Colleen McCullough - Morgan’s Run

“How long does it take?” Bess Parker whispered to Richard, eyes big with apprehension; she had lost her child of the gaol fever two days after he was born, and it was a grief to her.

“Not long, is my guess. The court will not sit for more than six hours in a day, if that, yet there are eight of us waiting to be tried. It must happen like a butcher turning out sausages.”

“Oh, I am so frightened!” cried Betty Mason, whose girl-child had been born dead. A grief to her.

Jimmy Price was taken away first, but had not returned when Bess Parker’s turn came; only after Betty Mason had gone did those remaining in the cell realize that once a prisoner’s hearing had concluded, the prisoner apparently went straight back to the gaol.

Sam Day was marched off, leaving Richard and Willy in the cell with Joey Long and Bill Whiting. Several hours went by.

“Dinner time for their lordships,” said the irrepressible Whiting. He licked his lips. “Roast goose, roast beef, roast mutton, flummeries and flans and flawns, pastries and puddens and pies-it looks well for us, Richard! Their lordships’ bellies will be full and their wits fuddled with claret and port.”

“I think that bodes ill,” said Richard, in no mood for jollity. “Their gout will play up, so will their guts.”

“What a Job’s comforter ye are!”

He and Willy were last of all, taken upstairs at half past three by the timepiece on the wall of the court room. The well from the bowels of the hall opened directly into the dock, where he and Willy stood (it had no seats) blinking at the brightness. A javelin man kept them company, his regalia medieval and his pose lethargic. Though the room was not enormous, it did have audience galleries on high; those on its floor all apparently had a role to play in the drama. The two justices sat on a tall dais clad in all the majesty of fur-trimmed crimson robes and full-bottomed wigs. Other court officials sat around and below them, while yet others moved about-which one was his counsel, Mr. James Hyde? Richard had no idea. The jury of twelve men stood in what looked a little like a sheepfold, easing their sore feet by surreptitiously stepping. Richard was aware of their plight, which figured large in every Free Man’s resentment of jury duty from the Tweed to the Channel: no sitting down on the job and no compensation for the loss of a day’s wages. Which encouraged the jury to get its business over and done with as quickly as the judge could say “Gallows!”

Mr. John Trevillian Ceely Trevillian was sitting in the company of a formidable-looking man clothed in the garb of a participant in the drama-robe, tie-back wig, buckles, badges. A different Ceely than any Richard had so far seen; this Ceely was soberly clad in the finest black cloth from head to foot, wore a conservative wig, black kid gloves and the mien of an amiable idiot. Of the mincing laughingstock or the brisk excise defrauder, no sign whatsoever. The Ceely who sat in Gloucester’s city hall was the quintessential dupe. Upon Richard’s entry into the dock he had emitted a shrill little squeak of terror and shrunk against his companion, after which he looked anywhere but in the direction of the dock. At law, Ceely himself was the prosecutor, but his counsel did the work, addressing the jury to tell it of the heinous crime the two felons in the dock had committed; Richard put his manacled hands on the railing, set his feet firmly on the ancient board floor, and listened as the prosecutor extolled the virtues-and idiocies-of this poor harmless person, Mr. Trevillian. There would be, he understood, no miracles in Gloucester today.

Ceely told his story amid sobs, gulps and long pauses to find words, rolling his eyes in his head, sometimes covering his face with his ungloved hands, agitated, trembling, twitching. At the end of it, the jury, impressed by his mental impoverishment and his material prosperity, clearly deemed him the victim of a lewd woman and her irate husband. Which in itself did not necessarily indicate that a deliberate felony had occurred, nor that the note of hand for £500, though extricated by force, was true extortion.

The job of establishing that fell to two witnesses, Joice the hairdresser’s wife, who listened through her wall, and Mr. Dangerfield in the other house, who saw through his wall. Mrs. Joice’s hearing was superlative, and Mr. Dangerfield was able to see a 360° world through a quarter-inch crack. One heard phrases like “Damned bitch! Where is your candle?” and “I will blow your brains out, you damned rascal!”, while the other saw Morgan and Insell threatening Ceely with a hammer and forcing him to write at a desk.

Mr. James Hyde, acting for Richard, turned out to be a tall, thin man who looked much like a raven. He cross-examined well, it seemed with the object of establishing that the three houses near Jacob’s Well contained a nest of gossips who had actually heard and seen extremely little and constructed their stories upon what Ceely had said to them in the lane afterward-followed by the Dangerfields’ sheltering him in their house with Mrs. Joice in attendance.

On one point Ceely could make little headway: the witnesses both testified that Richard had shouted through the door that Mr. Trevillian could have his watch back after Richard had obtained satisfaction. That sounded very much like a wronged husband, even to the jury.

It is ridiculous! thought Richard as the testimony went on and that trip to the Black Horse to fetch liquid refreshments was shifted to the following day. If Willy and I could speak for ourselves, we could establish easily that at the time we were both in the Lamb Inn courtyard. There is only one coach to Bath and it goes at noon and I was supposed to be in Bath, even Ceely says that. Yet they all say I was in Clifton!

During Mrs. Joice’s testimony it came out that she had overheard Richard and Annemarie plotting Annemarie’s assignation with Ceely in their hall-as if, thought Richard, anyone with criminal intent would choose to have such a conversation right next to a thin partition! But the very mention of the word “plot” caused both judge and jury to stiffen.

Mrs. Mary Meredith testified that she had seen the two men in the dock and a woman near Jacob’s Well as she was returning home about eight o’clock in the evening, and recounted hearing talk between them about a watch and Ceely’s having to go to law to get it back. Amazing! At eight o’clock at the end of September no one could have seen facial features farther away than a yard, as Mr. Hyde reminded Mrs. Meredith, much to her confusion.

A faint ray of hope began to suffuse Richard’s gloom; no matter how hard the prosecution tried, the jury still had not made up its mind whether what had happened was deliberate or the result of anger at being cuckolded.

Cousin James-the-druggist and Cousin James-of-the-clergy were called as character witnesses on Richard’s behalf; though the prosecutor made much of their close relationship to the accused, there could be no doubt that two such pillars of probity made a profound impression on the jury. The trouble was that this case, thanks to a defending counsel, was dragging out toward an hour in length, and the jurymen were dying to get off their feet. No one wanted a long case at the end of the day, including the judges.

Mr. James Hyde called Robert Jones as a character witness.

Richard jumped. Robert Jones testifying on his behalf? The smarmer who sucked up to William Thorne and had told Thorne of Willy’s visit to the Excise?

“Do you know the accused, Mr. Jones?” Mr. Hyde asked.

“Oh, aye, both of them.”

“Are they decent, law-abiding men, Mr. Jones?”

“Oh, aye, very.”

“Have they, to your knowledge, ever run foul of the Law?”

“Oh, nay, never.”