The jury was fifteen men. Four of them had sat on the first one. They did not look at her.
Kit spoke first, in a whisper that Mr. Greaves made him repeat three times, and said what Mr. Wren had said to him in the dark. Then Thorne stood up. He told it plainly, as he had told it to her in the box, and when he came to the part about the peppermint and the full flask his voice gave out, and he stood holding the rail with his mouth working until it came back. Then he said, "And I told this jury's fellows a year ago that I smelled spirits on him, and it were a lie, and I were told to tell it, and I told it," and sat down, and put his face in his hands. Nobody in the room made a sound.
Then the Earl.
She had wondered how he would do it. Whether he would soften it, or make it handsome, or let his title do the work. He did none of those things. He stood at the rail in a plain dark coat, without his watch chain, and told fifteen farmers and the Hull newspapers that he had been drunk since four in the afternoon over a broken engagement, that he had taken a valuable horse out in fog no sober man would have ridden in, that a better horseman than he had followed him into it and taken the drink out of his hand and sent him home and died going after his horse. He said that he had asked no questions afterward because he had preferred not to know the answers. He said, "I have been a year in debt to a dead man and did not have the courage to look at the bill." He said it to the jury, and then he turned and said it to Harriet, and she held his eyes and did not look away.
When he sat down, Mr. Greaves cleared his throat and said, "I have one further witness," and the door at the back of the long room opened.
She had not known he would come. Nobody had told her. Sir Roland Ferrers walked up the aisle between the benches with his white head high and his heavy coat buttoned to the throat, and the farmers drew in their knees to let him pass, and he went to the rail and put his hand on the Book.
He did not look at her. He looked at the jury.
"I took the depositions in this matter in November of the year eighteen twenty-one," he said. "A flask was found on the deceased's person. It was brought to me. It was very nearly full. I withheld it from the coroner and from the jury, and I advised a witness to give evidence that I had reason to believe was untrue. I did so in order to protect the reputation of a young man to whom I stand as godfather, and for other reasons of my own which are not this court's concern. I have today resigned my commission of the peace. The flask is here."
He set it on the table in front of Mr. Greaves. It was very small in the grey January light: a little silver thing with a heron on it and three wheatsheaves. Then he walked back down the aisle and out, and the door closed behind him, and the room let out its breath all at once.
The jury was out for twenty minutes. The verdict, when it came, was that Samuel Wren, horse trainer of Brayford, had died by accident on the night of the eleventh of November, being thrown into the lime pit on the Wold road while in pursuit of a loose horse in the course of his duty, and that there was no evidence whatever that he had taken drink.
Mr. Greaves read it out twice, because the room was noisy. Harriet heard it both times. She sat very straight on the bench with Thorne's rough hand gripping hers and Kit crying openly on her other side, and she heard her father's name said right, in a public room, aloud, and she thought that she would remember the sound of it for the rest of her life.
IX.