William Monk 05 - The Sins of the Wolf

escort was there, four large constables holding truncheons and looking nervously from left to right.
    “Come on, Latterly,” the wardress said sharply, yanking at Hester’s manacled hands. “No dithering around, now!”
    “I’m not going to escape!” Hester said with wry contempt.
    The wardress gave her a filthy look, and it was several seconds before Hester realized why. Then as the constables closed in around her, and there was an angry shout from a few yards away, suddenly she understood. They were here not to prevent her escape but to protect her.
    A woman screamed.
    “Murderess!” someone yelled hoarsely.
    “Hang ’er!” another shouted out, and a surge of bodies buffeted the constables and they lurched forward, unwittingly almost knocking Hester off her feet.
    A dozen yards away a newsboy was calling out about the trial.
    “Burn her!” a voice shouted quite clearly and chillingly, a woman’s voice, shrill with hatred. “Burn the witch! Put her to the fires!”
    Hester felt herself chilled as if by ice. It was terrifying to feel such a passion thick in the air, it was a kind of madness. There was no reasoning with it, no logic, no pity. She had not even been tried yet.
    A missile flew past her cheek and clattered against the carriage door.
    “Now then, now then!” another constable’s voice said with rising panic barely suppressed. “Move along. You got no business here. Move along or I’ll have to take you in charge for disturbing the peace. You let the courts do their job. Time enough then for hanging. Move along….”
    “Don’t stare there, stupid!” The wardress tugged atHester again, bruising her wrists where the manacles dug into her.
    “Come on, miss, we can’t stand about here,” the largest constable said, more gently. “We got to keep you safe.”
    Hurriedly and awkwardly, still pushed and heaved by the crowd, now sullen, they made their way off the platform and up to the street.
    They were driven in a closed van straight to the prison, where more wardresses awaited her, their faces hard, eyes angry.
    She said nothing, asked no questions, and passed into the cell in silence, her head high, her thoughts islanded from them. She remained there until the middle of the afternoon, when she was escorted to another small room, bare but for a wooden table and two hard wooden chairs.
    There was a man already there, tall and broad-shouldered, and to judge from his gray hair and beard and from the lines around his mouth, he was nearer sixty than fifty, but there was a quality of intense vitality in him which dominated the room, even though he remained motionless.
    “Good afternoon, Miss Latterly,” he said with courtesy, the irony of which reflected in his dark eyes. “I am James Argyll. Lady Callandra has retained me to represent you, since Mr. Rathbone cannot appear before the bar in Scotland.”
    “How do you do,” she replied.
    “Please sit down, Miss Latterly.” He indicated the wooden chairs, and as soon as she had taken one, he took the other. He was watching her with curiosity and some surprise. She wondered with self-mockery what he had expected of her—perhaps a big, rawboned woman with the physical strength to carry wounded men off the battlefield, like Rebecca Box, the soldier’s wife who had dared the shot and walked alone onto the field between the lines to bring back the fallen across her shoulders. Or maybe he had envisioned a drunkard, or a slut, or an ignorant woman whocould find no better employment than emptying slops and winding bandages.
    Her heart sank, and she found it difficult to control her sense of despair so it did not show in her face or spill in tears down her cheeks.
    “I have already spoken with Mr. Rathbone,” Argyll was saying to her.
    With a tremendous effort she mastered herself and looked back at him calmly.
    “He has told me that Miss Nightingale is prepared to testify for you.”
    “Oh?” Her heart leapt and without warning hope came back with a ridiculous pain. All sorts of things that she held dear seemed possible again, things for which she had already endured the parting, at least in her mind: people, sights, sounds, even the habits of thinking of tomorrow, having time for which to plan. She found her body shaking; her hands on the table trembled and she had to grip them so hard the nails dug into the flesh to keep them still enough that he would not see. “That must be good….”
    “Oh it is excellent,” he agreed. “But