The Coven
Page 37
John Bellflower sat down, and George Hazzard silently clapped his hands together.
Judge Stavely looked up wearily, and said, ‘Is that everything? If it is, I will ask the jury to huddle and give me their verdict.’
‘By no means everything, your honour!’ said Beatrice, standing up again.
‘Well?’ asked Judge Stavely.
‘I spoke to Mr Pott personally and although he had found arsenic in the bodies of the seven girls, his opinion was that it was not of sufficient strength to have killed them. As you may have read in his post-mortem report, he was unable to find evidence of any poison that could have killed them.’
‘Something killed them, madam, and if it wasn’t arsenic, then what? This is really rather tiresome.’
‘With Mr Potts’s permission, I examined the girls’ bodies myself. I used a test devised by my father to detect the presence of plant alkaloids in human tissue, and I found that the flesh of every one of those girls exuded the oily poisonous juice which can be extracted from tobacco. Without any question at all, that was what killed them.’
‘Tobacco juice?’ frowned Judge Stavely. ‘So what inference do you draw from that?’
‘No inference, your honour – evidence. There is one defendant in this court who has unlimited access to tobacco leaves – Mr George Hazzard. Mr Hazzard can also draw on the expertise of another defendant in this court who is proficient in chemistry – Mr Godfrey Minchin. Equipment was impounded by law officers from Mr Minchin’s apothecary, and that equipment includes numerous jars of tobacco leaves in the process of distillation, and full bottles of tobacco juices.’
Godfrey gripped the railing at the front of the dock and stared at Beatrice in horror. He knew what it would mean if the jury found him guilty of providing George Hazzard with poison – especially since Beatrice had already given evidence that he had anaesthetized her.
‘He made me!’ he screamed, and pointed at George Hazzard. ‘He made me! He said he would have me beaten if I didn’t! He made me!’
‘Order!’ shouted Judge Stavely, banging his gavel again. ‘This is a court of law, not a bear-pit!’
‘He made me! He made me! It was him! And her! She made me pour it down their throats! It was both of them! They made me!’
There was chaos in the courtroom. The jury were all standing up, and now the people in the public gallery were standing up, too, and jabbing their fingers towards the dock, and shouting, ‘Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!’
George Hazzard spun around and around, his fists bunched in fury. Beatrice thought that he was going to hit Godfrey, but then he grasped the rail at the front of the dock, and swung himself right over it. He dropped down onto the floor in front of the clerk’s table and turned around again, as if he couldn’t decide which way to go.
‘’E’s getting away!’ somebody shouted. ‘Look! ’E’s makin’ a run for it!’
One of the bailiffs came around the clerk’s table – a big man in a tight black uniform. He took hold of George Hazzard’s left shoulder and tried to twist him around, but George Hazzard twisted himself back. He drew the sword out of the bailiff’s scabbard and without any hesitation he stabbed it into his stomach. The bailiff looked down in surprise, and then tilted forward and pitched face-down onto the clerk’s table, scattering blood-spattered documents all over the floor.
Now George Hazzard switched his attention to the witness box, and Beatrice. His face was so scarlet and so contorted with rage with she could hardly recognize him. If the seven girls hadn’t really summoned Satan in their dormitory, they had surely done so now.
‘You!’ he roared, walking stiffly towards her, with the bailiff’s sword raised. ‘You and your evidence! Well, let me tell you this, you scabby jilt! If there’s no you, there’s no evidence! If you die, your evidence dies with you!’
Jonas Rook stood up and shouted, ‘Drop that! Do you hear me? Drop it!’
He stepped out of the witness box, but George Hazzard lashed the sword from side to side and caught his elbow, ripping right through his sleeve. Jonas Rook said, ‘Gah!’ and clenched his teeth in pain and gripped his arm. Blood began dripping quickly through his fingers and onto the floor.
George Hazzard shoved him roughly aside and came up to the steps of the witness box, holding the sword high.
‘What about retracting your fanciful evidence, Beatrice? No, I didn’t think you would. Not willingly. But this will do, just as well!’
Beatrice felt stone-cold. She had never felt as cold as this in her life, even when she had seen Francis, dead and embalmed. She reached down to her purse and without keeping her eyes off George Hazzard she felt for the butt of her Toby pistol. Before she lifted it out, she pulled back the hammer until she felt it click.
As George Hazzard came up the steps, she took it out and pointed it directly at his face and pulled the trigger. There was a deafening bang and a puff of blue smoke and she felt the pistol jolt in her hand. The ball hit George Hazzard in the right eye, so that it was nothing more than a deep black hole. He stopped, stock-still.
The silence in the courtroom was immense. All that Beatrice could hear was the sleet rattling furiously against the windows. Then the sword fell out of George Hazzard’s fingers onto the steps, bouncing on its point and ringing like a bell. He took one unsteady pace back, and then another, and then he fell over backwards with a heavy thump and lay on the floor with his arms spread wide.
Jonas Rook looked down at Beatrice, still clutching his arm. She had never seen such a complicated expression on a man’s face before.
‘Guilty!’ shouted somebody in the public gallery, and at once the cry was taken up all around the courtroom. ‘Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!’
47
The next morning, Beatrice was tying up her cape and putting on her bonnet, ready to take Florence out for a walk, when she heard a sharp knocking at the front door downstairs.
Eliza rushed into the sitting room, flung open the window and looked down into the courtyard.
‘’Oo are you?’ she demanded. ‘Wodger want?’
Beatrice couldn’t hear what the answer was, but when Eliza closed the window she said, ‘Two gentlemen for you, Beatrice! Oh yes, gentlemen for definite! I’ll fetch ’em up, shall I?’
‘Please,’ said Beatrice, because she was still fastening Florence’s cape. ‘Did they give you their names?’
‘No, but they asked for Widow Scarlet, so they must know you.’
Eliza went down and opened the door, and Beatrice heard voices. Then footsteps came up the stairs, and Jonas Rook came into the sitting room. He looked around as if to say, this isn’t quite the kind of place I expected to find you, but he gave her a smile all the same.
‘Good morning, Beatrice. And you must be Florence.’
Florence hid herself behind Beatrice’s cape, but No-noh trotted up to Jonas Rook and sniffed enthusiastically at his boots.
‘I believe I have some news for you, Widow Scarlet,’ said Jonas Rook. ‘Two items of news, in fact – some good news and some very good news. The good news is that Sir John Fielding is delighted with the outcome of yesterday’s court case, regardless of the uproar it has caused. I was not aware of this myself, but apparently Mr Hazzard had exploited his blindness and deceived him into dismissing a serious case of fraud against one of his friends, which would have caused Sir John a great deal of embarrassment, and might even have obliged him to resign as a magistrate.’
‘I’m very pleased,’ said Beatrice. ‘Not that I killed George Hazzard, of course. I can only hope that God forgives me for that.’
‘Sir John is certainly pleased, even if God is still making up his mind. He has told me that there are three empty rooms on the fourth floor of No. 4 Bow Street, and he says he would be honoured if you would take up occupancy. He will make sure that they are furnished however you wish, and at his expense. His only request is that you occasionally lend us your talents as an apothecary to solve any mystifying crimes.’
‘Really? H
e’s giving us somewhere to live?’
‘Completely free of rent, Widow Scarlet. And I am just as pleased as you are, because I will be seeing so much more of you.’
Beatrice turned around to Florence and said, ‘Did you hear that, Florrie? We’ll be having new rooms of our own! And we can decorate them however we wish!’
‘Not with German Green wallpaper, though,’ smiled Jonas Rook.
‘Please, don’t remind me,’ said Beatrice. ‘But you said you had some very good news. What could be better news than that?’
Jonas Rook said, Ah!’ and lifted one finger, and then he went back to the sitting-room door. ‘You can come in now,’ he said, to whoever was waiting outside.
The door opened wider, and Noah came in. His hair was long and braided, and his face was so tanned that he looked like an Indian, and he seemed to have grown three or four inches. He was wearing a brown tweed coat that was at least two sizes too big for him, and almost reached the floor. He stared at Beatrice in silence for five full seconds before he burst into tears, and came stumbling into her arms.
Beatrice sank back into the armchair behind her, sobbing and hugging him close. Florence stood beside them, patting Noah’s back and kissing the top of his head.
A voice said, ‘Hallo, Cousin Beatrice.’
Beatrice smeared away her tears with her fingertips and saw that it was Jeremy. He too looked suntanned, and his hair was long and tied back with a ribbon.
‘You found him!’ Beatrice wept. ‘Oh, my dear God, Jeremy, you found him!’
Jeremy looked at Jonas Rook and then back at Beatrice. ‘I thought it was the least I could do to make amends to you. I found an Ossipee scout in Lower Cohos and I hired him to take me up to New France. It took a while, but Noah wasn’t that hard to find when I let the Indians know that I was ready to pay good money for him.’
‘Oh Jeremy, I don’t know how I can thank you. Noah – look at you! Brown as a berry and all that long hair!’
Florence picked up her puppy and showed him to her brother.
‘This is No-noh, too. We called him that because we didn’t have you. But now we do. So we’ll have to give him a new name, won’t we?’
Beatrice stroked the puppy’s head and said, ‘Yes, you’re right, Florrie. Let’s call him James.’
We hope you enjoyed this book!
Graham Masterton’s next book, Dead Men Whistling, is coming in winter 2017
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GRAHAM MASTERTON was a bestselling horror writer for many years before he turned his talent to crime. He lived in Cork for five years, an experience that inspired the Katie Maguire series.
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About the Katie Maguire Series
Katie Maguire was one of seven sisters born to a police Inspector in Cork, but the only sister who decided to follow her father into An Garda Siochana.
With her bright green eyes and short redhair, she looks like an Irish pixie, but she is no soft touch. To the dismay of some of her male subordinates, she rose quickly through the ranks, gaining a reputation for catching Cork’s killers, often at great personal cost.
Katie spent seven years in a turbulent marriage in which she bore, and lost, a son – an event that continues to haunt her. Despite facing turmoil at home and prejudice at work, she is one of the most fearless detectives in Ireland.
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London, 1750
Beatrice Scarlet is the apothecary’s daughter. She can mix medicines and herbs to save the lives of her neighbours - but, try as she might, she can’t save the lives of her parents. An orphan at just sixteen, Beatrice marries a preacher and emigrates to America.
New Hampshire, 1756
In the farming community where Beatrice now lives, six pigs are found viciously slaughtered; slices of looking-glass embedded in their mouths. According to scripture, this is the work of Satan - but Beatrice Scarlet suspects the hands of men. As she closes in on the killer, she must act quickly to unmask him - or become the next victim herself...
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Graham Masterton, 2017
The moral right of Graham Masterton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781784977191
ISBN (HB) 9781784976354
ISBN (PB) 9781784976378
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