Pentecost Alley - Anne Perry [110]
Perhaps there was nothing more to do than speak quietly, look at him and meet his eyes without contempt and without judgment, simply as another human being aware of his terror and caring about it.
As Pitt stared across the courtroom at the inexorable process of the law, there was a ruthlessness about it which frightened him also. The wigs and gowns seemed as much masks for the men behind them as symbols of the majesty of justice. It was supposed to be anonymous, but it seemed merely inhuman.
There was very little defense Costigan’s lawyer could offer. He was young, but he made a considerable effort at suggesting mitigating circumstances, a woman who was greedy and who cheated, even by the standards of behavior accepted by her own trade. He suggested it was a quarrel which had gone beyond control. Costigan had not meant to kill her, only to frighten her and dissuade her from her behavior, bring her back to their bargain. When he saw that she was insensible, he had panicked and thrown water over her to try, vainly, to bring her back to consciousness, not realizing at first that he had killed her.
The broken bones, the dislocations?
The cruelty and perversion of a previous customer.
No one believed it.
The verdict was never truly in doubt. Pitt knew that, looking at the jurors’ faces. Costigan must have known it too.
The judge listened, picked up his black cap and pronounced the sentence of death.
Pitt left the courtroom without any sense of achievement, simply a relief that it was finished. He would never know all that had happened, never know who had placed Finlay FitzJames’s belongings in the room in Pentecost Alley or why so many lies were told about them. He would never know what thoughts were so harrowing in the mind of Jago Jones.
After the statutory three weeks Albert Costigan was hanged. The newspapers reported it but made no further comment.
The Sunday after that Pitt was in the Park with Charlotte and the children. Jemima was dressed in her very best frock, Daniel in a smart new navy-and-white suit. It was mid-October and the leaves were beginning to turn. The chestnuts, the first to break into bud in spring, were already limpid gold. The softer sunlight of early autumn flickered through them. The beeches showed fans of bronze amid the green. It would not be long till the first frosts, the raking up of leaves and the smell of wood smoke as bonfires consumed the waste. In the country, rose hips would be scarlet in the hedges, and hawthorn berries crimson. The grass would not need cutting anymore.
Pitt and Charlotte walked slowly side by side, indistinguishable from a hundred other couples enjoying one of the last really warm days of the year. The children ran around, laughing and chasing each other, largely pointlessly, simply because they had energy and it was fun. Daniel found a stick and threw it for a puppy that was dancing around them, apparently lost by its owner, at least for the time being. The dog ran for it and brought it back triumphantly. Jemima seized the stick and took a turn, hurling it as far as she could.
Over in the distance near the road a barrel organ was playing a popular tune. A running patterer abandoned the news and sat on the grass eating a sandwich he had just bought from a peddler a hundred yards farther along. An old man sucked on a pipe, his eyes closed. Two housemaids on their day off told each other tall stories and giggled. A lawyer’s clerk lay under a tree and read a “penny dreadful” magazine.
Charlotte took Pitt’s arm and walked a little closer. He shortened his step so she could keep pace with him.
It was several minutes before Pitt recognized in the distance, striding across the grass, the upright, military figure of John Cornwallis making his way purposefully between