William Monk 18 - A Sunless Sea

Rathbone that it was time for him to go.
    Hester smiled and rose to her feet. There was no need for further discussion, simply a quiet good-bye.
    L AMBOURN ’ S SUICIDE WAS STILL in Rathbone’s mind as the trial resumed an hour and a half later, when he met Sorley Coniston in the hall and they exchanged brief greetings.
    “Morning,” Coniston said with a slight smile. “Tough one for you, Rathbone. Whatever made you take it? I used to wonder if you accepted cases for notoriety sometimes, but I always decided you didn’t. Haven’t changed, have you?”
    “Not that much,” Rathbone replied drily. He did not know Coniston well, though they had been acquainted for years, but thought he might like the man if he did. He was unpredictable, and occasionally his opinions were startlingly honest. “This time I can’t make up my mind myself.”
    “For heaven’s sake!” Coniston said, shaking his head. “The only question in this one is how far you can bring in the damn opium question. Lambourn might have gone off the rails in his personal life, but he was a decent man, and honest. Don’t drag his private mistakes out in front of the world. His children don’t deserve that, even if you think he does.”
    Rathbone smiled back at him. “Cold feet?” he asked wryly.
    “Going to hold them to the fire,” Coniston replied. “Yours, I mean.”
    “Really?” Rathbone shrugged with confidence he did not feel, and they went into the courtroom.
    Twenty minutes later, Coniston rose to question his first witness of the day, Dinah’s sister-in-law, Amity Herne.
    Rathbone watched as she walked across the open space toward the witness box. With one hand delicately lifting her skirt so she did nottrip, she climbed up the steps to the top and stood facing the body of the court.
    Rathbone would like to have looked across at Dinah to see her expression, but he did not want to draw the jury’s attention to her, when they were all watching Amity Herne so closely. He could not imagine the pain of seeing your own family testify against you. Did they blame her for Lambourn’s death? For any degree of the unhappiness that they believed had led to his suicide? He might soon know. He realized his hands were knotted in his lap beneath the table where they could not see them, his muscles aching already, at the very beginning of the morning.
    Amity Herne swore to her name, and to tell the truth, all of it, and nothing but. She acknowledged that she was the sister of the accused woman’s late husband, Joel Lambourn.
    “I offer my condolences for the recent loss of your brother, Mrs. Herne,” Coniston began. “And I apologize for being obliged to open up so publicly a subject that must be additionally painful to you in the recent tragedy that has afflicted your family.”
    “Thank you,” she said graciously. She was an attractive woman, although not beautiful, and now appeared a little too unemotional for Rathbone’s taste. Perhaps in the circumstances a certain stiffness was the only defense she had to preserve any composure at all, when all privacy was denied her. There was something in the dignity with which she stood waiting for Coniston to open up the wounds that reminded him of Margaret. He should have admired her more. How much was his own disillusion warping his views of the people around him?
    Surely Coniston, standing gracefully and even a little deferentially, realized that the jury would not take kindly to anyone who was unnecessarily rough with Amity Herne. He would begin gently, set a pattern Rathbone would have no choice but to follow.
    “Mrs. Herne,” Coniston began, “were you aware of the nature of the work that your brother, Dr. Lambourn, was doing for the government?”
    Rathbone sat up a little straighter. Surely Coniston was not going to allow that subject to be raised?
    “Only in the vaguest terms,” Amity replied calmly, her voice softand very precise. “It was a medical investigation of some kind, that is all he would say.”
    “Confidential?” Coniston said.
    “I imagine so,” she agreed. She kept her gaze fixed on him, never allowing it to wander toward the gallery and not once even glancing over to the dock, where Dinah sat between her jailers.
    “But I did not ask him further anyway,” she continued. “I do know that it troubled him. He felt very deeply about it, and I was concerned that he was allowing himself to become too involved in it.”
    Rathbone rose to his feet. “My lord, Mrs.