Marie-Louise Hall - Rake's Reform

“You have my word I will do what I can to get the boy released.”

“Why?” Janey asked suddenly, “You are a stranger here and can have no interest in what becomes of Jem.”

Jonathan shrugged his shoulders. “I can never resist a distressed damsel, so long as she is passably pretty, of course,” he added self-mockingly.

“I am not distressed, sir! I am angry! And neither am I passably pretty!”

“No. Any man who considered you merely passable would be lacking in judgment and taste,” he said lazily, his eyes warm and teasing as they met her gaze.

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MARIE-LOUISE HALL

studied history at the University of London, where she met her husband. Now living in rural Aberdeenshire, she has had the ambition since marriage to find time to write. Domestically incompetent, she was thrilled when her husband took over the housework so that she could write. She also works for her husband’s oil industry consultancy and looks after her young son, six cats and three delinquent donkeys.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

The courtroom was small, crowded, but utterly silent as the judge, resplendent in his crimson, put on his black cap and began to intone the words of the death sentence. Above in the gallery, a young woman sat as still and as rigid as the ashen-faced boy who stood in the dock, his hands clenched upon the wooden rail.

Miss Jane Hilton stared disbelievingly at the judge, her hazel eyes ablaze with anger beneath the wide brim of her black straw hat. This was nothing short of barbarism. This could not be happening! Not in England! Not in the supposedly civilised, well-mannered England of King William IV in this year of 1830. And she was not going to let it happen.

She was on her feet before she had stopped to think.

“How can you?” Her question rang out in the hushed room. “What crime has this child committed? Any farmer or labourer in this room could tell you that a rick of poorly cured hay may heat to the point where it catches fire without any assistance.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the more poorly dressed onlookers as every head in the lower part of the courtroom turned and looked upwards, including that of her guardian, Mr Filmore, who regarded her first with astonishment and then with tightlipped fury as he gestured to her furiously to sit down and be silent. The judge’s hooded eyelids lifted as he, too, stared at her with bloodshot blue eyes.

“Silence in the court, madam, or I shall have you removed from the building,” he roared.

“I shall not be silent!” Janey retorted. “I know Jem Avery is not guilty of arson. On the morning and at the same time as he is supposed to have set the rick alight, I passed him upon the road some five miles from the Pettridges Home Farm yard.”

“Indeed?” The judge’s bushy white brows lifted. “I trust you acquainted the defence counsel with this—” he paused “—alleged meeting.”

“Of course I did, but—” Janey began.

“M’lud?” The defence counsel stepped forward and said something in an undertone to the judge. American, unstable and prone to female fancies were the only words which Janey caught, but it was enough, combined with the smug smile of her guardian, to tell her why she had not been called as a witness.

“It seems your evidence was deemed unreliable,” the judge said, lifting his head again to look down his long nose at Janey. “So I must ask you a second time to be silent.”

“I will not!” Janey repeated furiously. “I have seen better justice administered by a lynch mob in St Louis than I have here today.”

“Then perhaps you had better go back there,” the judge sneered, earning sycophantic smiles from both defence and prosecution counsels, who were already surreptitiously shuffling their papers together. “Gentlemen,” he said laconically to two of the ushers who stood at the back of the gallery, “remove that woman from the courtroom.”

“I suppose I should not have lost my temper.” Janey sighed heavily a few minutes later as she stood next to her maid upon the steps of the courthouse, attempting to push strands of her flyaway fair hair back into the rather workmanlike chignon in which it was usually confined. “But that judge is a pompous, port-sodden old fool!”

“Yes, miss,” Kate agreed as she handed her the wide-brimmed hat which had become dislodged from Janey’s head during her somewhat undignified exit from the courtroom between the two ushers.

“It makes me so angry, Kate,” Janey went on as she rammed the hat down on her head. “Jem Avery has never hurt a soul in his life. The worse he has ever done is poach a rabbit or two to prevent his family from starving. I know he did not fire that rick, though Mr Filmore gave him reason enough in the way he treated him! It is monstrous to even suggest he should hang.”

“I know, miss,” Kate said sympathetically. “And there was not a Christian person in that room who did not agree with you.”

“Then why didn’t they all get up and say so!” Janey said, her American drawl more pronounced as it always was when she was angry. “Why don’t they demand a retrial?”

“Because that’s just not how it’s done here, miss. People don’t dare make a fuss, for fear they’ll lose their places or trade if they’re in business. You have to know someone, one of them…if Jem were a Duke’s son, then it would be different.”

“I know,” Janey said gratingly as she retied the grey silk ribbons on her hat beneath her pointed chin. She was almost as angry with herself as she was with the judge. After four years in England, she should have known better than to expect an instant public protest. Kate was right. That wasn’t how things were done here in this genteel and ancient English cathedral city, where the law was enforced to the letter and property valued above lives.

She glanced upwards at the serene, awesome spire of the nearby cathedral, which seemed almost to reach the grey November clouds, and sighed. Even the buildings in this corner of England seemed to have that air of superior certainty which she had encountered in so many of her English acquaintances.

God in his Heaven and everything and everyone in their proper place, including Miss Jane Hilton, colonial nobody, she thought, feeling a sudden overwhelming homesickness for the handful of ramshackle timber dwellings strung out along a muddy track, half a world away. That had been the nearest to a town she had known, until her parents’ death had forced her to return to St Louis, where her grandfather had found her.

The log cabins in which she had spent her childhood had had no attractions with which to rival either the medieval splendour of the cathedral or the exuberant prosperity of the timbered Tudor merchant’s houses that clustered about its close. And the people who had lived in them had often been rough and illiterate. But they would not have condemned a boy like Jem for the loss of a hayrick, which had in all probability set alight by itself.