William Monk 19 - Blind Justice

humiliation. Anyway, she would hardly come to all the trials over which her husband presided! That would be absurd.
    Just in case she was here, Rathbone had to pull his wits and his emotions together and try to show the dignity and the courage he would wish her to see in him.
    Hester would be here. They had fought too many battles side by side for her ever to abandon him. She was a woman who might well hate what you had done, but she would go with you to the foot of the gallows, if need be. How badly had he let her down with this arrogance of judgment?
    Then he looked at the faces in the courtroom again and saw his father, and his courage bled away as if an artery had been cut. This was the one person he should never have let down, never disappointed. The pain of it left his stomach churning. He would have accepted any failure, any punishment, if only his father had not had to suffer too. This was worse than any other time he had let him down, worse even than when he had failed his exams one time, when, upset about some triviality or other, he had not studied hard enough. Henry had been so angry then, more than Oliver had ever seen him before. This quiet gray was worse. Oliver had been planning to take Henry for a holiday to Europe next year, to see Italy. He had always wanted that. Now it might be too late … if he was found guilty …
    The preliminaries were all finished. The trial was about to begin. Wystan rose to his feet. He was a solid man, not very large, but he looked imposing now as he stood out on the floor alone.
    “Gentlemen,” he said somberly, looking at the jury. “This may not seem to you a very serious case, compared with some that you might have been called to hear, such as thefts of great sums of money, assault, or murder. But believe me it is. This is a cheating of the process of law to which, as Englishmen, you are entitled. You are subjects of an ancient land that has been ruled by law since the days of the Saxon dooms,before William the Conqueror set foot on our shores eight hundred years ago.”
    He moved a couple of steps closer to them, his voice carrying clearly.
    “When we sit in judgment upon one another, we are following a very tight set of rules, which are there to ensure that, as far as it is possible for human beings, we are fair. We give to each person the chance to defend himself against wrongful conviction, to speak for himself, to answer or refute the evidence against him. Otherwise, how could we refer to it as the justice system?” He hesitated to let the weight of the concept sink into their minds. “If you are not certain of this system, how can you bring anything before the law?” he continued. “How can you hope for peace or safety? How can you sleep at ease in your beds and believe that we strive to be a just and God-fearing people? The answer is simple. You cannot.”
    He turned very slightly and indicated Rathbone high in the dock.
    “This man accepted the position of judge. It is a high and ancient position, perhaps one of the greatest honors in the land, in some ways second only to Her Majesty, and yet a position that intercedes with your lives on a regular basis. It was his task to administer justice to the people—to you. Instead of that, he perverted the law.”
    Rathbone winced. What could Brancaster say that would undo this damage?
    Wystan continued. His voice was quiet, almost without emotion, and yet it penetrated every corner of the room. Rathbone should have remembered this about him. He wondered now how he had ever beaten the man.
    “Oliver Rathbone was presiding over a case in which a man was accused of a most repellent manner of fraud, of taking money from those who had little enough, and of then misusing it. Your sympathy may be entirely with the prosecution of such a case. I know that mine is.” He shook his head. “But the ugliness of a charge does not mean that the person accused is guilty. He is as deserving of a fair and just trial as is a man accused of stealing a loaf of bread. It is the innocence or guiltthat we try; we determine whether or not the crime is as charged, and whether or not we have the right person in the dock.”
    He smiled very slightly, a mere twitch of the lip. “It is my duty to prove to you beyond any reasonable doubt that Oliver Rathbone abused the trust this nation, this people, placed in him by giving to the prosecution damning evidence as to the character of a witness for the defense, evidence quite unrelated