The prisoner’s dock of the King’s Bench was guarded by four city watchmen with grounded axe-spears when Deputy Chancellor Morvath was brought into the hall at four in the afternoon. His fine cambric cravat was torn and smeared with soot from the archive hearths. His velvet breeches were spattered with river mud. And his thin, high-born hands trembled so wildly that he could scarcely clasp the iron rail of the dock. For twenty years, Morvath had sat in the tapestried inner sanctum of the High court, drafting the secret caveats and signing the diversion warrants that had impoverished forty parishes. Now, he stood blinking in the cold, unsparing daylight of the court, stripped of all official dignity.
Tomas Reed sat at the petitioner’s table beside Hester Quill, resting his left arm against his knee. He had loosened the calfskin brace by a fraction of an inch to let the air cool his inflamed wrist. Beside them sat two heavy wicker baskets filled with the charred parchment fragments Sile Rook had rescued from the ministerial chimneys. Across the table, Barrister Brandon Keld sat alone in the respondent’s box, having formally recused himself from representing the personal defenses of the ministerial officers.
