Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

Libby Hatch never looked up. Sensing what was happening, the Doctor moved quickly for the gate in the railing; but when Clara saw him, her anguish only appeared to get worse, and she ran past him down the center aisle to Mr. and Mrs. Weston, who rushed her out of first the room and then the building.

The judge had already departed; and as the jury moved to do the same, Mr. Darrow got Libby to her feet and moved her in the direction of the side door down to her cell. But before either she or jury had exited, she began to wail, “She doesn’t remember! She doesn’t remember, how can you expect her to, she’s just a child! Oh, my poor Clara, my poor baby!”

At that Mr. Darrow turned to the jury box, looking uneasy; but the sight of their confused faces seemed to reassure him, and he gave the guard who’d been standing behind Iphegeneia Blaylock the okay to take his client on downstairs.

With things finally settling down, Mr. Picton made his way over to the Doctor. The look what they exchanged indicated nothing good, and I certainly didn’t have any trouble understanding why. The rest of our group crowded round, also looking deeply troubled; only Mr. Moore was scratching his head.

“Well,” he said, “if you ask me, Vanderbilt’s throwing his money away. Imagine trying to bully an eight-year-old girl like that! Darrow must be crazy! Hell, even her own mother -” Then he suddenly stopped: watching the rest of our faces, he finally realized what we’d already grasped. “Dammit!” he seethed quietly, with a stamp of his foot. “I hate being the last one to get these things! He planned the whole scene, didn’t he?”

“Son of a bitch,” Marcus said, more amazed than angry. “He took an unmitigated disaster for his client and turned it into a possible advantage.”

“And she played her part perfectly,” Mr. Picton said regretfully. Then he turned to Mr. Moore. “Men like Vanderbilt do not maintain their stations in life by making stupid choices, John.” He hissed once and slapped at the railing. “What the hell does Darrow care if people think he’s callous, if at the same time he can make the jury believe that Libby genuinely loves her daughter, and wouldn’t do anything to hurt her?”

I looked up at the Doctor, whose face had gone a little pale. He turned to stare at the mahogany doors, as if he thought Clara might come back into the room; but all he saw, all any of us saw, was the crowd filing out, some of them turning back to give our group what might politely be called very unsympathetic glances. Feeling for his chair, the Doctor swayed back and then sat on it, his features suddenly going very ashen: the kind of ashen they’d gone, I realized with some dread, when he’d gotten the news about Paulie McPherson.

As I stood there watching him, I felt a little tug at my arm, and turned to find El Niño giving me a grave look.

“Señorito Stevie,” he said, trying not to be heard by the others, “this is not a good thing.”

“No,” I answered, “it ain’t.”

The aborigine considered that, and then nodded, straightened his white silk tie, and put his hands to his hips. “This man Darrow-you are certain I should not kill him?”

“Actually,” I answered, shaking my head, “I’m beginning to wonder…”

Spirits were very depressed around Mr. Picton’s house that night, all the more so because at the start of the day we’d figured that the afternoon’s events would put us pretty firmly in control of the case. Instead, the clever Mr. Darrow had battled us to what amounted to a draw, or maybe worse: he’d made Clara look unsure and confused, and he’d planted the idea that her confidence and maybe even her story had been the Doctor’s work, not her own. True, the facts as she’d recalled them worked to our favor; but as anybody who’s ever been involved with the law will tell you, facts aren’t always or even usually what decides a case. And so we didn’t talk much during dinner, the adults putting most of their energy into making another good-sized dent in Mr. Picton’s wine cellar. After the meal Marcus and Mr. Moore took the trolley on up to Saratoga to try to get an idea of what the general public’s reaction to Clara’s testimony’d been-though the answer to that question seemed pretty obvious.

As for me, I found that nightfall brought more worries about Kat. Ana Linares was still on my mind, too, as she was on everybody else’s; but the thought of what would happen if Libby got off, went back to New York, and found Kat trying to protect the baby tugged at my heart and my stomach in a way what I found I just couldn’t control. After dinner I went for a long walk, and when I came back I just sat out on the front porch of the house, still trying to think my way out of what I was feeling by telling myself that Kat should’ve already left New York, that she only had herself to blame for her new predicament. But it didn’t really work. The more I considered the problem, the more it brought me to a state of mind what was typical, when it came to my dealings with Kat: a kind of frustrated sadness, and underneath it a sense that somehow I was to blame for at least part of the situation.

Wrapped up in such cogitations and emotions, I barely noticed the sound of the screen door opening behind me. I knew it was the Doctor: he’d been able to read my worried face at dinner, and it would’ve been like him to want to make sure I was all right. I didn’t feel much like talking-as usual, the subject of Kat only made me feel stupid when I discussed it with other people-and so I was grateful when he just sat beside me and didn’t say a thing. We listened to the crickets for a time, and traded a few short comments about a swarm of fireflies what were giving a good imitation of the starry sky above us out on Mr. Picton’s front lawn. Other than that, though, we stayed wrapped up in our separate worries.

It was plain what the Doctor was thinking: the moment when Clara Hatch’d run past him and out the door of the courtroom had been a terrible one, and’d caused him to wonder whether he’d done right by the little girl, or if he hadn’t, in fact, been using her for his own purposes instead of helping her. There wasn’t anything I could tell him-I honestly didn’t know how I felt about it. Maybe silence and forgetting would’ve been better, part of me thought, for somebody like Clara Hatch; maybe facing the devils of your past, especially at such a young age, was just a painful waste; maybe the key to life, despite everything the Doctor believed and’d spent his life working on, was to just put the ugliness what you encounter-what every person encounters-behind you, and get on with things. Maybe memory was just a wicked curse, and the kind of mind what could wipe out painful recollections a blessing. Maybe…

We were still sitting there on the porch when Mr. Moore and Marcus came wandering up. Catching sight of them, the Doctor stood and called out, “Did you see White?”

Mr. Moore nodded, holding up a small envelope. “We saw him.” They reached the steps, and Mr. Moore handed the envelope to the Doctor. “He didn’t have much to say, though.”

“There’s more,” Marcus added, as the rest of our group, drawn by the returning men’s voices, came out onto the porch. “Several other guests arrived at the Grand Union today-courtesy of Mr. Vanderbilt.”

“Defense witnesses?” Miss Howard asked.

Marcus nodded, then looked to his brother. “They’re bringing in Hamilton, Lucius.”

The younger Isaacson’s eyes went wide. “ Hamilton ? You’re joking!”

Marcus shook his head as Mr. Picton asked, “And who is ‘Hamilton’?”

“ Doctor Albert Hamilton, of Auburn, New York,” Marcus said. “Though there’s no proof that he actually has a doctorate of any kind. He used to sell patent medicine. Now he passes himself off as an expert in everything from ballistics to toxicology to anatomy. A complete charlatan-but he’s made quite a name for himself as a legal expert, and he’s fooled a lot of smart people. Sent a lot of innocent ones to the gallows, too.”