William Monk 08 - The Silent Cry

Some of ’em was on’y bits o’ children theirselves. So I got a bit o’ money tergether an’ ’ired meself someone ter find out ’oo wos doin’ it.” She stopped abruptly, staring at Rathbone. “D’yer want me ter say ’oo I got, an’ wot ’e found?”
    “No, thank you, Mrs. Hopgood,” Rathbone replied. “You have laid an excellent foundation for us to discern from these poor women themselves what occurred. Just one more thing …”
    “Yeah?”
    “How many women do you know of who were beaten in this way?”
    “In Seven Dials? Abaht twen’y-odd, as I knows of. They went on ter St. Giles—”
    “Thank you, Mrs. Hopgood,” Rathbone interrupted. “Please tell us only your own experience.”
    Goode rose again. “All we have heard so far is hearsay, my lord. Mrs. Hopgood has not been a victim herself, and she has not mentioned Mr. Rhys Duff. I have been extraordinarily patient, as was your lordship. All this is tragic, and abhorrent, but completely irrelevant.”
    “It is not irrelevant, my lord,” Rathbone argued. “The prosecution’s case is that Rhys Duff went to the area of St. Giles to use prostitutes there, and that his father followed him, chastised him for his behavior, and in the resulting quarrel, Rhys killed his father and was severely injured himself. Therefore what happened to these women is fundamental to the case.”
    “I have not claimed that these unfortunate women were raped, my lord,” Goode contradicted. “But if they were, then that only adds to the brutality of the accused’s conduct and the validity of the motive. No wonder his father charged him with grievous sin and would have chastened him severely, possibly even threatened to turn him over to the law.”
    Rathbone swung around to face Goode. “You have proved only that Rhys used a prostitute in the area of St. Giles. You have not proved violence of any sort against any women—in St. Giles or in Seven Dials.”
    “Gentlemen!” the judge said sharply. “Sir Oliver, if you are determined to prove this issue, then you had better be absolutely certain you are aiding your client’s cause and not further condemning him, but if you are satisfied, then prove your point. Proceed with dispatch.”
    “Thank you, my lord.” Rathbone dismissed Vida Hopgood, and one by one called half a dozen of the women of St. Giles whom Monk had found. He began with the earliest, and least severely injured. The court sat in uncomfortable near silence and listened to their pathetic tales of poverty, illness, desperation, journeys out onto the streets to pick up a few pence by selling their bodies, and the cheating, then the violence which had followed.
    Rathbone loathed doing it. The women were gray-faced, almost inarticulate with fear and, in some cases, also shame. They despised themselves for what they did, but need drove them. They hated standing in this handsome courtroom facing exquisitely gowned and wigged lawyers, the judge in his scarlet robes, and having to tell of their need, their humiliation and their pain.
    Rathbone glanced at the jurors’ faces and read a sense of different emotions in them. He watched how much their imaginations conceived of the lives that were being described. How many of them, if any, had used such women themselves? What did they feel now? Shame, anger, pity or revulsion? More than half of them looked up to the dock at Rhys, whose face was twisted with emotion, but it was impossible to say what aroused his anger, or the revulsion which was so plain in his features.
    Rathbone looked also at Sylvestra Duff and saw her lips puckered with horror as a world opened up in front of her beyond anything she had imagined, women whose lives were so utterly unlike her own they could have belonged to a different species. And yet they lived only a few miles away, in the same city. And her son had used them, could even, for all she knew, have begotten a child upon them.
    Beside her, Fidelis Kynaston looked pale but less shocked. There was in her already a knowledge of pain, of the darkerside of the world and those who lived in it. This was only a restatement of things she already knew.
    On Sylvestra’s other side, Eglantyne Wade was motionless as wave after wave of misery passed over her, things she had never imagined were rehearsed before her in sickening detail.
    The following day the stories became more violent. The witnesses still carried the marks of beatings on their blackened and swollen faces, their