Unraveled (Turner #3)(2)

Miranda swallowed. He was Magistrate Turner—better known as Lord Justice.

His face wasn’t red. His wig was straight. And while the other magistrates were smiling at Croggins’s antics, Lord Justice looked as somber as a crow in his black robes, stern and implacable. She could almost believe the stories that were told about him.

“Always covering the ground, Turner,” the mayor said in exasperated tones. “Very well. I suppose you must have your way. But I hardly see the point, as the man has admitted his guilt.”

Compared with his colleagues, Lord Justice looked like the statue of a magistrate instead of irresolute flesh and blood. He fit the name he’d been given. Justice made her think of hard lines and inflexible resolve. Lord Justice scanned the room with sharp, mobile eyes, which seemed to take in everything all at once.

Lord Justice, everyone said, could smell a lie at twenty paces. Miranda sat no more than fifteen from him.

Just looking at the man gave her gooseflesh. She’d appeared before him once. Even thinking of the questions he’d asked, the way his eyes had pierced her, made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. And that time, she’d been telling the truth.

“Perhaps,” Lord Justice said, “you could help me understand the events of last night. I’ve heard the testimony from your daughter. But I wish to hear it in your words. How did the fire start?”

“Ah,” Billy Croggins said, “that would be the drunk part of drunk and disorderly.” He smiled winningly.

Lord Justice was not so easily won. He steepled his fingers. “Were you voluntarily drunk? Or did you have your drink forced upon you?”

“I’d be much obliged, Your Worship, if people forced drink upon me. As it were, I had to purchase it like a regular booby.”

The only response to that witticism was a thinning of the magistrate’s lips. “When you were inebriated, you went to your daughter’s house?”

“Yes, and can you believe my own child wouldn’t open her door for me? Told me to go away and come back sober. If I waited for that, I’d never see my grandchildren at all, not ’til Gabriel sounded his trump at the last.”

A woman in the crowd let out a harsh bark of laughter at that, and the mayor hid a smile behind his sleeve.

Lord Justice still found no amusement in the proceedings. He tapped his fingers against the bench. “Was it then you threw the lantern into the woodshed and threatened to burn her out?”

The smile on Croggins’s face fixed in place. “Might have done, might have done. Wasn’t thinking so clearly at that point. I didn’t actually burn her woodshed down—just wanted to scare her a little, so she’d show some respect for her father. Besides, it seemed like a good idea. At the time.”

Lord Justice sighed and leaned back. “You see, Billy Croggins, this is what has me worried. Everyone in this courtroom seems to think you’re a jolly old fellow. Everyone thinks you’re amusing. Everyone is laughing. Everyone, that is, except your daughter. Why do you suppose that is?”

“She’s got no sense of humor.”

A few chuckles rose from the audience, but they were weaker, and held a nervous edge.

“Here’s my theory: her two infants were in the house when you tried to burn her out. Maybe she didn’t see the joke in putting their lives at risk.”

“Aw, it was just the woodshed!”

“It was an outbuilding, within the curtilage and attached to the dwelling-house,” Lord Justice said. His gaze focused on some point in the distance, as if he were reading those words off some page that only he could see. “According to the Statute of George, that’s arson.”

“Arson! But the wood scarcely even caught!”

Lord Justice leaned over the bench. “Arson,” he repeated firmly. “As you didn’t succeed, attempted arson, and as such, punishable by one year’s hard labor. Do you think that might dry you out?”

“Your Worship, I was drunk. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Under the rule of Lord Hale, a man who becomes voluntarily drunk is responsible for his actions, the same as if he was sober.”

Croggins glanced about. There was no laughter in the courtroom now. Lord Justice had emptied it of all humor. This little display, after all, was just another demonstration of how Magistrate Turner had come by his name.

Miranda clenched her hands together and bit her lip. She could only hope he would not examine her so closely.

“Turner,” the mayor said, “this is the petty sessions. We’ve no authority to consider a charge of arson at a summary conviction.”

“Quite right,” Lord Justice said. “Nor was arson charged in the indictment. But we can dismiss the case and commit him until the Assizes. I’ve heard enough testimony to have him charged when next the grand jury meets.”

It wasn’t Magistrate Turner’s looks that had earned him the sobriquet “Lord Justice.” In the two years before he’d become a magistrate, the petty sessions had convicted every man but one who had stood before them. In Turner’s first six months in office, he’d let more than a dozen people go, claiming the crimes had been unproven. But he wasn’t kind; far from it. He punished the guilty with harsh efficiency.

The Lord part came about because his brother was a duke. But they called him Justice because he was as cruel—and as kind—as the weather. You never knew what you were going to get, and no complaint would change the result.