William Monk 06 - Cain His Brother

go.
    “Mr. Nicolson …” Rathbone prompted.
    Nicolson blinked. “My heart ached for him, and I was moved to speak to Lord Ravensbrook on his behalf, but I fear I did no good. My interference only provoked him to be even stricter. He thought Angus had complained to me, and he regarded that as both cowardice and a personal disloyalty.”
    “I see.” To Rathbone it was a picture of such pain he was lost for more powerful or appropriate words. What must have lain beneath the surface of Angus’s honorable and upright character? Could he ever have forgiven Ravensbrook for those years of misery?
    The coroner had not interrupted, nor had his eyes once strayed to the clock, but now, deeply unhappy, he was compelled to speak.
    “Mr. Rathbone, this past distress is most harrowing, but it is still, so far, irrelevant to the death of Caleb Stonefield. I am sure you must be aware of that. Mr. Nicolson’s evidence has addressed itself solely to Angus.”
    “That is because he never met Caleb,” Rathbone replied. “If I may be permitted to call my last witness, sir, she will explain it all.”
    “I hope she can, Mr. Rathbone, otherwise you appear to have harrowed our emotions and wasted our time to no purpose.”
    “It is to a purpose, I assure you. I call Miss Abigail Ratchett.”
    Abigail Ratchett was a very stout woman with unnaturally black hair, considering that she must have been at least seventy-five. But apart from being hard of hearing, she was self-assured and quite in command of her wits. Every eye in the room was upon her.
    “You are a nurse, Miss Ratchett?” Rathbone began, speaking clearly and rather above his usual pitch and volume.
    “Yes sir, and midwife. At least I used to be.”
    The coroner’s face tightened.
    Goode groaned.
    Rathbone ignored them both.
    “Were you in attendance when Miss Alice Stonefield was delivered of her two sons, in October of 1829, the father being one Phineas Ravensbrook?”
    Rathbone glanced at Ravensbrook. He looked like a death’s-head.
    “I were in attendance, yes sir,” Miss Ratchett replied. “But it were just a normal birth like any other, no twins, sir, just the one child. Boy … beautiful he were. Healthy child. Called him Angus, she did.”
    One could have heard a tin tack drop in the court.
    “What?” Rathbone demanded.
    The coroner leaned forward, peering at her.
    “Madam, you are aware of what you are saying? There are people in this courtroom who knew both Angus and Caleb!”
    “There were one baby, sir,” Miss Ratchett repeated. “I were there. Miss Alice had one baby. I were with her for all the time she nursed him. Knew him right until his poor mother were killed. Year after Phineas Ravensbrook died in some foreign place. It were after that as his uncle took him, poor little mite. Only five, he were, an’ terrible took with his grief. Father never ’ad no time for ’im. Never owned ’im, he didn’t, nor loved ’is mother neither.” Her face betrayed her feelings for Phineas Ravensbrook.
    “What you say makes no sense, madam!” the coroner cried desperately. “If there was only one child, where did Caleb come from? Who was he? And who killed Angus?”
    “I don’t know nothing about that,” Miss Ratchett answered levelly. “I just know there were one baby. But I do know as children have a powerful imagination! I looked aftera little girl once as ’ad a friend, all imaginary, and whenever she done something wrong, she said as how it were Mary what done it, not her. She was good, Mary was bad.”
    “An ordinary excuse any child might make,” the coroner said. “I have children myself, madam. I have heard many such stories.”
    The Reverend Nicolson rose to his feet. “I beg your pardon, sir.” He addressed the coroner respectfully, but he would not be denied. “But is it not possible that in his unhappiness, and his feeling of rejection, obligation and loneliness, that the boy created an alternative self which would take the blame for his failures, and which would also be free to hate his uncle as he wished to, as he did in his heart?”
    He raised his voice above the mounting noise in the room, the groans and murmurs of horror, pity, rage or disbelief.
    “Might it not begin as an escape within the imagination of an unhappy child’s hurt and humiliation?” he asked. “And then grow into a genuine madness wherein he became two quite separate people, one who did everything to please, and earned the resultant rewards, and