realized he might actually die, that his life hung on this decision, on these words, and who on earth could willfully put an innocent man through such an ordeal? Who could frame a man for a capital crime he did not commit? It was murder, absent the courage of murder, the moral conviction of looking your man in the face and pulling the trigger. It was cowardice, the act of a runner. Freddie stared at Mr. Sands, waited for his fate, and for a terrible instant I forgot all about Sir Harry Oakes. I forgot about the Bahamas and the Windsors. For a terrible instant, I thought we were in Bakersfield, and it was Tommy’s murder being tried, it was my guilt for which Freddie would hang.
I heard the registrar speak.
How say you, is the prisoner guilty or not guilty of the offense with which he is charged?
He is a goner, I thought. God forgive me.
Mr. Sands called out, Not guilty.
In the pandemonium that followed, I was possibly the only person who kept my seat. While my colleagues stampeded for the telephones, I stared at Mr. Sands, whose lips still made words, though you couldn’t hear them in all that noise. In the corner of my vision, Freddie was leaping from his cage to embrace his wife, a free man.
Well, so are you, I thought. You’re free, aren’t you? Freddie’s acquittal is your acquittal. But I was not free. The world spun in frantic loops around the small, fragile core inside my womb, the piece of himself that Thorpe had left behind. I rose from my seat and shouldered out of the press gallery. I found a telephone and communicated my dispatch to the Associated Press, and to this day I’ve got no idea what that dispatch actually said. By now, everybody had tumbled out of the courthouse and into Rawson Square, where Freddie was hoisted onto the shoulders of the crowd—white and Negro—and carried through the evening air to his car. I stood there on the steps and watched it all. A sense of dread overcame me, of imminent disaster, and I fought to master it. The Lady of Nassau had a column to write and transmit by two o’clock in the morning, after all, just in time to set the press for the December issue, and since Lightfoot had agreed—with many a grumble—to pay me a thousand clams for said column, I needed my conscience at its clearest and my pencil at its sharpest. No morbid thoughts, no impending doom. Not guilty, remember?
A man stood next to me, checking his watch. Godfrey Higgs, Freddie’s barrister.
“Why, Mr. Higgs! There you are. The man of the hour.”
He looked up. “Mrs. Thorpe. You give me too much credit. The prosecution laid a contemptible case. Any competent barrister should have won acquittal.”
“Any barrister should, maybe. But they weren’t exactly scrambling to take on the defense, were they? Just you.”
“I did my duty, that’s all, Mrs. Thorpe.”
“Well, at least you were wise enough to leave certain questions unasked. I wonder if we’ll ever see justice?”
He shook his head, and I saw how weary he was, not that I blamed him. The poor fellow probably hadn’t experienced a good night’s sleep since July.
“Mr. Higgs,” I said. “I thought I saw the foreman speaking, after the verdict. Only I couldn’t hear him in all the racket. Was it something important?”
Mr. Higgs turned his head to watch Freddie’s car as it drove slowly through Rawson Square, parting the crowd, honking its joyous horn. “It was,” he said. “I’m afraid there was an addendum to the verdict.”
“An addendum? What do you mean?”
“Mr. Sands went on to say that the jury recommended—in spite of the verdict—that Mr. de Marigny and his cousin, Georges de Visledou, be deported from the Bahamas immediately as undesirables.”
“Deported? Undesirables? Why?”
“A very good question, Mrs. Thorpe. I shall seek answers as soon as possible, although I don’t imagine it will make any difference.”
Across the square, Freddie’s car had disappeared around a corner, and the jubilant glow of the headlamps arced across a building to dissolve into blackness. “Why not?” I whispered.
“Because I suspect that certain elements of the government will move heaven and earth to see that the deportation is carried out forthwith.”
I turned to gaze at him. He had removed the wig, of course, and while I privately thought these wigs an absurdity, Mr. Higgs did seem to have shed a certain air of importance along with his gray curls.
He went on. “I