Free The Secret River by Kate Grenville Page B

two ducks, value twenty-five shillings, had that day told the court that he was as innocent of the crime as the child unborn, and had been acquitted. In Newgate Yard, with the murmured stories of injured innocence all around them, the idea caught on like cholera. As innocent as the child unborn , Thornhill heard the man next to him muttering. I am a soldier, I had just come off duty, there was others in the house besides me, I am as innocent as the child unborn .
    He added it to his own story as he rehearsed it to himself. I made the lighter fast meaning to come back later to unload, I am as innocent as the child unborn .
    ~
    The court of the Old Bailey was a bear-pit. Down in the well of the court there was a great curving table full of crow-like barristers in their black gowns and their grey periwigs, and standing humbly around them the mass of witnesses waiting to be called, and the ushers lounging against the panelling.
    On the next layer up, the jury men sat along one wall, four by four, packed into dark-panelled pews, too far away to make out their faces in the dimness of this vast space. Opposite the judge, the witness was pinned into a little box with his back to the light coming in from the high windows.
    Those tall white windows, full of light, were cousins to the ones at Christ Church. They showed, if Thornhill had doubted it, that the judge was gentry, the same way God was gentry.
    Above the witnesses a mirror tipped the daylight from the window full onto their faces. By that cold dull light, that gave faces a metallic look, the judge and jury could peer into the soul of the person on the stand. Behind the witness there was another, smaller mirror, and a man in a periwig like the barristers’ with an inkwell and a big ledger in front of him, in which he wrote down each word.
    That was almost the worst of it, that anything anyone said, be it never so false or condemning, was there forever, with no margin of forgetfulness where human mercy might step in.
    Way up near the ceiling were the public galleries, cut off from the court by a high wall of panelling and columns that held the restless public in behind them. He stared up, hoping to find Sal, but could only see a vague restless mass of people. Now and then an arm dropped down in front of the panelling or there was the flash of a shawl flung over a woman’s shoulders. He saw a straw hat bent down over a head by means of a scarf tied under the chin. Sal had a hat she wore that way, and perhaps that tilt of the head was hers as she craned past others to see down into the court.
    He heard a distant cry, a woman’s voice. Was it calling, Will! Will! and was that her arm waving to him?
    It was, he thought, and he loved her for it. As the prisoner at the bar he did not dare call back. That would be as bad as calling out in church. In any case, she was in the other world, the one he was leaving. She was dear to him, but down here he was on his own.
    He stood up in the prisoner’s dock, a high pedestal where he was on display as if naked to the whole court. His hands were tied hard behind his back, forcing him to bow his head. He kept trying to straighten up, to look his fate in the eye, but the pain in his neck forced him again to hunch. Up so high, he could feel the rising vapours of those below him in the court: all those bodies encased in their clothes, all those chests breathing in and out, and all those words, passing around through the air.
    He was struck by the power of the words. There was nothing going on in the court but words, and the exact words, little puffs of air out of the mouth of a witness, would be the thing that saw him hanged or not.
    It took him some time, when he was first pushed up onto his pedestal, to see the judge behind his carved bench: a tiny grey face, dwarfed by his full-bottomed wig, by the layers of his robes, by the lapping collar with the gold edging, until there was no trace of the human within.
    ~
    Mr Knapp, the lawyer who had