The Traitors by Vivian Stuart

Author:Vivian Stuart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jentas Ehf
Published: 2022-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

The six scarlet-uniformed officers composing the court of criminal jurisdiction filed into their seats, and in response to the usher’s stentorian ‘All stand for his Majesty’s justices of the peace!’ the prisoners rose, with varying degrees of reluctance, to their feet. Joseph Fitzgerald, who was heavily chained, was the last to do so, aided none too gently by a constable, whose jerk on his leg irons was calculated to discourage any lack of respect he might be tempted to display.

Jenny, wearing only wrist fetters, rested her arms on the edge of the dock and looked uneasily across at the faces of her judges. She had no difficulty in recognising them, and her gaze went first to Major Johnston. Inclining now to corpulence, the acting commandant of the New South Wales Corps held himself with stiff military precision, as he unbuckled his sword belt and eased himself into the president’s chair, after exchanging a coldly formal bow with Mr Atkins, the judge advocate.

Captain Kemp was seated next to him; he made some demand of the clerk and swore audibly when it was not immediately answered, but then the usher supplied him with pen and ink, and he lapsed into smouldering silence, the quill grasped like a weapon in his right hand. The corps quartermaster, Lieutenant Laycock, took the seat to the commandant’s left, and to Jenny’s surprise, he raised a hand in her direction and smiled ... seemingly in reassurance.

She knew him better than she knew any of the others because in the past he had bought horses from her and sought her advice when breaking them to the saddle. Gratefully she acknowledged his smile before subsiding onto the hard wooden bench which ran the length of the dock. It was a relief to know that at least one of her judges was well disposed toward her, she reflected wryly, since the adjutant, Lieutenant Minchin, and his friend, Lieutenant Moore—known to her only by sight—both enjoyed a reputation for severity on the bench.

The sixth officer was evidently a fairly recent arrival in the colony, for he was a stranger to her—a coarse-featured, stockily built man of about twenty-five or thirty, whose curiously light eyes contrasted oddly with his darkly tanned skin and heavy black moustache and side whiskers. His name, she learned when the clerk announced it, was Lieutenant Desmond Aloysius O’Shea ... an unmistakably Irish name, and she saw Joseph Fitzgerald frown as he heard it. But he held his peace, and the initial formalities duly completed, the prisoners were again ordered to stand and the judge advocate shambled awkwardly to his feet, a sheaf of papers clutched to his chest.

After consulting these, he read the charges. They were addressed to all of them, including herself, Jenny realised, and couched in such a maze of long-winded legal terms and phrases that she listened in unhappy bewilderment, unable to make out whether she, too, were being charged with sedition and conspiracy, in addition to the expected charge of harbouring and giving comfort to those whom the judge advocate described as ‘the king’s enemies’.

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