William Monk 08 - The Silent Cry

broken teeth.
    Ebenezer Goode hesitated before questioning each one. None of them had recognized their assailants. Every brutal act only added to his case. Why should he challenge any of it? To demonstrate that the women were prostitutes anyway was unnecessary. There was not a man or woman in the room who did not know it and feel their own emotions regarding their trade and its place in society, or in their own personal lives. It was a subject of emotion rather than reason anyway. Words were only a froth on the surface of the deep tide of feeling.
    A particular wave of revulsion and anger swelled when the thirteen-year-old Lily Drover testified, still nursing her dislocated shoulder. Haltingly she told Rathbone how both she and her sister had been beaten and kicked. She repeated the grunted words of abuse she had heard, and how she had tried to crawl away and hide in the dark.
    Fidelis Kynaston looked so ashen Rathbone thought she suffered more in hearing it than Sylvestra, beside her.
    The judge leaned forward, his own face tight with distress.
    “Have you not established all you need, Sir Oliver? Surely no more can be necessary. This is a horrifying matter of escalating violence and brutality. What more do you require to show us? Make your point!”
    “I have one more victim of rape, my lord. This one was in St. Giles.”
    “Very well. I realize you need to establish that your assailants have moved into the relevant area. But make it brief.”
    “My lord.” Rathbone called the woman who had been raped and beaten on the night before Christmas Eve. Her face was still discolored. She had difficulty speaking through her brokenteeth. Slowly, her eyes closed as she refused to look at the people who were watching her as she told about her terror and pain and humiliation. She began to describe being accosted by three men, how one of them had taken hold of her, how all three had laughed, then one had thrown her to the ground.
    In the dock, Rhys was gray-skinned, his eyes so hollow one could almost visualize the skull beneath the flesh. He leaned forward over the rail, his splinted hands stiff, shivering.
    The woman described how she had been taunted by the men, called names. One of them had kicked her, told her she was filth, should be got rid of, the human race cleansed of her sort.
    In the dock, Rhys started to bang his hands up and down on the railing. One of the warders made a move to stop him, but the muscles of Rhys’s body were knotted so hard he did not succeed. Rhys’s face was a mask of pain.
    No one else moved.
    The woman in the witness stand went on speaking, slowly, each word forced between her lips. She told how they had knocked her over till she was crouching on the cobbles.
    “They were ’ard, an’ wet,” she said huskily. “Then one of ’em leaned on top o’ me. ’E were ’eavy, and ’e smelled o’ summink funny, sort o’ sharp. One o’ the others forced me knees up and tore me dress. Then I felt ’im come inter me. It was like I were tore inside. It ’urt summink terrible. I—”
    She stopped, her eyes wide with horror as Rhys wrenched himself from the warders, his mouth gaping, his throat tortured with the sound it could not make, as if inside himself he screamed again and again.
    A warder made a lunge after him and caught one arm. Rhys lashed at him, his face a paroxysm of terror and loathing. The other warder made a grab and missed. Rhys overbalanced, hysterical with fear, teetered for a moment on the high railing, then swiveled and fell over the edge.
    A woman shrieked.
    The jurors rose to their feet.
    Sylvestra cried out his name and Fidelis clasped her arms around her friend.
    Rhys landed with a sickening crash and lay still.
    Hester was the first to move. She rose from her seat in the back of the gallery, on the edge of the row, where she could be reached were she needed, and ran forward, falling on her knees beside him.
    Then suddenly there was commotion everywhere. People were crying out, jostling one another. Others had been hurt, two of them badly. Press reporters were scrambling to force their way out to pass on the news. Ushers were trying helplessly to restore some form of order. The judge was banging his gavel. Someone was shouting for a doctor for a woman whose leg had been broken by an overturned bench.
    Rathbone swung around to make his way towards where Rhys was lying. Where was Corriden Wade? Had he been seized to tend to the woman? Rathbone did not even know if