How silent that room was, how taut, how stifling. There was not the slightest sound, not a movement. I remember I stared not at Mr. Sands, or the judge, or the portrait of King George there on the wall, but at Freddie in his cage. I remember how I looked at his face and realized he might actually die, that his life hung on this decision, on these words, and who on earth could willfully put an innocent man through such an ordeal? Who could frame a man for a capital crime he did not commit? It was murder, absent the courage of murder, the moral conviction of looking your man in the face and pulling the trigger. It was cowardice, the act of a runner. Freddie stared at Mr. Sands, waited for his fate, and for a terrible instant I forgot all about Sir Harry Oakes. I forgot about the Bahamas and the Windsors. For a terrible instant, I thought we were in Bakersfield, and it was Tommy’s murder being tried, it was my guilt for which Freddie would hang.

I heard the registrar speak.

How say you, is the prisoner guilty or not guilty of the offense with which he is charged?

He is a goner, I thought. God forgive me.

Mr. Sands called out, Not guilty.

In the pandemonium that followed, I was possibly the only person who kept my seat. While my colleagues stampeded for the telephones, I stared at Mr. Sands, whose lips still made words, though you couldn’t hear them in all that noise. In the corner of my vision, Freddie was leaping from his cage to embrace his wife, a free man.

Well, so are you, I thought. You’re free, aren’t you? Freddie’s acquittal is your acquittal. But I was not free. The world spun in frantic loops around the small, fragile core inside my womb, the piece of himself that Thorpe had left behind. I rose from my seat and shouldered out of the press gallery. I found a telephone and communicated my dispatch to the Associated Press, and to this day I’ve got no idea what that dispatch actually said. By now, everybody had tumbled out of the courthouse and into Rawson Square, where Freddie was hoisted onto the shoulders of the crowd—white and Negro—and carried through the evening air to his car. I stood there on the steps and watched it all. A sense of dread overcame me, of imminent disaster, and I fought to master it. The Lady of Nassau had a column to write and transmit by two o’clock in the morning, after all, just in time to set the press for the December issue, and since Lightfoot had agreed—with many a grumble—to pay me a thousand clams for said column, I needed my conscience at its clearest and my pencil at its sharpest. No morbid thoughts, no impending doom. Not guilty, remember?