“He Has Hours Left,” the Doctor Said—Then Everyone Abandoned the Dying Duke, Unaware a Stranger Had Found Proof His Crash Was Deliberate

Chapter 9

The sessions house at Heatheridge was a low stone building with a smell of ink and damp wool, and the courtroom was full to the windows by the time they carried Edmund in. He walked the length of the aisle on his stick, with Clara at his elbow and Gideon at his other side, and the room went quiet in a particular way that told him the whole county had come to watch a duke go mad.

The commissioner was a dry, patient man named Justice Waring, who looked at Edmund for a long moment and then looked at the petition, and seemed to be comparing the two with some interest. The jury of twenty-three good and lawful men sat packed in their box with their hats on their knees.

Mr. Thorne opened for the petitioners, and he made the case well. He told them of the broken leg and the fever; of the blind man and the daughter; of the letters written in a woman’s hand; of the six weeks without a physician; of the extravagant gifts promised to persons in that house. It was, he said, a man who had lost the command of his body and, they feared, the command of his mind.

Dr. Crowe was the first witness.

He came to the box looking pleased with himself, and he swore his oath, and he told the court how he had examined His Grace on the night of the third of November and found him in a settled delirium, and how His Grace had refused him, and how he had been kept from his patient ever since.

Edmund heard Clara draw a slow breath.

“Dr. Crowe,” said Edmund’s attorney, a thin man named Mr. Ashford whom Clara had chosen from the six letters, “you say you examined His Grace’s leg.”

“I did.”

“How long were you in the room with him?”

“Some little time.”

“Nine minutes,” said Edmund, from his seat. The commissioner tapped his gavel and told His Grace to address the court through his attorney.

“Nine minutes,” repeated Ashford. “In nine minutes, did you remove his boot?”

“I—”

“Did you cut away his clothing? Did you wash the wound? Did you put a hand upon the fracture, sir, at any point that night?”

Crowe’s mouth worked.

“The wound was beyond help,” he said. “I told them the prognosis.”

“Let me be precise,” said Ashford. “You told them twelve hours. Is that correct? Twelve hours, or fifteen if he was fortunate.”

“It was my opinion.”

“And on the sixteenth of December, when Sir Reginald Ashcombe rode out to the toll house with a commission in his pocket, you accompanied him. His Grace, whom you had given twelve hours to live, was still alive. Did you examine him then?”

“I was not permitted—”

“Not permitted. Yet you had already sworn, in the petition, that he was in a settled delirium and incapable of governing himself. When you swore that oath, Dr. Crowe, how many times had you spoken to him since the third of November?”

Crowe was silent.

“Answer the question.”

“Once.”

“And on that single occasion, the night of the commission, did you put a hand upon his leg?”

“No.”

“Then upon what, sir, do you found your settled delirium?”

The silence was very long. Somewhere in the crowd a woman coughed, and it sounded like a laugh, and someone hushed her.

Mr. Bell, the clerk, came next, and he was afraid, as the stranger had promised, but he had been given a promise of protection signed by the Lord Lieutenant, and he held it in his hand the whole time he was in the box, and he told the court about the man called Corless, and the monthly money, and the names of the months. And then they produced the steward’s account, and the dates of the causeway maintenance, and the entries in Clara’s toll book, and the two letters she had written in November that had been suppressed.

And then Edmund, with the court’s leave, stood up and took off his coat, and showed them the leg, and the scar, and the inch that was lost, and told them, in a voice that carried to the back wall, that he could write his own name now, and had done so, and produced the letter in his own hand.

“Good and lawful men,” said Justice Waring, “you have heard a great deal. Is there aught else the parties would lay before you?”

Mr. Thorne, with a face like chalk, said there was one further witness. A boy. A boy who had slept under the causeway shoring in the last week of May.

Tommie Jarrold stood in the box in his Sunday boots and told them, in a high, clear voice, about the two men in the dark, and the saw, and the pot, and the lantern, and the way the one with the limp had trod on his hand and cursed him in the voice of a gentleman. And when the commissioner asked him if he could see that gentleman anywhere in the room, the boy looked at the jury box, and then at the benches, and then at the back of the court, where Sir Reginald Ashcombe sat very still between two of his friends.

The boy pointed.

“That’s him,” he said. “The one with the gray face.”

The court erupted. The commissioner’s gavel came down six times before there was silence. Sir Reginald rose, and his friends rose with him, and then two of the constables rose, and the room understood, in the sudden terrible quiet, that the man who had come to prove the Duke of Blackmere insane was himself under arrest for the attempt on the Duke’s life.

Justice Waring turned to the foreman of the jury.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “you have heard the evidence. Do you wish to withdraw?”

The foreman, an old farmer with a face like a ploughed field, looked at Edmund, and looked at Clara, who had sat with her hands folded in her lap for the whole of the day and had not once looked away.

“We do not need to withdraw, my Lord,” he said. “We have agreed.”

“And what say you?”

“We find His Grace the Duke of Blackmere of sound mind, and every way capable of governing himself and his estates. And we find the petition served upon him to have been a malicious and false thing, and we would be obliged if the court would say so.”

The room came down around them. People were standing, calling out, pushing toward the bar. Clara sat very still, and Edmund turned and looked at her, and she was looking at her hands, and there were tears on her face, and she was not making any sound at all.

Edmund reached across and took her hand.

“You counted for me,” he said. “Now let me count for you. One. Two. Three.”