s death? Then why did you think it necessary to protect him still?”
“I saw the relationship between him and his grandfather, the looks, the touching, the shame and the excitement. It was exactly the same as before—in the past. I was afraid it was happening again.”
There was utter silence in the room. One could almost hear the creak of corsets as women breathed.
“I see,” Rathbone said quietly. “So you did your best to protect the boy. Why did you not tell someone? That would seem to be a far more effective solution.”
A smile of derision crossed her face and vanished.
“And who would believe me?” For an instant her eyes moved up to the gallery and the motionless forms of Felicia and Randolf, then she looked back at Rathbone. “I’m a domestic servant, accusing a famous and respected gentleman of one of the most vile of crimes. I would be thrown out, and then I wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.”
“What about Mrs. Felicia Carlyon, the