Blind Justice by Bruce Alexander Page A

“I’m sure it is. Now, Potter, if you will now conduct Master Proctor into the garden, so that he may view it, and be kind enough to answer any questions he might have.”
    ”Master Proctor?” The butler looked around the room as if I were not there.
    “Indeed. Master Proctor. Now, if you will be so good as to wait by the door, I would have a word with him.”
    I then left off my survey of the library, which in truth had not advanced far since Ebenezer Tepper’s departure, and went straight to Sir John’s side. Potter, as ordered, went to the door. There he pouted.
    Sir John groped forward and grasped me by the arm, pulling me close. “Jeremy,” he said in a whisper, “what you must do is observe this room from the outside. Look for any suspicious thickness in its walls at any point. Ask him anything you like, but try not to give out precisely what you are looking for. And be reasonably quick about it. I must be back to prepare for today’s court session. Understood?”
    “Understood, Sir John.”
    “Very well, I shall be waiting for you: probably in the hall, near the street door.”
    “I’ll not be long.”
    He released me then, and I went off to follow Potter through a door beneath the stairs Just beyond the one we had passed through the night before to reach the kitchen in the cellar. There were three steps down, leading to a door to the outside. Potter made a great show of producing a key from his pocket, not a ring of keys but a single key, and unlocking the door.
    “Was this door locked last night?” I asked, making my youthful voice as deep as possible.
    “Of course it was, boy!” said Potter to me rudely. Clearly, he did not fancy being guide to a thirteen-year-old.
    However, he told no less than the truth when he called the garden lovely. Indeed it was lovely. There were blooms of every sort in abundance in every corner. They mocked the rich disorder of nature, laid out not in sections but rather in a gay, scattered profusion in which colors and varieties mixed in a way I had not seen before. A path led through this array. Potter stood aside and allowed me to look as I liked. I took the path and walked to where it ended at a high privet hedge as Potter trailed behind. There was a gate, which I tried. It was locked.
    “And where does this gate lead?” I asked, maintaining my serious demeanor.
    “To a narrow mews between the houses,” said he, snappish as any snapping turtle.
    “And was it locked last night?” “Of course!”
    “Do you now have the key?”
    “No, I do not.”
    “Will you fetch it, please, Mr. Potter?” Even I was amazed at my coolness in these circumstances. For his part, Potter was quite shocked at my request. I read his face as he fought back the impulse to strike me for my presumption, or at least to refuse me. Yet in the end he thought better of it, doubtless remembering that I was there in the garden as the agent of Sir John Fielding, no less.
    And so he had no choice but to turn around and stalk off to the house, calling over his shoulder that he would be back in a moment.
    That moment was all it took for me to make the inspection I’d been charged to make. I darted to the house and looked around it to the right, looking for any extension or protrusion from the walls, anything at all that seemed amiss.
    But no, there was nothing.
    Then I walked along the library windows at the rear of the house, looking up, checking below. There were two, separated by the chimney which accommodated the fireplace in the library that stood directly behind the desk where I first saw the corpus of Lord Good-hope seated. All was just as I supposed it should have been from having looked over the room so carefully from the inside.
    Or was it?
    I backed up the garden path away from the house, continuing to study the rear of the library, feeling there was something there to be seen: if I could but see it.
    We were together in the hackney, Sir John and I, before he at last spoke to me of