Chapter 2 #2
After Jennie left, Padua knelt beside her bed. She reached under it for a valise she stored there. Opening it, she removed a little purse that held her money.
These coins had a purpose, but she doubted now that she would ever save enough to pay for her passage to Italy, and to her namesake city, where her mother had studied and her parents had met.
Not when these coins were required to pay for the lawyers to help her father now, and to procure him what little comfort she could while he lived in his current abode.
She had saved almost enough once before, when she was younger and teaching at the school in Birmingham that she had attended as a student herself.
After three years of scrimping, she had the passage.
Then she had met Nicholas and fallen in love.
Beautiful, glorious love. The kind of love her mother and father had known, and about which poems are written.
She had loved totally, freely, and without guilt or worry.
Three months later Nicholas was gone, with her money in his pocket.
She stared at the coins. Her father had been cold to her for ten years, ever since her mother had died when Padua was fifteen.
He had sent her away to that school then, at a time when she wanted to be with what family she had left.
She had only seen him a few times a year since then, even after she moved to London in order to be closer to him.
He did not want her help. He did not even want her company. She should just leave, and go to Padua and apply to the university and make her mark if she still could. Papa might even respect her then.
Her mother’s voice came to her, frail and trembling from the consumption taking her life.
He is like a child, Padua. You must promise me you will watch over him, as much as he will allow.
For a man who has traveled extensively and read the great books, he knows almost nothing about surviving in the world.
A long sigh escaped her. Oh, Mama, what a promise to demand—to care for a man who did not love her. To demand a place in his life when he would prefer she had none.
She thumbed fifteen shillings aside, then returned the rest to the valise.
* * *
Given a choice, most lawyers would never sully themselves with criminal law. The result was those who did usually were the lawyers who could not find something more lucrative to do.
Ives was a rarity, a lawyer who argued criminal cases out of a sense of duty.
There was no criminal bar, and his colleagues in the endeavor consisted of a motley assortment of lawyers whose primary work involved other courts and pleadings.
Like him, only on occasion did they arrive in regalia at the Old Bailey or other criminal courtrooms to lend their eloquence and legal knowledge to the deliberations therein.
Solicitors, sergeants—there was no limitation on who appeared to defend.
If one saw a trained barrister in the Old Bailey or Newgate Prison, most likely he served as prosecutor, either one hired by the victims or by the state.
Some judges now allowed the accused to have lawyers, too, but not all did.
In many cases judges held to the tradition that a defendant could provide his own defense by simply speaking the truth.
Today Ives entered Newgate by way of a door through which most of those other lawyers were never received—that of the house of the gaoler, Mr. Brown. Being Lord Ywain had its privileges. Within minutes he was sitting in Mr. Brown’s office, explaining his purpose.
“Belvoir is being held here, while further investigations are pursued,” Mr. Brown confirmed. “He has been here going on four weeks.”
“If charges have been laid or are imminent, I would like to know what they are.”
“Coining, it was. It will be the noose for him, or at best a life on the hulks.”
Ives was not sure what he had thought the crime would be.
Something political he supposed. As an intellectual, to hear his daughter describe him, Mr. Belvoir was the sort to take to radical ideas and company, and get swept into some misstep against the laws in place to control that sort of thing now.
“What is the evidence?” Coining, or counterfeiting money, was among the most serious offenses. Counterfeiting undermined the health of the economy, and was viewed as a type of treason.
“Caught him red-handed, is how I hear it,” Brown said. “Found the bad money in those rooms he keeps on Wigmore Street.”
This was not looking good for Hadrian Belvoir. Ives expected he would dispatch the entire trial in less than an hour. “What has he said for himself?”
“Well, now, that is the rub. He hasn’t said anything. Magistrates and others keep asking him, and he refuses to cooperate. Unwise of him, isn’t it? He might garner some mercy if he turned on his colleagues in crime. You know how that works, sir.”
He did indeed. Criminals laying down information about other criminals was the oil that made the wheels of the criminal courts turn.
“We even showed him the old press in the yard, to frighten him. Usually the mere threat of torture works wonders,” Brown said. “With this strange one, nothing. If anything he became more stubborn.”
“Strange, you call him. Is he perhaps demented?”
“I wouldn’t say so. As for strange, well, come see for yourself.”
The gaoler rose. Together they walked into the prison proper and its long corridors of cells, or wards.
Enough of a breeze penetrated through the small windows today so it did not smell as bad as it might.
Still, when hundreds of people crammed damp cells, the mere odors of humanity’s existence became concentrated and offensive.
The smell of human waste alone overwhelmed the senses.
Add to that the effects of unwashed bodies, rotting food, and the almost sweet odor of illness, and it produced a mix strong enough to leave men retching.
As they approached a crossway in the corridors, a woman sped past on the other path.
Padua Belvoir, tall and proud, walked with determination toward the exit, a handkerchief to her nose.
She headed down past wards holding women, some of whom mocked her with lewd calls and cackles.
Ives paused in the crossway and watched her run the gauntlet.
“That is his daughter, or so she says,” Brown commented.
“Showed up yesterday, asking to see him. She brought him some food, clothes, and books today. Them that care about Belvoir’s case were very interested in this woman’s sudden appearance after all this time.
I expect they are hoping she was sent by those he worked for. ”
“She really is his daughter.” Ives spoke with more authority than he could claim.
He hardly had proof of the fact. Yet there had been very little dissembling, and considerable concern, in the woman who intruded on his evening.
Should she cajole her father into cooperating, it would be a good thing.
That she had now attracted the attention of the authorities alarmed him, however.
After a few more turns, Brown stopped in front of a cell. Like many of the others, it held at least twenty men, all of whom lived, slept, ate, and wasted away in it. For a price a man could have better lodgings. The wretches here could not afford it.
“That is him, in the corner.”
Ives did not need the gaoler’s direction.
The man in the corner stood out from all the others.
Although he sat against the wall, with his manacled ankles pulled close to his body, one could tell he was very tall and very thin.
He wore a waistcoat and frock coat that, while disgusting and dirty now, had once been those of a gentleman.
Presumably there had been no beard when he entered that cell, and his steely gray hair had been better groomed too.
The most notable thing about him, however, was not his appearance, but rather his activity. In his corner, beside his hip, stood a little stack of books. Belvoir read one so intently that he did not notice the gaoler and Ives peering through the door’s iron grate.
Beside the books rested a wrapped package, and a small basket of fruit. The other men in the cell eyed the last item with lust. Ives assumed Belvoir would soon be relieved of the fruit, and perhaps the package of clothing. No one would want the books.
“When he first came, and I took down his information, he identified his occupations as teacher, scholar, gentleman, and mathematician.” Brown found it amusing. “Funny how they never say forger, coiner, murderer, or thief.”
Ives looked at those books. Hadrian Belvoir would not even notice his surroundings until they were all read, he guessed. Then read again, if no new ones were brought by his daughter.
“That daughter, if she is a daughter, wanted to buy him a better place,” Brown said. “She had the coin for it. I said I would check to see if that is allowed. My guess is they want him here, and as uncomfortable as possible.”
Ives did not think it would matter now. Anyone who saw him could tell that Hadrian Belvoir had entered a different world from the one in which he sat. His mind had been freed even if his body still suffered.
* * *
Padua pushed through the crowd waiting to hear the news from the Old Bailey’s trials. She found a spot near the end of the building, where she could pause and compose herself.
She would never grow accustomed to seeing her father in that place, but his condition was not what agitated her.
Rather she carried a deep anger away from her meeting.
She had brought him some items to relieve his suffering, at notable cost to herself, only to have him once more reject her help.
Oh, he had taken the food and books, but there had not been one word of thanks, and he had once again ordered her not to return.