“Problems, ah!” Caleb Higbed stretched his back, turning his rubicund, kindly face to the sun. “What a lovely day! You know there’s a field of poppies at Houndsditch? I passed it yesterday in the sunlight and it was quite wonderful! I’ve often pondered how many wild flowers grow in our city. We have some scarlet pimpernel in Gray’s Inn, and very good they look too.” He smiled around him, looking at sunlight on gray walls. “Now then, problems. Shall we walk? Or are you enhorsed?”

“I’m riding back.”

“Ah! You see so much more on foot, Mr. Slythe, you truly do.” He looked at Ebenezer’s limp. “Still, I do understand. Problems.” He had stopped again. “I do wonder, Mr. Slythe, I truly do, whether you would not have been wiser to restrict the prosecution to simple murder. I suppose there’s no doubt but that she did slay her husband?”

“There’s no doubt, sir.”

“A soul will go to hell for murder as surely as for witchcraft. Still, it’s too late to change the charge, I suppose?” He looked hopefully at Ebenezer.

“Sir Grenville, sir, was insistent on witchcraft.”

“Ah! Sir Grenville! Good Sir Grenville!” Caleb Higbed laughed. “A Chancery man, but we can teach him no law, eh, Mr. Slythe? Indeed not. So witchcraft it will be, with an added touch of murder.” He turned to watch a file of soldiers march toward the main gate. The sun flashed on pikes and breastplates. “Such a fine sight I always think.” He looked back to Ebenezer, smiling. “I’ve no doubt the Grand Jury will find for us, no doubt at all, but I have one small worry. Small, Mr. Slythe, but a worry nonetheless.”

“Sir?”

“It is a question, Mr. Slythe, of maleficio.” He nodded, as if he had made a good point.

Ebenezer, respectful and grave, smiled. “Maleficio, sir?”

“Ah! The lawyer’s disease! Expecting those who are not lawyers to understand us. Maleficio, Mr. Slythe, is demanded by the Witchcraft Act of ’04. In brief, the act says that no person can be convicted of witchcraft, teats or no teats, unless the prosecution establishes that they were motivated by maleficio. That they had previously stated, clearly stated, that they wished to destroy the victim of their malevolence. In your sister’s case, Mr. Slythe, we must have proof that she intended to kill her husband by witchcraft, and that she had publicly said as much. Do you follow me?”

Ebenezer shook his head in astonishment. “But that’s nonsense! No witch will announce her intentions!”

“Ah, nonsense! How often our laws seem nonsense to the young! And how right you doubtless are, but the law is the law, Mr. Slythe, and we are, so to speak, mired in it. I think what we need is either a witness who will testify that she heard your sister expressing malice and an intention to kill, or we need a confession.” He shook his head. “I had great hopes of Palley, but he failed.”

“A confession?”