Death In Hyde Park

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

When the jury had retired, Kate and Nellie went out for a cup of tea. By the time they returned to the courtroom, the gas jets had been lighted, the spectators’ section was half-empty, and the journalists were glancing uncertainly at their watches, as if wondering whether they might safely go out to a restaurant. The jury might agree at any moment; on the other hand, it might deliberate for hours if just one of their number differed in his opinion from the others.

At half-six, the usher came into the court and announced that the jury had reached a verdict. The spectators scrambled to return to their seats, and the prosecuting and defense counsels took their places. The defendants, still shackled, were returned to the dock, each one escorted by a warder, with a plain clothes officer standing guard. A dead silence fell upon the courtroom as the judge took his seat, and then the jury. The clerk called out their names, one by one, and then said: “Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed upon your verdicts?”

“We have,” the foreman answered in a stern voice. The verdicts were read out swiftly, a sibilant sigh, like the sound of ocean surf, washing through the room at each reading. Pierre Mouffetard, guilty. Ivan Kopinski, guilty. Adam Gould, not guilty. The three men stood, not moving, as still as stone.

“Not guilty!” Nellie exclaimed jubilantly. “They found Adam not guilty! Oh, I wish Lottie were here to see him go free. And surely the police cannot want her, now that the trial is over.” Around Kate and Nellie, the crowd was exchanging excited whispers. “Guilty! Guilty! Not guilty!”

The judge pounded his gavel for order, and pronounced sentence: ten years of penal servitude for each of the two convicted men. “Ten years!” went the whispers around the courtroom, louder now, and awed. “Ten years!”

As Kate watched, the warder standing beside Adam bent down and removed his shackles. The warders beside Pierre and Ivan applied handcuffs. Then they were escorted out of the dock, leaving Adam standing alone and bewildered, looking after the departing prisoners, raising his hands and stepping toward them, as if to go with them. Perhaps he wanted to say goodbye, Kate thought, or to protest at the fate that released him and imprisoned them-or perhaps he had not yet realized that the jury had acquitted him, that he was unshackled and free to go.

Then Adam seemed to come to himself. He glanced once more over his shoulder at the others, then a great smile spread across his face, and with a leaping, jubilant step, he went down the steps and made for the defense table, where he seized the hands of both Charles and Edward Savidge, pumping them up and down.

“Ten years,” Nellie said, suddenly sobered. “That’s a very long time for… for what, Kate? For working at the Clarion? For being acquainted with the man who blew himself up?”

“I don’t understand,” Kate said angrily, “how the jury could find one innocent and the other two guilty. That awful old lady perjured herself, the inspector doctored the evidence, and the whole case was so flimsy that it took no more than a good puff of air to blow it all to pieces.”

“It’s because Mouffetard is French and Kopinski has a Russian name,” Nellie said in a practical tone. “They let Adam Gould go free because he’s English.” She smiled crookedly. “Juries can do anything they like, I guess.”

“I suppose,” Kate sighed, gathering up her things. “It’s late, Nellie, and we’re both tired. Let’s find a cab.”

Feeling as if a terrible burden had been lifted from his shoulders, Adam Gould stood on the stone steps of the Old Bailey, a free man. He had thanked Lord Sheridan and Edward Savidge, and each member of the jury. In his excitement, he had even thanked the bailiff and the judge. It was all over now but the shouting, and there was plenty of that. Around him rose a stormy cacophony of voices, some people hailing him with jubilant congratulations, others hurling angry abuse. But Adam heard almost none of it, for he was too full of a turbulent storm of feelings. He was torn by anger and grief at the conviction of Pierre and Ivan, who were no more guilty than he of the crime with which they’d been charged. But he was also filled with a glad relief at the thought of his freedom. Now if only he could find Lottie…

The twilight had been hastened into evening by a bank of lowering clouds, and a fine mist filled the darkening air. Eagerly, Adam searched the milling crowd on the sidewalks, under the gas lamps. Lottie. Where was the devil was she? He hadn’t expected her to come to the prison to see him, but he had been both confident and afraid that she would come to his trial: confident, because he knew that she cared for him, afraid because he knew that if she showed her face in the courtroom, the police would grab her. He’d spent the whole day in the dock searching each face in the spectators’ section, both hoping and fearing to see her and alternately jubilant and despairing that she was not there. And then, when the verdict was read out and he was acquitted, he hoped to see her come flying toward him, to fling his arms around her and hold her tight, hold her and hold her and never let her go. That would have been the real victory, he a free man and Lottie in his arms.

But she had not been in the courtroom and now, he saw, surveying the crowd with mounting despair, she was not outside, waiting for him in the street. Did that mean that something terrible had happened to her? That the police had caught her and were holding her somewhere? That she had been forced to leave the country, or-

And then he saw her. She was dressed in the garb of a Russian girl, in a white, full-sleeved blouse and dark skirt with an embroidered apron, a red babushka tied under her chin. But no matter what costume she had been wearing, Indian or Russian or Egyptian, Adam would have recognized that dear, familiar form and graceful motion anywhere in the world. He thrust up his arm and shouted against the clamor of shouting voices, the clatter of horses’ hoofs, the confusion of noisy lorries in the street. “Lottie! Lottie!”

For a split second, she turned to look up at him, her face pale, her eyes wide and anxious and full, it seemed to him, of guilt. Guilt? Not his Lottie! Never Lottie! He thought her glance had met his and felt in his heart that she had seen him. But no, perhaps she had not, for she had already turned in the other direction. She was pushing swiftly against the current of moving people, away from him, toward the covered courtyard at the other end of the block, where the Black Maria waited to take the convicted Anarchists to the prison where they would begin their sentence. And she was not alone, or that was Adam’s blurred impression. She seemed to be in the company of a strongly-built, dark-haired man in a dark jacket and green cloth cap. They moved side by side through the surging crowd with an easy, companionable familiarity and what seemed to be a common purpose. Who was the man? Was he one of her comrades? What was their object? What did they intend to do?

And then suddenly Adam’s heart jumped into his throat and he knew (although he had no way of knowing) that Lottie and the dark-haired man, together, meant to free Ivan and Pierre. The two of them were bent on doing, outside the law, what Lord Sheridan and Edward Savidge had not been able to do within it. They intended to free the men who now faced ten years of penal servitude for a crime they had not committed, the innocent men who should have gone free, as he was free.

But how? Were Lottie and her companion armed? Were there other comrades with them, or others aiming to meet them in the yard? How did they mean to overpower the guards? Suddenly, he was struck by the almost paralyzing fear that their desperate plan would place Lottie in grave danger. Having lost one of their three Anarchists to the jury’s acquittal, the warders and the police, who were armed with guns, would be in no mood to deal gently with anyone who attempted to interfere with them. At the worst, they might shoot her. At the least, they would capture her and take her immediately to jail. And if Lottie were innocent of everything else she might have been accused of, she would certainly be found guilty of attempting to free the prisoners.

Suddenly, Adam’s paralysis vanished, and he sprinted after them. Whatever Lottie and her companion meant to do, he would join them. Freedom meant nothing at all to him if he could not share it with Lottie.

Adam Gould was not the only one who saw Lottie and recognized her. Nellie had emerged from the Old Bailey with Kate, and the two of them stood on the steps just outside the doors, looking through the gathering darkness for a cab.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to walk to Ludgate Circus,” Kate was saying, her voice concerned. “There’s too large a crowd here, and half of them will be wanting a cab, just as we are. We might wait for Charles, but he may want to go off with Edward Savidge. I hope you’re not too tired for a bit of a walk.”

“I’m not, really,” Nellie said, taking a deep breath of the misty air, which seemed almost sweet in contrast to the hot, heavy atmosphere of the courtroom, redolent of cigars and men’s sweat. “I feel very well.”

Nelie was grateful to Kate, in fact, for asking her to come to the Old Bailey. It had been much better for her to concern herself with the welfare of the three men on trial than to sit in her room at the Rehearsal Club, alternatively hating Jack London and feeling sorry for herself. If nothing else, the defendants’ desperate plight had taken her mind off her own. Why, for three or four whole hours, she hadn’t once thought about being pregnant, or wondered how she was going to manage. She-

“Oh, look, Nellie,” Kate said, pointing to their right. “There’s Adam Gould, over there. Let’s go congratulate him on his acquittal. I don’t know him, but you do-you can introduce us.”

Nellie looked where Kate was pointing, and just as she did, she saw Adam violently thrust up his arm. “Lottie!” he cried loudly, standing on his tiptoes and looking intently out over the crowd. “Lottie!”

Swiftly, Nellie turned in the direction of Adam’s searching glance. She saw a dark-haired man in a green cap and a young Russian girl with a red babushka over her head and a basket on her arm. The pair was pushing against the jostling press of people, hurrying in the direction of the courtyard between Newgate Prison and the Old Bailey. Was the girl Lottie? Adam apparently thought so, although from this distance, Nellie couldn’t be sure.

But then the pair, the man and the girl, passed under a gas street lamp, and with a sudden shocking jolt that almost seemed to knock the breath out of her, Nellie recognized the man.

“Kate,” she gasped, pointing. “There! It’s Jack London!”

Kate looked. “And that’s Charlotte Conway with him, Nellie! I’m sure of it!”

As Kate spoke, Adam gave another loud cry and bolted down the stone steps. After that, it was all a wild confusion of shouting and pushing and scrambling as he attempted to shove his way through the crowd in pursuit of Lottie and Jack. Nellie would have gone after him, but Kate seized her arm.

“Let them go, Nellie,” she said firmly. “Leave it to Adam to catch her.”

“But what of him?” Nellie cried, desperately trying to pull away. “What of Jack London? I have to catch her, Kate. I have to warn her! I can’t let him do to her what he did to me!”

“There’s nothing you can do, Nellie,” Kate said in a low voice, putting a sisterly arm around her shoulders and pulling her apart from the press of people. “Perhaps it isn’t what you’re thinking, and there’s nothing of that sort between them. Or perhaps, if Lottie has been with Jack for a time, the damage is already done. Either way, she won’t welcome your interference. And you certainly don’t want to confront him, do you?” She tipped up Nellie’s chin, wiping the tears from her cheeks.

Nellie bit her lip, thinking distractedly. Kate was right about one thing-she couldn’t push her way through the milling crowd to catch up with Jack and Lottie. And she suddenly realized that she didn’t want to. Did she want to confront him? Perhaps, once she was sure she was carrying his child. But not yet, and certainly not now, in this public place, where she would be bitterly conscious of hundreds of eyes, watching, hundreds of ears, listening. She had to talk to Lottie, though-she could not allow her friend to be deceived and betrayed by that man, as she had been. But how would she find her to warn her? If not here and now, where and when?

There was nothing to be done for the moment. But Nellie suddenly realized, as she allowed her friend to lead her down the steps and into the darkening street, that she knew exactly how and where to find Jack London.

And with an anguished certainty, she knew where she would find Lottie, as well.