‘Lack of malice? Well. This is a first, I think, Mr Pettigrew. Unprecedented, so far as I know –’

‘No.’ You both flicker at me in surprise. ‘It makes me look guilty,’ I say.

Tomkin shakes his head. ‘Miss Langton. It is a defence.’

In the end, having no other, I had no choice.

Chapter Forty-Two

The judge comes back. Jessop calls his remaining witnesses to say their piece.

First, Constable Meek gives his testimony about the blood on my hands, saying I tried to clean myself on the bedclothes: ‘I knew it wasn’t hers, sir, because she had no wounds herself, save some bruises at her neck, no doubt made by one of the victims trying to defend themselves.’ They all look at me when he says that. The pounding in my chest works its way to my throat. No matter how I swallow and swallow I can’t swallow it down.

Next comes Mr Casterwick, turning his hat this way and that while he speaks. ‘I tried to stay out of matters that were none of my concern. However, it was quite apparent in those latter days that the prisoner was behaving queerly. She’d stop in the middle of doing something and then be quite unable to remember what she was about. Once I came upon her in the garden, near the pond. She said she’d come out in search of an infant, that a child had been lost. There was no infant at Levenhall. I wondered if I hadn’t caught her in her cups, truth be told. Once she was left downstairs, in the kitchen, after everyone else retired. I found her at the table, head resting on the wood, and her hand moved, as if writing something. Only she had no pen. And when I went close to her, she said, “Oh! My head. Such an ache in it, we’ll have to open it.”

‘I regret now that I did not tell Mrs Linux. I felt sorry for the girl, you see, and she begged me not to. Mrs Linux suspected that she was stealing her mistress’s medicaments.’

Finally, it’s Charles’s moment. He says that when he managed to get me upstairs on that dreadful night, I jittered on my sleeping pallet like a loose wheel and he could see mischief upon me, that he should have seen then that I would ‘come off’ and, if he had, he would never have left me, and his master and mistress never would have been killed. To everyone’s shock, not least his own, he begins to cry.

The afternoon wears smooth. All this makeweight evidence, tipping the scales against me. Slowly, slowly. But none of it has helped to fill that gap. The light stretches thin, glints off the sword above the judge and the mirror above me in the prisoner’s dock. An old gaol-bird told me it’s put there so judge and jurors can better see the prisoner’s face. English justice. The mirror and the sword. First, they force you to face yourself, then they force you to face death. Fear gnaws deep in my guts. I long to run. To flee. How could anyone bear to stand still for so long and hear what other people have to say about them? But the prisoner is forced to watch, to listen. And I know that, if I move a muscle, the keys will push me to the floor, drag me away.