‘And oh!’ said the Duchess, ‘the vicar sent up a message that his asthma’s rather bad and the curate away; so as Gerald isn’t here he’d be very grateful if you’d read the Lessons.’
Peter said amiably that he would, but hoped it wouldn’t be anything about Jacob, whose personality irritated him.
‘No, dear. It’s a nice gloomy piece out of Jeremiah. You’ll do it so much better than Mr Jones, because I was always very careful about adenoids, making you breathe through the nose. We’ll pick up Cousin Matthew on the way…’
The small church was packed. ‘Good house,’ said Peter, surveying the congregation from the porch. ‘The peppermint season has begun, I notice.’ He removed his hat and followed his female belongings up the aisle with preternatural decorum.
‘… world without end, amen.’
The congregation sat down with a creak and a shuffle, and disposed itself to listen with approval to his lordship’s rendering of Jewish prophecy. Peter, handling the heavy red-silk markers, glanced round the building, collected the attention of the back pews, clasped the brass eagle firmly by either wing, opened his mouth, and then paused, to direct his eyeglass awfully upon a small boy sitting just beneath the lectern.
‘Is that Willy Blodgett?’
Willy Blodgett became petrified.
‘Now, don’t you pinch your sister again. It’s not cricket*.’
‘There,’ said Willy Blodgett’s mother in an audible whisper, ‘sit still! I declare I’m ashamed of you.’
‘Here beginneth the Fifth Chapter of the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah.
‘Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man, if there be any that executeth judgement…’
(Yes, indeed. Frank Crutchley in the local gaol-was he listening to execution and judgement? Or didn’t you have to attend Divine Service until after you were tried and sentenced?)
‘Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evening shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities…’
(Peter seemed to be rather enjoying the zoo. Harriet noticed that the family pew had crouching cats in place of the ordinary poppy-heads, in compliment no doubt to the Wimsey crest. There was a chantry at the east end of the south aisle, with canopied tombs. Wimseys again, she supposed.)
‘Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes and see not…’
(To think how they had looked on while that pot was wiped clean! The reader, untroubled by this association of ideas, had passed happily on into the next verse-the exciting one, about waves tossing and roaring.)
‘For among my people are found wicked men: they lay wait, as he that setteth snares; they set a trap, they catch men…’
(Harriet looked up. Had she fancied that slight check in the voice? Peter’s eyes were steadily fixed on the page.)
‘… and my people love to have it so: and what will you do in the end thereof?
‘Here endeth the First Lesson.’
‘Very well read,’ said Mr Wimsey, leaning across Harriet, ‘excellent; I can always hear everything you say.’
Peter said in Harriet’s ear: ‘You ought to hear old Gerald, when he gets in among the Hivites and the Perizzites and the Girgashites.’
As the Te Deum started, Harriet again thought of Paggleham, and wondered whether Miss Twitterton had found courage to preside at the organ.
So here I’ll watch the night and wait
To see the morning shine
When he will hear the stroke of eight
And not the stroke of nine.
– A. E. houseman: A Shropshire Lad.
After the magistrates’ court they were free until the Assizes. So they finished their honeymoon in Spain, after all. The Dowager Duchess wrote that the furniture had been sent up to Talboys from the Hall and that the painting and plastering were done. It would be better to leave work on the new bathroom until the frosts were over. But the house was habitable.
And Harriet wrote back that they were coming home in time for the trial, and that no marriage had ever been so happy as theirs-only, Peter was dreaming again.
Sir Impey Biggs, cross-examining:
‘And you expect the jury to believe that this remarkable piece of mechanism went unnoticed by the deceased from 6.20 to 9 o’clock?’
‘I expect nothing. I have described the mechanism as we constructed it.’
Then the judge: ‘The witness can only speak to his knowledge of the facts. Sir Impey.’
‘Quite so, m’lud.’
The point made. The suggestion implanted that the witness was a little unreasonable…
‘Now, this booby-trap you set for the prisoner…’
‘I understood the witness to say that the trap was set by way of experiment, and that the prisoner arrived unexpectedly and sprang it before be could be warned.’
‘That is so, my lord.’
‘I am obliged to your lordship… What effect did the accidental springing of this booby-trap have upon the prisoner?’
‘He seemed very much frightened.’
‘We may easily believe that. And astonished?’
‘Yes.’
‘When suffering under this very natural surprise and alarm, was he able to speak coolly and collectedly?’
‘He was anything but cool and collected.’
‘Did you think he was aware of what he was saying?’
‘I can scarcely be a judge of that. He was agitated.’
‘Would you go as far as to call his manner frenzied?’
‘Yes; that word describes it very well.’
‘He was out of his mind with terror?’
*I am not qualified to say so.’
‘Now, Lord Peter. You have explained very clearly that this engine of destruction at the lowest point of its swing was not less than six feet from the ground?’
‘That is so.’
‘Anybody less than six feet in height would be perfectly safe from it?’
‘Exactly.’
‘We have heard that the prisoner’s height is five feet and ten inches. He was, therefore, not at any time in danger from it?’
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘If the prisoner himself had arranged the pot and chain as the prosecution suggest, he would know better than anybody else that it could not even touch him?’
‘In that case, certainly he must have known it.’
‘Yet he was very much alarmed?’
‘Very much alarmed indeed.’
An exact and non-committal witness.
Agnes Twitterton, an excited and spiteful witness, whose very obvious resentment against the prisoner did him if anything more good than harm. Dr James Craven, a highly technical witness. Martha Ruddle, a talkative and circumlocutory witness. Thomas Puffett, a deliberate and sententious witness. The Rev Simon Goodacre, a reluctant witness. Lady Peter Wimsey, a very quiet witness. Mervyn Bunter, a deferential witness. P.C. Joseph Sellon, a witness of few words. Superintendent Kirk, an officially impartial witness. A strange ironmonger from Clerkenwell, who had sold the prisoner a quantity of lead shot and an iron chain, a damaging witness. Then, the prisoner himself, witness in his own defence: a very bad witness indeed, sullen and impudent by turns.
Sir Impey Biggs, eloquent on behalf of the prisoner-‘this industrious and ambitious young man’; hinting at prejudice-‘a lady who may have some cause to fancy herself ill-used’; indulgently sceptical about ‘the instrument of destruction so picturesquely constructed by a gentleman whose ingenuity is notorious’; virtuously indignant at the construction placed upon ‘words uttered at random by a terrorised man’; astonished to discover in the case for the Prosecution ‘not a scintilla of direct proof’; passionately moving in his appeal to the jury not to sacrifice a young and valuable life on evidence so flimsily put together.