around him. “I wish she could have testified,” he said at last. “I’m very much afraid that she would have chosen silence, but by God I wish I’d had the opportunity to let her speak.”
“It is a strange case,” I said. “She looks like an angel, but her neighbors tell such tales of the crime and her coldhearted lies about it that I hardly know what to think.”
“It’s what the jury thinks that matters, Mr. Gaither. And I’m very much afraid that I know that already.”
I slept so fitfully that night that Elizabeth declared that I was taking sick from overwork and the uncertainty of the spring weather. She bundled a woolen scarf around my throat when I went off to court
that morning, which kept me warm against the March winds but did nothing for the chill at my backbone that told me death was even nearer than spring. The road was thick with crowds surging toward the courthouse to hear the verdict, but I spoke to no one. I bundled my coat tighter about me and trudged along in silence, wishing that I could spend the day in the cold sunshine instead of in a rank-smelling courtroom.
I took my place at the front of the court with only a few minutes to spare—quite later than my customary time of arrival, for I had lingered over an indifferent breakfast and loitered along the road to work like a wayward schoolboy reluctant to begin the day. The jury looked as if they, too, had passed a turbulent night. They shuffled into the jury box with rumpled clothes and that solemn expression of neutrality that jurors all contrive to maintain, perhaps in defense of their privacy, knowing that a hundred strangers are searching their faces, looking for the verdict.
The attorneys came into court together, solemnly, as if they were deacons in a church processional, and I was pleased that they did not laugh and chat among themselves, as lawyers are sometimes wont to do, distancing themselves from the harsh proceedings. Woodfin and Alexander took their appointed places with somber nods to Mr. Donnell and myself, and we waited for the prisoner to be brought in.
She appeared in the doorway, looking small and lost, and I felt a ridiculous urge to stand up, as one does when the bride enters the sanctuary. She wore the same faded blue dress as before, but now she had an old black shawl draped about her shoulders, for the wind was brisk today. The murmur of voices in the courtroom fell away to silence as she made her way to Mr. Woodfin’s side. He bent down and whispered a few words to her—encouragement, perhaps, but I saw no emotion in Mrs. Silver’s face. She held her head high and looked toward the front of the courtroom; perhaps she, too, was aware of the stares of the multitude.
“Gentlemen of the jury, may we have your verdict?” Mr. Donnell’s dour Scots countenance seemed perfectly in keeping with the tenor of the day, and I fancied that I saw the jury foreman blanch under the old justice’s withering stare.
“Ah, well, Your Honor . . .” The small man’s eyes darted left and right, seeking either support or a way out, but neither was forthcoming. He cleared his throat and began again. “That is to say . . . we don’t have one yet.”
Judge Donnell waited in a deafening silence during which nobody breathed.
The hapless juror licked his lips, but he resolved to tough it out. “We cannot agree on the matter. We’d like to question some of the witnesses again, sir.”
This statement elicited a burst of noise from the gallery, and an answering clatter from the gavel of John Donnell. “This is most irregular,” he told the jurors.
“Yes, sir,” said the foreman, but he was more confident now. The judge may be the piper of the court, but the jury calls the tune. “We’d like to hear some of the testimony again, sir.”
Mr. Donnell sighed wearily, perhaps at his own folly in having left the marble halls of Raleigh to come out to the uncouth hinterlands, where juries didn’t even know how to reach a proper verdict. No doubt the judge had wished to get an early start on his travels east, but it was not to be.
One of the other jurors handed the foreman a piece of paper. “We have a list, sir.”
The bailiff conveyed the paper to His Honor, who read it twice over with an expression of