The Silent Cry - Anne Perry [161]
Rathbone glanced at the jurors’ faces and read a sense of different emotions in them. He watched how much their imaginations conceived of the lives that were being described. How many of them, if any, had used such women themselves? What did they feel now? Shame, anger, pity or revulsion? More than half of them looked up to the dock at Rhys, whose face was twisted with emotion, but it was impossible to say what aroused his anger, or the revulsion which was so plain in his features.
Rathbone looked also at Sylvestra Duff and saw her lips puckered with horror as a world opened up in front of her beyond anything she had imagined, women whose lives were so utterly unlike her own they could have belonged to a different species. And yet they lived only a few miles away, in the same city. And her son had used them, could even, for all she knew, have begotten a child upon them.
Beside her, Fidelis Kynaston looked pale but less shocked. There was in her already a knowledge of pain, of the darker side of the world and those who lived in it. This was only a restatement of things she already knew.
On Sylvestra’s other side, Eglantyne Wade was motionless as wave after wave of misery passed over her, things she had never imagined were rehearsed before her in sickening detail.
The following day the stories became more violent. The witnesses still carried the marks of beatings on their blackened and swollen faces, their broken teeth.
Ebenezer Goode hesitated before questioning each one. None of them had recognized their assailants. Every brutal act only added to his case. Why should he challenge any of it? To demonstrate that the women were prostitutes anyway was unnecessary. There was not a man or woman in the room who did not know it and feel their own emotions regarding their trade and its place in society, or in their own personal lives. It was a subject of emotion rather than reason anyway. Words were only a froth on the surface of the deep tide of feeling.
A particular wave of revulsion and anger swelled when the thirteen-year-old Lily Drover testified, still nursing her dislocated shoulder. Haltingly she told Rathbone how both she and her sister had been beaten and kicked. She repeated the grunted words of abuse she had heard, and how she had tried to crawl away and hide in the dark.
Fidelis Kynaston looked so ashen Rathbone thought she suffered more in hearing it than Sylvestra, beside her.
The judge leaned forward, his own face tight with distress.
“Have you not established all you need, Sir Oliver? Surely no more can be necessary. This is a horrifying matter of escalating violence and brutality. What more do you require to show us? Make your point!”
“I have one more victim of rape, my lord. This one was in St. Giles.”
“Very well. I realize you need to establish that your assailants have moved into the relevant area. But make it brief.”
“My lord.” Rathbone called the woman who had been raped and beaten on the night before Christmas Eve. Her face was still discolored. She had difficulty speaking through her broken teeth. Slowly, her eyes closed as she refused to look at the people who were watching her as she told about her terror and pain and humiliation. She began to describe being accosted by three men, how one of them had taken hold of her, how all three had laughed, then one had thrown her to the ground.
In the dock, Rhys was gray-skinned, his eyes so hollow one could almost visualize the skull beneath the flesh. He leaned forward over the rail, his splinted hands stiff, shivering.
The woman described how she had been taunted by the men, called names. One of them had kicked her, told her she was filth, should be got rid of, the human race cleansed of her sort.
In the dock, Rhys