The Sins of the Wolf - Anne Perry [147]
For a moment Gilfeather was startled. He had been fought with before, but not in these terms.
There was a gasp and a sigh of suspended breath. A journalist broke his pencil. One of the jurors choked.
“Oh God!” Rathbone said inaudibly.
The judge reached for his gavel, and mistook the distance. His fingers closed on nothing.
In the gallery Monk smiled, and his stomach knotted inside him with grief.
“Only the right person will do, Miss Latterly,” Gilfeather said angrily, his hair standing on end. “But all the evidence says that that is you. If it is not, pray tell me who is it?”
“I do not know, sir, or I should already have told you,” Hester answered him.
Argyll rose to his feet at last.
“My lord, if my learned friend has questions for Miss Latterly, he should put them to her. If not—although she seems well able to defend herself—this baiting is unseemly, and not the purpose of this court.”
The judge looked at him sourly, then turned to Gilfeather.
“Mr. Gilfeather, please come to the point, sir. What is it you wish to ask?”
Gilfeather glared first at Argyll, then at the judge. Finally he turned to Hester.
“Miss Nightingale has painted you as a ministering angel, tending the sick regardless of your own sufferings.” This time he could not entirely keep the sarcasm from his tone. “She would have us envision you passing gently between the hospital beds wiping a fevered brow, bandaging a wound; or else braving the battlefield to perform operations yourself by the light of a flickering torch.” His voice grew louder. “But in truth, madam, was it not a rough life, most of it spent with soldiers and camp followers, women of low degree and even lower morals?”
Vivid memories surged back into her mind.
“Many camp followers are soldiers’ wives, sir, and their humble birth equals that of their husbands,” she said angrily. “They work and wash for them, and care for them when they are sick. Someone must do these things. And if the men are good enough to die for us in our bloody battles, then they are worthy of our support when we are safe in our own houses at home. And if you are suggesting that Miss Nightingale, or any of her nurses, were army whores, then—”
There was a roar of anger from the gallery. One man rose to his feet and shook his fist at Gilfeather.
The judge banged his gavel furiously and was totally ignored.
Rathbone sank his head in his hands and slid farther down in his chair.
Argyll swiveled around and said something to him, his expression incredulous and accusing.
Henry Rathbone closed his eyes and offered up a silent prayer.
Gilfeather abandoned that line of attack altogether and tried another.
“How many men have you seen die, Miss Latterly?” he shouted above the general clamor.
“Silence!” the judge said furiously. “I will have order in court! Silence! Or I shall have the gallery cleared!”
The noise subsided almost immediately. No one wished to be removed.
“How many men, Miss Latterly?” Gilfeather repeated when the uproar had finally abated.
“You must answer,” the judge warned even before she had had time to speak.
“I don’t know. I never thought to count. Each one was a person, not a number.”
“But a great many?” Gilfeather persisted.
“Yes, I am afraid so.”
“So you are accustomed to death; it does not frighten you, or appall you, as it might most people?”
“All people who care for the sick become accustomed to death, sir. But one never ceases to grieve.”
“You are argumentative, madam! You lack the gentleness of manner and the delicacy, the humility, which is the chief ornament of your sex.”
“Perhaps,” she responded. “But you are trying to make people believe that I hold life cheaply, that I have somehow become inured to the death of others, and it is not true. I did not kill Mrs. Farraline, or anybody else. I am far more grieved by her loss than you are.”