scrutiny of the press, the attention of every spectator. No actress could have played her part more heroically in that witness chair. She waved away a little cigarette smoke and said, “Well, I hope you’re right.”
“Oh, you heard the judge. My goodness. What did he say in that summation of his? Never in all his years seen a case handled like that, evidence mishandled, testimony fabricated, et cetera. I wonder if he really meant that bit about recommending an investigation into the whole mess.”
“I hope so. I’ll hope it’s got them scared, all right, I mean everyone who had a hand in this. Everyone who wanted to take Freddie down.”
“Thank goodness they were so incompetent.”
She laughed shrilly. “Those Miami policemen! I never saw such a pair of dunces. That idiot Barker was on the stand, sweating and stuttering and backtracking. Everybody could see those fingerprints were planted. Everybody.”
She laid such an emphasis on that last word, I flinched. “Well, it won’t be long now. He’ll be vindicated, I’m sure of it.”
Even to me, the words sounded hollow. Nancy looked at the clock. Six fifty-six in the evening, not even two hours since the jury had retired. Across the room, a pair of policemen lounged about their desks, pretending not to notice us.
“What will you do when it’s over?” I asked.
“Over? My God. I don’t know. Just to settle down with my husband, I guess.”
“You deserve it. Everyone admires how you’ve handled yourself.”
She flicked a little ash from her cigarette. “Except my mother, it seems. Speaking of which, where on earth has your husband gotten to? He’s missed all the excitement around here.”
“You know how it is in wartime,” I said. “When you’re called away to serve king and country and all that. He sends his warmest regards.”
“Does he? That’s kind.” She rose from the sofa and stepped to the window, a few feet away, overlooking the street outside the courthouse. “Just look at all those folks standing there. They all support Freddie, you know. They love him.”
I made myself rise, too, and came to stand with her by the window. By “those folks” she of course meant “the Negroes.” The Windsors and the Bay Street Boys might not abide Freddie, but the greater part of the population, the colored part, the part that didn’t sit in parliament or on juries, stood firm behind him.
“Anyway,” Nancy said, “however things turn out. I appreciate your support. I mean that. Seeing you up there in the gallery, every day, it just gave us strength. Both of us.”
“I wouldn’t have been anywhere else. Anyone could see he’d been framed. Just as anyone could see who the real culprit was.”
A twitch involved the corner of Nancy’s mouth. She stubbed out her cigarette on the windowsill and turned to me.
“Anyone could see, sure,” she said, “but do you think anyone’s got the guts to say it out loud?”
Across the room, a telephone rang. We both jumped. One of the policemen answered it, speaking in low tones, glancing in our direction. Nancy grabbed my hand and dug her fingernails into my palm with such ferocity, my eyes stung.
The policeman hung up the phone and rose. “Mrs. de Marigny. It seems the jury has reached its verdict.”
By the time I elbowed my way back to my seat in the press gallery, the courtroom was packed, the air electric. Freddie was back in his cage. From the opposite wall, in its place of honor, a portrait of the King of England stared nobly into the distance, as it had done throughout the trial. The resemblance to the duke unsettled me. At certain moments, it had seemed as if the brothers had switched places, as if the duke himself were somehow staring through the bland eyes of his successor, as if he presided over us—participants and spectators alike—from a point higher than that of the judge himself.
When the jurors had filed back inside the courtroom, Sir Oscar entered and resumed his seat on the dais in his robes and his curling wig. The court registrar asked the foreman of the jury, a grocer named James Sands, if they had reached a verdict.
Yes, we have, said Mr. Sands.
How silent that room was, how taut, how stifling. There was not the slightest sound, not a movement. I remember I stared not at Mr. Sands, or the judge, or the portrait of King George there on the wall, but at Freddie in his cage. I remember how I looked at his face and