William Monk 03 - Defend and Betray

his voice level, as if the question were not especially important.
    “To do what I could to prevent him being abused anymore.”
    “Abused? Was someone mistreating him? In what way?”
    “I believe the word is sodomy, Mr. Rathbone,” she said with only the slightest tremor.
    There was a gasp in the court as hundreds of throats drew in breath.
    Alexandra covered her face with her hands.
    The jury froze in their seats, eyes wide, faces aghast.
    In the front row of the gallery Randolf Carlyon sat immobile as stone. Felicia’s veiled head jerked up and her knuckles were white on the rail in front of her. Edith, now sitting beside them, looked as if she had been struck.
    Even the judge stiffened and turned to look up at Alexandra. Lovat-Smith stared at Rathbone, his face slack with amazement.
    Rathbone waited several seconds before he spoke.
    “Someone in the house was sodomizing the child?” He said it very quietly, but the peculiar quality of his voice and his exquisite diction made every word audible even at the very back of the gallery.
    “Yes,” Miss Buchan answered, looking at no one but him.
    “How do you know that, Miss Buchan? Did you see it happen?”
    “I did not see it this time—but I have in the past, when Thaddeus Carlyon himself was a child,” she said. “And I knew the signs. I knew the look in a child’s face, the sly pleasure, the fear mixed with exultancy, the flirting and the shame, the self-possession one minute, then the terror of losing his mother’s love if she knew, the hatred of having to keep it a secret, and the pride of having a secret—and then crying in the night, and not being able to tell anyone why—and the total and overwhelming loneliness …”
    Alexandra had lifted her face. She looked ashen, her body rigid with anguish.
    The jury sat immobile, eyes horrified, skin suddenly pale.
    The judge looked at Lovat-Smith, but for once he did not exercise his right to object to the vividness of her evidence, unsupported by any provable fact. His dark face looked blurred with shock.
    “Miss Buchan,” Rathbone continued softly. “You seem to have a vivid appreciation of what it is like. How is that?”
    “Because I saw it in Thaddeus—General Carlyon—when he was a child. His father abused him.”
    There was such a gasp of horror around the room, a clamor of voices in amazement and protest, that she was obliged to stop.
    In the gallery newspaper runners tripped over legs and caught their feet in onlookers’ skirts as they scrambled to get out and seize a hansom to report the incredible news.
    “Order!” the judge commanded, banging his gavel violently on his bench. “Order! Or I shall clear the court!”
    Very slowly the room subsided. The jury had all turned to look at Randolf. Now again they faced Miss Buchan.
    “That is a desperately serious thing to charge, Miss Buchan,” Rathbone said quietly. “You must be very certain that what you say is true?”
    “Of course I am.” She answered him with the first and only trace of bitterness in her voice. “I have served the Carlyon family since I was twenty-four, when I came to look after Master Thaddeus. That is over forty years. There is nowhere else I can go now—and they will hardly give me aroof over my head in my old age after this. Does anyone imagine I do it lighly?”
    Rathbone glanced for only a second at the jury’s faces, and saw there the conflict of horror, disgust, anger, pity, and confusion that he had expected. She was a woman caught between betraying her employers, with its irreparable consequences to her, or betraying her conscience, and a child who had no one else to speak for him. The jurors were of a servant-keeping class, or they would not be jurors. Yet few of them were of position sufficient to have governesses. They were torn in loyalties, social ambition, and tearing pity.
    “I know that, Miss Buchan,” Rathbone said with a ghost of a smile. “I want to be sure that the court appreciates it also. Please continue. You were aware of the sodomy committed by Colonel Randolf Carlyon upon his son, Thaddeus. You saw the same signs of abuse in young Cassian Carlyon, and you were afraid for him. Is that correct?”
    “Yes.”
    “And did you know who had been abusing him? Please be careful to be precise, Miss Buchan. I do mean
know
, supposition or deduction will not do.”
    “I am aware of that, sir,” she said stiffly. “No, I did not know. But since he normally lived at his own home, not