clerk read out the charge against her. How did she plead?
Margery seemed to sway a little, and her eyes slid toward the public gallery.
“Not guilty,” she answered quietly, and there was a loud scoffing sound from the right-hand side of the court, followed by the loud banging of the judge’s gavel. He would not, repeat not, have an unruly court and nobody here was to so much as sniff without his permission. Did he make himself understood?
The crowd settled, albeit with an air of vaguely suppressed mutiny. Margery looked up at the judge and, after a moment, he nodded at her to sit down again, and that would be the extent of her animation until she was allowed to leave the courtroom.
* * *
• • •
The morning crept forward in legal increments, women fanning themselves and small children fidgeting in their seats, as the prosecuting counsel outlined the case against Margery O’Hare. It would be clear to all, he announced, in a somewhat nasal, showman’s voice, that before them was a woman brought up without morals, without concern for the decent, rightful way of doing things, without faith. Even her most visible enterprise—the so-called Packhorse Library—had proven to be a front for less savory preoccupations, and the state would show evidence of these through evidence from witnesses shaken by examples of her moral laxity. These deficiencies in both character and behavior had found their apotheosis one afternoon up on Arnott’s Ridge when the accused had come across the sworn enemy of her late father, and taken advantage of the isolated position and inebriation of Mr. Clem McCullough to finish what their feuding descendants had started.
While this went on—and it did go on, for the prosecuting counsel loved the sound of his own voice—the reporters from Lexington and Louisville scribbled furiously in small lined notebooks, shielding their work from each other and looking up intently at every new piece of information. When he came to the bit about “moral laxity,” Beth called out “Bullcrap!” earning herself a cuff from her father, who sat behind her, and a stern rebuke from the judge, who announced that one more word from her and she would be sitting outside in the dust for the rest of the trial. She listened to the remainder of the statement with her arms folded and the kind of expression that made Alice fear for the prosecution lawyer’s tires.
“You watch. Those reporters will write that these mountains run red with blood feuds and such nonsense,” muttered Mrs. Brady, from behind her. “They always do. Makes us sound like a bunch of savages. You won’t read a word about all the good this library—or Margery—has done.”
Kathleen sat silently on one side of Alice, Izzy the other. They listened carefully, their faces serious and still, and when he finished they exchanged looks that said they now understood what Margery was up against. Blood feuds aside, the Margery the court had described was so duplicitous, so monstrous, that if they had not known her they might have been afraid to sit just a few feet away from her too.
Margery seemed to know it. She looked deadened, as if the very thing that made her Margery had been squeezed out of her, leaving only an empty shell.
Alice wished for the hundredth time that Sven had not absented himself. Surely, no matter what she’d told him, Margery would have taken some comfort from having him there. Alice kept imagining what it must be like to be sitting in the dock, facing the end of everything she loved and held dear. It hit her then that Margery, who loved nothing better than solitude, to be left alone, unexamined, and who belonged outside, like a mule or a tree or a buzzard, was going to be in one of those tiny dark cells for ten, twenty years, if not the rest of her life.
And then she had to stand and push her way out of the gallery because she knew she was going to throw up from fear.
* * *
• • •
You okay?” Kathleen arrived behind her as she spat into the dust.
“Sorry,” Alice said, straightening. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Kathleen passed her a handkerchief and she wiped her mouth.
“Izzy’s holding our seats. But we’d best not be too long. People are already eyeing ’em.”
“I just . . . can’t bear it, Kathleen. Seeing her like that. Seeing the town like this. It’s like they just want the slightest excuse to think badly of