I made myself rise, too, and came to stand with her by the window. By “those folks” she of course meant “the Negroes.” The Windsors and the Bay Street Boys might not abide Freddie, but the greater part of the population, the colored part, the part that didn’t sit in parliament or on juries, stood firm behind him.

“Anyway,” Nancy said, “however things turn out. I appreciate your support. I mean that. Seeing you up there in the gallery, every day, it just gave us strength. Both of us.”

“I wouldn’t have been anywhere else. Anyone could see he’d been framed. Just as anyone could see who the real culprit was.”

A twitch involved the corner of Nancy’s mouth. She stubbed out her cigarette on the windowsill and turned to me.

“Anyone could see, sure,” she said, “but do you think anyone’s got the guts to say it out loud?”

Across the room, a telephone rang. We both jumped. One of the policemen answered it, speaking in low tones, glancing in our direction. Nancy grabbed my hand and dug her fingernails into my palm with such ferocity, my eyes stung.

The policeman hung up the phone and rose. “Mrs. de Marigny. It seems the jury has reached its verdict.”

By the time I elbowed my way back to my seat in the press gallery, the courtroom was packed, the air electric. Freddie was back in his cage. From the opposite wall, in its place of honor, a portrait of the King of England stared nobly into the distance, as it had done throughout the trial. The resemblance to the duke unsettled me. At certain moments, it had seemed as if the brothers had switched places, as if the duke himself were somehow staring through the bland eyes of his successor, as if he presided over us—participants and spectators alike—from a point higher than that of the judge himself.

When the jurors had filed back inside the courtroom, Sir Oscar entered and resumed his seat on the dais in his robes and his curling wig. The court registrar asked the foreman of the jury, a grocer named James Sands, if they had reached a verdict.

Yes, we have, said Mr. Sands.