final triumphant toss, he dismissed the witness. Patterson sagged in the witness chair, spent. His surgical coat looked four sizes too large, as if the body underneath had wasted away. After a minute, he managed to rise and shuffle back to his table.
“What’s next for the jury’s consideration, Mr. Lincoln?” Judge Thomas asked. He gave an innocent smile toward the audience, which shouted with glee.
“A moment, Your Honor,” Lincoln replied. He bent over next to Patterson and the two whispered back and forth at some length. Eventually Lincoln straightened and said, “We call Jane Patterson to the stand.” He looked toward the audience.
An excited buzz arose from the crowd. Jane Patterson herself, however, did not rise. No one did.
“Miss Patterson?” called the judge, gazing out at his courtroom. “Miss Patterson?” He looked down at Lincoln. “Where’s your witness?”
“I’m not sure, Your Honor,” Lincoln said, glancing around with agitation. Dr. Patterson, too, was on his feet and scanning the audience, a perplexed look on his face.
“If I may have a minute,” said Lincoln. He gestured frantically to the office boy Hay, who had been crouched in a corner of the well. Hay scurried over and, taking quick instruction from Lincoln, raced from the room as fast as his little legs would carry him.
In Hay’s wake, the courtroom let down its guard. The gallery talked excitedly about Prickett’s cross examination. The gentlemen of the jury stood and stretched. On the bench, Judge Thomas took out a new cigar and, having caressed it lovingly, struck a match.
Hay did not immediately return. Where could Jane have gone? I wondered. Surely she knew Lincoln intended to call her this afternoon. At length, the jury sat down again and started looking bored. Judge Thomas’s pulls on his cigar became increasingly agitated. Several members of the crowd left the courtroom in search of a necessary.
“Mr. Lincoln,” said the judge after some ten minutes had passed. “Why don’t you call your next witness.”
“I’m not sure I have one,” said Lincoln. “I’d very much prefer to put Miss Patterson on next. I’m sure Hay won’t be too much longer.”
“I’ll give him five more minutes,” said the judge. He pulled out his pocket watch and laid it on the bench in front of him. Lincoln pulled out his own watch and studied it nervously.
Five minutes passed. Judge Thomas glowered at Lincoln. “Any minute now,” Lincoln offered, hopefully. The crowd hummed with excitement. What might happen next if the witness was nowhere to be found? Perhaps, some wondered aloud, a hanging before nightfall. Seven minutes. Ten. Judge Thomas cleared his throat loudly.
“Mr. Lincoln—”
He was interrupted by the crash of the courtroom door as Hay burst through. The bedraggled boy was drenched in sweat. He raced up the central aisle and stopped at the gate, right next to me, seemingly unable to muster the strength to advance any further.
“Well?” said the judge.
The boy panted. The courtroom was silent, staring at Hay with anticipation. At last he managed to speak. “Miss . . . Miss Patterson has been . . . abducted.”
The courtroom was thrown into tumult.
Hay looked at me and added, “And your sister’s gone too.”
CHAPTER 38
About five things happened at once. Dr. Patterson, suddenly reanimated, shouted out, “My dear Jane!” and started to rush from the well. Sheriff Hutchason dove and managed to catch Patterson around the leg. Men shouted; women shrieked. Judge Thomas pounded madly for order.
But none of this mattered to me.
“What happened to Martha?” I demanded, taking Hay by the lapels of his jacket. The boy tried to wriggle free, but I pulled him closer, staring into his small, dark eyes and breathing in his stale, foul-smelling breath, and said, “Tell me. Now.”
“I only know what I learnt from Molly Hutchason in between her screamin’,” he said. “And what some trades-fellow said he’d seen on the street in front their house.”
“Tell me what you know,” I demanded again. I was vaguely conscious of Lincoln beside us, listening to what the boy had to say.
“A slave-catcher snatched up the Negro midwife, right from Hutchason’s yard,” Hay said. “Asked to see her papers, and when she couldn’t show him none, he bound her and loaded her into his cart. I guess your sister and Miss Patterson was there, and the catcher seized them up too. He drove off with all three of ’em.”
“Don’t tell me you neglected to register Phillis,” Lincoln said to me.
I did not spare a glance for Lincoln but rather tightened my grip on Hay. “Who was