“Because that’s just not how it’s done here, miss. People don’t dare make a fuss, for fear they’ll lose their places or trade if they’re in business. You have to know someone, one of them…if Jem were a Duke’s son, then it would be different.”
“I know,” Janey said gratingly as she retied the grey silk ribbons on her hat beneath her pointed chin. She was almost as angry with herself as she was with the judge. After four years in England, she should have known better than to expect an instant public protest. Kate was right. That wasn’t how things were done here in this genteel and ancient English cathedral city, where the law was enforced to the letter and property valued above lives.
She glanced upwards at the serene, awesome spire of the nearby cathedral, which seemed almost to reach the grey November clouds, and sighed. Even the buildings in this corner of England seemed to have that air of superior certainty which she had encountered in so many of her English acquaintances.
God in his Heaven and everything and everyone in their proper place, including Miss Jane Hilton, colonial nobody, she thought, feeling a sudden overwhelming homesickness for the handful of ramshackle timber dwellings strung out along a muddy track, half a world away. That had been the nearest to a town she had known, until her parents’ death had forced her to return to St Louis, where her grandfather had found her.
The log cabins in which she had spent her childhood had had no attractions with which to rival either the medieval splendour of the cathedral or the exuberant prosperity of the timbered Tudor merchant’s houses that clustered about its close. And the people who had lived in them had often been rough and illiterate. But they would not have condemned a boy like Jem for the loss of a hayrick, which had in all probability set alight by itself.
No, she thought, Lilian, her parents, the Schmidts, the Lafayettes and the rest would all have been on their feet with her in that courtroom—and one way or another the judge would have been made to see reason.
She shut her eyes, seeing them all for a moment as if they were stood beside her. Her mother, fair, calm and beautiful, even with her apron besmirched with smuts and her sleeves rolled up. Her father, weathered and strong as the trees he had felled with his own hands to make the clearing that they had farmed. Proper Mrs Schmidt, looking askance at red-haired Lilian, who was as tough as the trappers she allowed to share both her cabin and her body. And Daniel, quiet, brown-eyed, brown-haired Daniel Lafayette, who had moved through the forest as silently as their Indian neighbours.
Daniel, who had been her childhood sweetheart and the first to die of the smallpox that had swept through the small frontier community. And with all the innocence and intensity of a fifteen-year-old, she had thought nothing worse could ever happen to her. And then her parents had become ill, and she knew that it could.
She shivered, remembering the sound of the earth being shovelled on to their rough wooden coffins by Lilian who, since she had had the smallpox as a child and survived it, had taken on the responsibility of nursing the sick and burying the dead.
“Miss?”
She started, wrenched back into the present by Kate’s voice.
“They’ll commute it, surely—give him transportation, won’t they?” Kate said hopefully.
“I don’t know,” Janey said flatly, swallowing the lump which had arisen in her throat. Hankering for the past and feeling sorry for herself was not going to help Jem. This was not Minnesota, this was England. Green, pleasant, and pitiless to its poor. And if she was going to save Jem’s neck, she had to think clearly and fast.
“They wouldn’t hang him, they couldn’t,” Kate added with a distinct lack of conviction. “He’s just a child, really.”
“I know,” Janey replied grimly. “But everyone is in such a panic of late because of the labourers’ riots in Kent and Hampshire that they are seeing the threat of revolution everywhere. If you had heard Mr Filmore and his fellow magistrates at dinner last night, you would have thought them in danger of being carted off to the guillotine at dawn. They see harshness as their protection.”
“But it’s not right!” Kate’s blue eyes brimmed with unshed tears. “If Mr Filmore had not dismissed him, this would never have happened. I don’t know how we’re going to break this to Mrs Avery, miss.”
“Nor do I, but I promised I should call and tell her of the verdict as soon as it was known,” Janey said grimly. “Where’s the gig, Kate?”
“That way, around the corner—I paid Tom Mitchell’s boy to hold the pony out of the master’s sight, like you said,” Kate replied.
“Thank you—I’d better go before Mr Filmore arrives and tries to stop me,” Janey said as others began to trickle down the courthouse steps. “Can you stay here and see if the warders will let you see Jem for a moment, or at least get a message to him that I will do everything I can for him? I saw Jem’s uncle, Will Avery, over there. I am sure he will give you a lift back to Pettridges if you ask him.”
“Yes, miss,” Kate agreed. “Miss—you’d better go. There’s Mr Filmore.”
With an unladylike oath acquired from Lilian, Janey picked up the skirts of her grey gown and pelisse coat and ran.
“Be careful, miss,” Kate admonished from behind, “that leg of yours is only just healed. You don’t want to break the other one.”
“Jane! Jane! Come here at once!” Janey increased her speed a little as Mr Filmore’s rather shrill tones overlaid Kate’s warning. But flicking a glance over her shoulder, she slowed a little. Mr Filmore’s over-inflated idea of his own dignity would not allow him to be seen chasing his ward down the street.
There would undoubtedly be a scene when she returned to Pettridges Hall, she thought resignedly as she scrambled into her gig and took up the reins. Not that she cared. While her grandfather had been alive, she had done her best to turn herself into the English lady he had so wanted her to be, out of affection for him. But she had no such feeling towards the Filmores, and what they thought of her had long since ceased to matter to her in the slightest.
Five months, she thought, as she cracked the whip over the skewbald pony’s head and sent it forward at a spanking trot. Five months, and she would be twenty-one, and she would have control of her fortune, her estate—and would be able to tell the Filmores to leave Pettridges.
Heads out, extended necks flecked with foam, the blood bays pulled the high-wheeled phaeton along the narrow lane at full lick. Bouncing from side to side on the rutted surface, the wheel hubs scraped first the high stone wall on one side then the other.
“You win, Jonathan! I still consider this contraption outmoded and damned uncomfortable, but I will grant you it is faster than anything in my carriage house. So, slow down!” the fair-haired man, sitting beside the driver, gasped as he held on to his tall silk hat with one hand and the safety rail with the other. “We’ll never make that bend at this speed and if there’s anything coming the other way—”
“You’re starting to sound like my maiden aunt, Perry.” The Honourable Jonathan Lindsay laughed, but he pulled upon the reins and began to slow the team of matched bays, who were snorting and sweating profusely. “For someone who was cool as a cucumber when Boney’s old Guard came on at Waterloo, you’ve made an almighty fuss for the last twenty minutes about a little speed.”
“At nineteen, one has not developed the instinct for self-preservation one has at thirty-two,” Perry said, sighing with relief as his dark-haired companion brought the bays down to a trot. “And I can assure you, I was far from cool…” A faraway look came on to his fresh ruddy face. “Is it really fifteen years ago? I still have nightmares about the sound of the damned French drums as if it were yesterday. And at the time, I didn’t think either of us would see our twentieth birthdays.”
“No.” Jonathan Lindsay sighed. “Neither did I, and sometimes I begin to wish that I hadn’t—”