“Don’t they tell you anything at all?” inquired the red-headed girl sympathetically.
“They tell us that there’s been a murder,” replied the reporter gloomily. “And I’m telling you that it’s the only murder that ever took place in the United States of America where the press has been treated like an orphan child by everyone that knows one earthly thing about it. Not one word of the hearing before the grand jury has leaked out to anyone; we haven’t been given the name of one witness, and whatever the state’s case against Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives may be, it’s a carefully guarded secret between Mr. Daniel Farr and Mr. Daniel Farr. The defense is just as expansive. So don’t believe all you hear from me. I’d boil the lot of ’em in oil. Here comes Ben Potts. To be continued in our next.”
The red-headed girl wasn’t listening to him; she was watching the dark figure of the prosecutor, moving leisurely forward toward the little space where twelve men were seating themselves quietly and unostentatiously in their stiff, uncomfortable chairs. Twelve men—twelve everyday, ordinary, average men—— She drew a sharp breath and turned her face away for a minute. The curtain was going up.
“May it please Your Honour”—the prosecutor’s voice was very low, but as penetrating as though he were a hand-breadth away—“may it please Your Honour and gentlemen of the jury: On the night of the nineteenth of June, 1926, a little less than four months ago, a singularly cruel and ruthless murder took place not ten miles from the spot in which we have met to try the two who are accused of perpetrating it. On that summer night, which was made for youth and love and beauty, a girl who was young and beautiful and most desperately in love came out through the starlight to meet her lover. She had no right to meet him. She was another man’s wife, he was another woman’s husband. But love had made her reckless, and she came, with a black cloak flung over her white lace dress, and silver slippers that were made for dancing on feet that were made to dance—and that had danced for the last time. She was bound for the gardener’s cottage on one of the largest and oldest estates in the neighbourhood, known as Orchards. At the time of the murder, it was not occupied, and the house was for sale. She was hurrying, because she feared that she was late and that her lover might be waiting. But it was not love that waited for her in the little sitting room of the gardener’s cottage.
“If you men who sit here in judgment of her murderers think harshly of that pretty, flushed, enchanted girl hurrying through the night to her tryst, remember that that tryst was with death, not with love, and be gentle with her, even in your thoughts. She has paid more dearly for the crime of loving not wisely but too well than many of her righteous sisters.
“Next morning, at about nine o’clock, Mr. Herbert Conroy, a real-estate agent, arrived at the gardener’s cottage with a prospective client for the estate who wished to inspect the property. As he came up on the little porch he was surprised to see that the front door was slightly ajar, and thinking that sneak thieves might have broken in, he pushed it farther open and went in.
“The first floor at the right of the narrow hall was the sitting room—what was known by the people who had formerly used it as the front parlour. Mr. Conroy stepped across its threshold, and his eyes fell on a truly appalling sight. Stretched out on the floor before him was a young woman in a white lace evening gown. A table was overturned beside her. Either there had been a struggle or the table had been upset as she fell. At her feet were the fragments of a shattered lamp chimney and china shade and a brass lamp.
“The girl’s white frock was stained with blood from throat to hem; her silk stockings were clotted with it; even her silver slippers were ruinously stained. She was known to have been wearing a string of pearls, her wedding ring, and three sapphire-and-diamond rings when she left home. These jewels were missing. The girl on the floor—the girl who had been wilfully and cruelly stabbed to death—the girl whose pretty frock had been turned into a ghastly mockery, was Madeleine Bellamy, of whose murder the two defendants before you are jointly accused.
“The man on trial is Stephen Bellamy the husband of the murdered girl. The woman who sits beside him is Susan Ives, the wife of Patrick Ives, who was the lover of Madeleine Bellamy and to whom she was going on that ill-starred night in June.
“Murder, gentlemen, is an ugly and repellent thing; but this murder, I think that you will agree, is a peculiarly ugly and repellent one. It is repellent because it is the State’s contention that it was committed by a woman of birth, breeding, and refinement, to whose every instinct the very thought should have been abhorrent—because this lady was driven to this crime by a motive singularly sordid—because at her side stood a devoted husband, changed by jealousy to a beast to whom the death of his wife had become more precious than her life. It is peculiarly repellent because we propose to show that these two, with her blood still on their hands, were cool, collected, and deliberate enough to remove the jewels that she wore from her dead body in order to make this murder seem to involve robbery as a motive.