Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)

Climbing over the stile into the pasture was even harder than struggling uphill. He slipped on the last rung of the descent, and his bad leg slammed into the ground on the other side. His hands grabbed the splintered wood of the fence rail, just as his limb twisted underneath him. He barely kept from toppling over. Instead, he grasped the post and breathed in.

He could do this.

He could do this.

And perhaps the only reason he was muttering that he could do this in the gray of near dawn was that he couldn’t. The world swayed dizzily about him, even as he clung to the fence. He had no notion of balance any longer. He wasn’t sure which direction was forward. His mind was fuzzing around the edges, everything turning to uniform gray with the pain.

He wasn’t capable of taking another step. It really couldn’t get any worse.

And then, in the darkness of the night, he heard a sound. The stamping of hooves. A challenge, from an animal frightened because its sleep had been interrupted.

Stay away, that noise proclaimed. I am a dangerous stallion.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

KATE COUNTED close to a hundred unfamiliar faces in the courtroom just before eleven the next morning. Word of the trial must have spread overnight. Perhaps the drunkard had not been so drunk. Or more likely, the sergeants who had been on duty the previous day had boasted of the coming spectacle.

Most of the people in the room Kate could identify only by function. The back two rows were taken up by men, pencils at the ready. Gossip-columnists, caricature artists, no doubt all determined that his version of the most sensational trial to grace the police magistrate’s bench would appear in the evening paper. No doubt they would reach their verdict before the magistrate’s gavel even took up the matter.

Kate sat for them, properly polite, her spine straight, her stance relaxed. Nobody would write that she was in tears, or that she’d broken down under the weight of the matter. No doubt there was another set of wagers running about her in the gentlemen’s betting books, and she’d not give those idiots the satisfaction of showing fear.

Besides that, in the front rows sat several people she knew very well.

The Marquess of Blakely and his wife sat on the left. Lord Blakely watched Kate intently. He was not frowning at her—which was a good start. He was peering at her, as if there were something to see.

He sat close to his wife, both of them meticulously dressed in sober attire. But their faces told the story of a sleepless, troubled night.

For once, Kate knew precisely how Lord and Lady Blakely felt.

In the police courts, Harcroft himself was the one who had to prosecute the case. Even with the jury and the crowded courtroom, she could not count on him to tell the truth. In fact, with half of London guaranteed to learn of this through the gossip rags, it was rather a given that he would lie. Despite—or perhaps because of—that, Harcroft looked as if he had slept the sleep of the innocent. If Kate hadn’t already hated him, she would have despised him now.

Beyond that first row sat a smattering of people Kate knew quite well—Lady Bettony, Lord Worthington—and some she knew by sight and name only, from one of the million ton parties.

If they’d cleared away the oaken magistrate’s bench and thrown in an orchestra, this courtroom could have been mistaken for a ball.

But of all the hundred souls packed into this room, not one of them was her husband. She glanced toward the entrance for the seventeenth time. When she did so, she held her chin high, as if she were a lady expecting a morning call.

But, of course, she was. Where was Ned? He’d been riding alone at night. Anything could have happened to him. He might have broken his neck, could have been set upon by footpads. If she’d been thinking clearly the previous evening, she would have insisted that someone accompany him. As if Ned would have brooked any assistance.

Kate met Lord Blakely’s eyes across the crowded courtroom again. And for a second, it was as if all of her greatest fears were coming true. He looked at her, and she could imagine what he was thinking. He was castigating her for not telling him, cursing her for letting him waste his time, shaming her for those days of silence while he searched. He could not be thinking kindly of her.

To her surprise, he gave her one simple nod.

The magistrate entered. A jury was sworn. But instead of looking somber at the prospect of deciding her fate, the men exchanged tight smiles, as if to celebrate their luck, to be deciding one of the most talked-of affairs in all of London. Their apparent glee didn’t make Kate feel better about the likelihood of justice.

And then Harcroft began to speak. In the weeks since his wife’s disappearance, Harcroft had actually done an incredible job of scouring up information—better than Kate had expected. He had brought witnesses—the Yorkshire nursemaid’s husband, who brought along the note sent from the agency Kate had used to find her.