The emergency Sunday hearing of the Court of the King’s Bench was held not in the cavernous Great Hall, but in the private Robing Room behind the High Bench. A somber, wood-paneled chamber lined with calfskin-bound statutes and portraits of seventeenth-century Chief Justices. A single coal fire burned in the wide stone hearth. It cast long, wavering amber shadows across the long refectory table where Chief Justice Aldous sat in his plain black velvet robe. It was flanked by two senior puisne judges.
Aldous was an old man of seventy-six winters, his face lined like cracked thick parchment. His hands shook slightly with age, but his dark eyes were bright, fierce, and utterly uncorrupted. He held a brass jeweler’s magnifying glass in his right hand, leaning within three inches of the master sheepskin thick parchment that lay unrolled across the green baize table, weighted down by six polished bronze metal bars.
Tomas Reed stood before the dais, his ash-wood pack frame resting beside his boots. His gray wool tunic was damp from the river mist. But his stance was straight, his shoulders square, his scarred left arm resting in its calfskin brace. Beside him stood Hester Quill, her legal folios open in her hands, her voice quiet, steady, and devastatingly careful as she finished her three-hour presentation of the evidence.
