Mr. Beddows did what he could to call Sharpe’s testimony into question, but Sophia could see it was hopeless. Peter Sharpe was the trustworthy servant of a well-respected peer. As far as anyone knew, he didn’t stand to gain a thing from accusing Jeremy of murder, and Sampson Willis, the Bow Street magistrate, corroborated every word of Sharpe’s testimony.
There was little Sophia could now do but wait, her heart in her throat, for Jeremy to be pronounced guilty. As for what she might do later, once she left the courtroom, well…that was a different matter entirely.
She waited at the back of the gallery, as unmoving as the column beside her. No one paid her any attention. If they had—if they’d happened to catch a glimpse under the wide brim of her hat—the cold malevolence with which she gazed at Peter Sharpe would have turned their blood to ice.
* * * *
The back row of the gallery smelled like flowers.
It was faint, just a hint of the sweet, honeyed scent wafting in the stale air. At any other time, Tristan wouldn’t have noticed it, but given the circumstances in which he’d first inhaled that scent, it was imprintedon his senses.
Shewas here.
Sophia Monmouth, the dark-haired, green-eyed ghost who’d led him on a merry chase through every alleyway in Westminster, was in the gallery. He’d found out her name easily enough, but surprisingly, he hadn’t been able to discover muchelse about her.
Lady Clifford’s students enjoyed a certain notoriety among a select group of people in London, but none of them seemed to know anything about Sophia Monmouth’s past, other than she’d become the Clifford School’s first pupil a few months after Lady Clifford had secured the building at No. 26 Maddox Street. Miss Monmouth had been a child then, not more than six or seven years old, and she’d been with Lady Clifford ever since.
It wasn’t much to go on, but Tristan had only just begun to dig into the mystery that was Sophia Monmouth, who’d sacrificed any claim she had to privacy when she climbed onto Lord Everly’s pediment.
She hadn’t been back to Great Marlborough Street since, nor had he caught her out in any other suspicious behavior in the week he’d been following her. No, since then Miss Monmouth had been a model of good citizenry, a veritable paragon of exemplary behavior. He might have grown bored of following her if he hadn’t known it was only a matter of time before she slipped. No woman who’d gone to the trouble of scaling the front of a townhouse would give up so easily, especially not one of Lady Clifford’s students.
Tenacity was their distinguishingcharacteristic.
Still, he hadn’t expected he’d find herhere. Criminals tended to avoid courthouses in general, but then Lady Clifford had likely directed Miss Monmouth to discover what fate awaited Jeremy Ives. Not that the outcome of the trial was much of a mystery. Ives was going to be found guilty, and he’d be sentenced to swing.
Simple enough.
Tristan cast a subtle glance over the spectators in the gallery. There weren’t many ladies here, and none with the dainty features Tristan remembered so well, but then she was skilled at disguising herself—
Ah. There.
A few paces to his left was a lady with a bowed head. Her face was hidden under the wide brim of the ugliest hat he’d ever seen, but he could just make out a curl of dark hair at her nape, the tip of a pointed chin. She was partially concealed behind one of the gallery’s columns—Miss Monmouth seemed to be fond of columns—but as luck would have it, he wasn’t more than five or six pacesaway from her.
Slippery as she was, there was no way she could sneak from the courtroom without him seeing her, but Tristan suspected Sophia Monmouth would remain right where she was until Ives’s trial concluded.
As it happened, Jeremy Ives was the first to come before the bench.
Tristan kept an eye on Sophia Monmouth as Ives was brought into the courtroom. She didn’t move or make a sound, but her entire body went rigid as Ives was dragged, blinking, to stand at the bar before the court.
Ives was a big man with broad shoulders, and hands so massive he could snap a man’s neck as easily as snapping a twig, but aside from his intimidating size, there wasn’t much about him that spoke of violence. Tristan couldn’t see him well, but from here Ives didn’t look to be more than nineteen or twenty years old, and there was a soft, slack quality to his face that made him look even younger, almost childlike.
He was filthy, his ragged clothing hanging on his emaciated frame. Prisoners condemned to await trial at Newgate did tend to lose weight, even as much as a stone or two, but Ives’s extraordinary height exaggerated the effect. He was gaunt, reduced to nothing more than a pale, wasted pile of flesh and bone, like a cock plucked of its feathers.
Ives had been accused of an unusually brutal crime, but he wasn’t at all the hardened criminal Tristan had expected. He gaped at the assembly before him, bafflement mixed with abject terror on his face. He didn’t seem to understand how he came to be there, or for what reason.
The courtroom stilled as Peter Sharpe, the only witness to the crime, stepped into the witness box to give his testimony. His mouth was pulled into a stern line, as befitted the solemnity of the occasion. He was seated in full view of the accused in the dock, but if Jeremy Ives remembered Sharpe, he gave no indication of it. He stared dumbly at him, mouth agape, as if he didn’t recognizeSharpe at all.
As for Sharpe, he seemed to relish having the attention of everyone in the courthouse fixed on him, and delivered his testimony in a tone of self-righteous defiance.
It was one of the quickest trials Tristan had ever seen. Sharpe gave his account of the crime committed against him, then Willis briefly took the stand and testified that yes, Sharpe had come to No. 4 Bow Street that night in a panic, shrieking about leaking brains and murder. All the Runners being out at the time, Willis himself had followed Sharpe to St. Clement Dane’s Church, where he’d found Jeremy Ives lying unconscious next to Henry Gerrard’s body, his hands dripping withHenry’s blood.
And finally, they heard from the accused, who professed himself innocent with tears running down his cheeks. When the judge demanded he explain the evidence against him, he could offer nothing but a fumbling account of having come across Sharpe in front of St. Clement Dane’s Church, along with a somewhat incoherent insistence that he “’adn’t hurt or stolen nothing from no one, if it pleaseyer lordships.”
The verdict was swift, and thesentence harsh.
Jeremy Ives was found guilty of the crimes of theft with violence and murder, and sentenced to hang. A hush fell over the courtroom as the punishment was handed down, but if the crowd wanted tears and wailing and pleas for mercy, they were disappointed. Ives didn’t appear to understand any of what had transpired. He stared blankly at the judge as the sentence was read, and then he was dragged from the courtroom,his head bowed.
Tristan watched him go with an uneasy sensation in his stomach. He’d seen too many innocent people hurt by criminals in London to feel any sympathy for those who were convicted, but there’d been something off about the proceeding he’d just seen. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt none of the fierce satisfaction he’d anticipated at seeing Henry’s murderer brought to justice.
