He was extremely efficient. He called witness after witness to show that Dalgarno was talented, ambitious, gifted with figures, and that he was undoubtedly the one who had accomplished most of the land negotiations for Baltimore and Sons with regard to the London-to-Derby railway.

  On the second day he demonstrated that Dalgarno had paid court to Katrina Harcus, albeit not as openly as he might have done. They had been seen together quite often enough to substantiate her belief in his affection for her. Indeed, two of the witnesses had expected them to announce an engagement within the month.

  Margaret sat beside Hester, leaning forward a little. Several times she seemed to be on the edge of speech, and Hester knew she was wondering why Rathbone did not cross-examine the witnesses, at least to appear to offer some kind of a defense. It was only her care for Rathbone which prevented her each time from putting her anxiety into whispered words. It would seem like a criticism.

  On the other side of Hester, Monk was sitting equally tense, his shoulders high and stiff, his eyes strained forward. He must be thinking the same thing, but for entirely different reasons. If Rathbone failed, for him it was far more than disappointment in someone with whom he was falling in love; it would almost certainly mean changing places with the man in the dock.

  And yet as Fowler paraded one witness after another, Rathbone said and did nothing.

  “For God’s sake!” Monk said desperately that evening as he paced his sitting room floor. “He can’t be going to let it go by default. He’s got to do more than just hope they can’t prove it. Does he want to get accused of an incompetent defense?” He was ashen-faced, his eyes hollow. “He’s not doing that to save me, is he?”

  “No, of course not,” Hester said instantly, standing in front of him.

  “Not for me,” Monk said with painful humor. “For you.”

  She caught his arm. “He’s not still in love with me.”

  “The more fool he!” he retorted.

  “He’s in love with Margaret,” she explained. “At least he soon will be.”

  He drew in his breath, staring at her. “I didn’t know that!”

  A flash of impatience crossed her face and disappeared. “You wouldn’t,” she replied. “I don’t know what he’s going to do, William, but he’ll do something—for honor, pride, all kinds of things. He won’t let it go without a fight.”

  But Rathbone was unavailable all weekend. When Hester went to fetch fresh milk on Saturday morning, Monk snatched a few moments alone to look again at Katrina’s diary. He hated doing it, but he was desperate enough to grasp after any clue at all.

  But he still could understand only fragments of it. It was cryptic, scattered words as if simply to remind herself of emotions; the people who inspired them were so woven into her life she needed nothing more to bring them back to her. Nothing made a chain of sense.

  He struggled with his own memory. There was something just beyond his grasp, something that defined it all, but the shadows blurred and the harder he looked the more rapidly it dissolved into chaos, leaving him dependent on the slow, minute process of the law.

  On Monday morning, when the trial resumed for the third day, it looked as if letting go without a fight was exactly what Rathbone was going to do.

  Monk, Hester and Margaret all sat in an agony of impatience as Fowler brought on the police witnesses, first the constable called to the scene who found the body, then Runcorn, who described his own part in the proceedings.

  At last Rathbone accepted the invitation, now offered somewhat sarcastically, to cross-examine the witness.

  “Good gracious!” Fowler said in amazement, playing to the jury, who until now had had nothing to consider but uncontested evidence.

  “Superintendent Runcorn,” Rathbone began courteously. “You described your conduct in excellent detail. You appear to have overlooked nothing.”

  Runcorn eyed him with suspicion. He was far too experienced at giving evidence to imagine a compliment was merely that. “Thank you, sir,” he said flatly.

  “And presumably you tried to find evidence proving that this cloak found on the roof from which Miss Harcus fell belonged to Mr. Dalgarno?”

  “Naturally,” Runcorn conceded.

  “And did you succeed?” Rathbone enquired.

  “No, sir.”

  “Mr. Dalgarno doesn’t have a cloak?”

  “Yes, sir, but it’s not that one.”

  “Has he two, then?”

  “Not that we can trace, sir. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t his,” Runcorn said defensively.

  “Of course not. He purchased this one secretly in order to leave it on the rooftop after he had thrown Miss Harcus off it to her death.”

  There was a nervous titter around the room. Several jurors looked confused. Jarvis Baltimore reached across and slid his hand over Livia’s.

  “If you say so, sir,” Runcorn replied blandly.

  “No, no, I do not say so!” Rathbone retorted. “You say so! I say it belonged to someone else . . . who was on the roof and was responsible for Miss Harcus’s death . . . someone you never thought of trying to trace.”

  “No one else had reason,” Runcorn said calmly.

  “That you know of!” Rathbone challenged him. “I will presently show you a completely different interpretation of circumstances, Superintendent, one beyond your wildest ideas . . . which you would never seek to prove because it is extraordinary beyond anything else I have ever heard, and no man could be expected to think of it. Thank you. That is all.”

  Monk swiveled to look at Hester, his eyes wide.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered back. “I’ve no idea.”

  The jurors were staring at each other. There was a buzz of speculation in the body of the court.

  “Grandstanding!” Fowler said audibly, disgust heavy in his voice.

  Rathbone smiled to himself, but Hester had a hideous fear that he was doing exactly that, and that Fowler was not blustering, but knew it.

  Margaret sat with her knuckles white, leaning forward a little.

  Fowler called his next witness—the police surgeon, of whom Rathbone asked nothing—and then began on the neighbors who had seen or heard something that evening.

  Rathbone glanced at his watch now and then.

  “What is he waiting for?” Monk hissed.

  “I don’t know!” Hester said more sharply than she had intended. What could Rathbone hope for? What other solution was there? He had not shaken any of the testimony at all, let alone suggested the alternative he had spoken of so dramatically.

  They adjourned for the day and people trooped out into the halls and corridors. Hester overheard more than one say that they would not bother to return.

  “I don’t know why a man like Rathbone would take such a case,” one man said disgustedly as he began down the broad steps into the street. “There’s nothing in it for him but defeat, and he knows it.”

  “He can’t be doing as well as we thought,” his companion replied.

  “He knows his client’s guilty!” The first man pursed his lips. “Still, I’d have thought he’d try, for the look of it.”

  Hester was so angry she started forward, but stopped as she felt the pressure of Monk’s hand on her arm. She swung around to face him.

  “What were you going to say?” he asked.

  She drew breath to reply, and realized she had nothing prepared that made sense. She saw Margaret’s misery and growing confusion. “He’ll fight!” she assured her, because she knew how badly Margaret wanted to believe it.

  Margaret made an attempt at a smile, but excused herself to find a hansom home before facing the evening in Coldbath Square.

  * * *

  Hester began the fourth day of the trial with a sinking heart. She had lain awake in the night wondering whether to go to Rathbone’s house and demand to see him, but realized there was nothing she could learn that would help, and certainly she had nothing to offer him. She had no idea who could have killed Katrina Harcus, or why. She knew it was not Monk, and was less and less certain that it was Dalgarno, although she could not like the man. Looking at him through the days so far she had seen fear in his face, in the hunched angle of his shoulders, the tight lips and pallor of his skin, but she had not seen pity for the dead woman. Nor had she seen any concern for Livia Baltimore, who was growing more miserable with each new piece of testimony that showed how callously he had treated a young woman who had believed he loved her, and whom, all evidence showed, deeply loved him.

  In court in the morning she looked at Livia. Her skin was pale and puffy around the eyes, her body rigid, and Hester knew she was still clinging to hope. But even if Rathbone could somehow perform a miracle and gain an acquittal of murder for Dalgarno, was there anything on earth he could do to show him innocent of duplicity and opportunism?

  Fowler concluded for the prosecution.

  Hester slipped her hand over Monk’s briefly. It was easier than trying to find words when she had no idea what to say.

  Rathbone rose to begin the defense. The public gallery was almost half empty. He called the surveyor again.

  Fowler complained that he was wasting the court’s time. The surveyor had already testified in great detail. The subject had been more than exhausted.

  “My lord,” Rathbone said patiently, “my learned friend knows as well as the rest of us that I was able only to cross-examine him on the subjects already spoken of in direct examination.”

  “Can there possibly be any other subjects left?” Fowler asked to a ripple of laughter from the crowd. “We already know far more about the building of railways than we need to, or I imagine than we wish to.”

  “Possibly than we wish to, my lord.” Rathbone smiled very slightly. “Not than we need to. We have still reached no unarguable conclusion.”

  “You are lawyers,” the judge said dryly. “You can argue any conclusion on earth! However, proceed, Sir Oliver, but do not waste our time. If you appear to be talking for the sake of it I shall sustain Mr. Fowler’s objection—indeed, I shall object myself.”

  Rathbone bowed with a smile. “I shall endeavor not to be tedious or irrelevant, my lord,” he promised.

  The judge looked skeptical.

  Rathbone faced the surveyor when he had been duly reminded of his previous oath and had restated his professional qualifications. “Mr. Whitney,” he began, “you have already told us that you surveyed both the originally intended route for the railway of Baltimore and Sons from London to Derby and the route now taken. Is there a significant difference in cost between the two?”

  “No, sir, not significant,” Whitney replied.

  “What do you consider significant?” Rathbone asked.

  Whitney thought for a moment. “Above a few hundred pounds,” he replied at length. “Hardly as much as a thousand.”

  “A lot of money,” Rathbone observed. “Sufficient to buy several houses for an ordinary family.”

  Fowler rose to his feet.

  The judge waved him down again and looked at Rathbone. “If you are intending to reach any conclusion, Sir Oliver, you have diverted further than the railway in question. You would be better occupied justifying your own circuitous journey.”

  There was a titter from the crowd. This, at least, was mildly entertaining. They were happy to see Rathbone baited; he was better game than the accused, who had long since lost any sympathy they might have felt for him.

  Rathbone took a deep breath and steadied his temper. He acknowledged the judge’s remark and turned again to the witness stand. “Mr. Whitney, would it be technically possible to commit a far greater fraud than the one suggested here, one worth several thousands of pounds, by this same means of diverting a proposed route?”

  Whitney looked startled. “Yes, of course it would. This was only a slightly greater length, a few hundred yards. One could do far more to make money.”

  “For example?” Rathbone asked.

  Whitney shrugged. “Buy land oneself, prior to the rerouting, and then sell it back at an inflated price,” he answered. “Many things, with enough imagination and the right contacts. Choose a stretch where a lot of construction was necessary, bridges, viaducts, tunnels, even long cuttings, and take a percentage on materials—the possibilities are numerous.”

  “My lord!” Fowler said loudly. “My learned friend is simply showing that the accused is incompetent even at fraud. That is not an excuse.”

  There was open laughter in the room. No one pretended not to be amused.

  When it had died down Rathbone turned to him. “I am attempting to prove that he is innocent of murder,” he said politely, but with an underlying anger. “Why is it that you seem unwilling to allow me to do that?”

  “It is circumstances that are preventing you, not I,” Fowler returned to another rustle of laughter.

  “Your circumstances!” Rathbone snapped. “Mine not only allow me to, they oblige me to.”

  “Mr. Fowler!” the judge said very clearly. “Sir Oliver has a point. Unless you have some objection of substance in law, will you cease from interrupting him, or we are likely to be here indefinitely!”

  “Thank you, my lord,” Rathbone said ironically. Hester believed that he was, in fact, spinning out time, but she had no idea what for. What, or whom, was he expecting? She felt the first sudden shiver of hope.

  Rathbone looked up at Whitney. “You have given us examples of other ways in which a more efficient fraud could be perpetuated. Have you knowledge of any such fraud—I mean a specific circumstance?”

  Whitney looked slightly puzzled.

  “For example,” Rathbone assisted him, “in Liverpool almost sixteen years ago? The company involved was Baltimore and Sons. There was a falsification of a survey, the grid references were changed . . .”

  Fowler stood up again.

  “Sit down, Mr. Fowler!” the judge commanded. He looked at Rathbone sternly. “I presume you have facts, Sir Oliver? Be careful you do not slander anyone.”

  “It is a matter of record, my lord,” Rathbone assured him. “A man named Arrol Dundas was convicted of the crime, and unfortunately died in prison of jail fever. But the details of the crime were made public at the trial.”

  “I see. The relevance to this present case may easily be guessed, nevertheless we require you to prove it.”

  “Yes, my lord. I shall prove that records of it were kept by Baltimore and Sons, therefore it was known to senior members of the present company, even though they were not involved—in fact, not even out of school—at the time.”

  “Very interesting. Be sure that it is also relevant to Mr. Dalgarno’s innocence.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Rathbone drew out a few more details from Whitney, then excused him. Fowler looked as if he were considering asking him something, then declined, and Whitney left the stand.

  Hester looked at Monk, but it was obvious from his tense, white face and the confusion in his eyes that he did not know what Rathbone was planning any more than she did. He was frowning, and staring at the court clerk, busily taking notes, his right hand bandaged. Fortunately, he wrote with his left.

  Rathbone then called a junior clerk from Baltimore and Sons and drew from him the statement that the records of the earlier dealings were available—not easily, but a diligent search by a company member would elicit them all.

  “And was the case public knowledge?” Rathbone said finally.

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  Fowler tried to show that it was an abstruse piece of information, never discussed and unlikely to come to the attention of Dalgarno.

  “I couldn’t say, sir,” the clerk replied soberly. “I would think such things would be known, sir, even if only as an object lesson in what not to do.”

  Fowler retreated. “I still say, my lord, that incompetence does not equal innocence!” he said tartly. “The Crown does not say that the accused committed fraud well, merely that he did it!”

  Rathbone opened his eyes very wide. “If the Crown wishes, my lord, I can call a number of witnesses to demonstrate that Mr. Dalgarno was an ambitious and extremely able young man, that he rose from a relatively minor position to become one of the partners—”

  The judge held up his hand. “You have already done so, Sir Oliver. We take the point that the nature of the fraud with which he is charged is far less efficient than the earlier example for which Mr. Dundas was found guilty. The only thing relevant to this case appears to be the fact that the earlier case may well have been known to Mr. Dalgarno, and one wonders why he did not emulate it, if fraud was his intention. So far you have not completed your task. Please be succinct!”

  “Yes, my lord.” Rathbone recalled the foreman of the team of navvies who had worked on the Derby line, and drew from him greater and more tedious detail of the cutting and blasting necessary to drive a track through a hillside, coupled with the labor and cost of building a viaduct. He could equally easily have asked Jarvis Baltimore, but the navvy was not only more skilled in detail, he was demonstrably impartial.

  The court did not bother to hide its total lack of interest.

  They adjourned for luncheon. Monk told Hester to go with Margaret and he would join them later. Unwillingly, she obeyed, and he strode forward, shouldering his way through the crowd moving in the opposite direction until he was standing in front of the court clerk.

  “Excuse me,” he said, trying not to be abrupt, and yet his voice was sharp.

  The man made an effort to be civil. He was still trying to catch up with his notes. His writing was cramped, awkward, and with an odd, backward slope. Monk felt a strange dizziness in his mind as if there was something familiar about it. Could his idea be right?

  “Yes, sir?” the clerk said patiently.

  “What did you do to your hand?” Monk asked him.

  “I burned it, sir.” The clerk blushed very slightly. “On the cooking stove.”

  “You were writing with your other hand yesterday, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. Fortunately, I can write with either hand. Not so neatly, but it’ll do.”

  “Thank you,” Monk said with a surge of understanding like a blaze of sunlight. He could picture exactly the odd characteristic capital G’s and E’s in Katrina’s diary, and sloping back, but still the same, in Emma’s. And suddenly the inscription in the recipe book—Eveline Mary M. Austin—EMMA! She had loved Katrina, and Katrina had kept her alive in her imagination by writing to her, and even from her, using her left hand.