“You don’t have to go back in this afternoon, you know,” said Izzy, who was still a little appalled by the idea of Alice throwing up in public. “If it’s too much for you.”

“It was just nerves getting the better of me,” said Alice. “I was the same when I was a little girl. Should have made myself eat some breakfast.”

They walked on in silence.

“It’ll probably be better once our side gets to speak,” Izzy said.

“Yeah. Sven’s fancy lawyer will put them straight,” said Beth.

“Of course he will,” said Alice.

But none of them sounded convinced.

* * *

• • •

Day Two, it turned out, was not much better. The prosecution team outlined the autopsy report on Clem McCullough. The victim, a fifty-seven-year-old man, had died from a traumatic head injury consistent with a blunt instrument to the back of the head. He also had suffered facial bruising.

“Such as, for example, could be caused by a heavy hard-backed book?”

“That could be the case, yes,” said the physician who had conducted the autopsy.

“Or a bar fight?” suggested Mr. Turner, the defense lawyer. The physician thought for a moment. “Well, yes, that too. But he was some way from a bar.”

The area around the body had not been carefully examined, given the remoteness of the trail. Two of the sheriff’s men had carried it down the mountain track, a journey that had taken several hours, and a late snowfall had covered the ground where it had lain, but there was photographic evidence of blood, and possibly hoof-prints.

Mr. McCullough had not owned a horse or mule.

The prosecution counsel then interviewed their witnesses. There was old Nancy, who was pushed again and again to confirm that her first statement had stated clearly that she had heard Margery up on the ridge, followed by the sound of an altercation.

“But I didn’t say it like you’ve made it sound,” she protested, her hand reaching for her hair. She turned to look at the judge. “They twisted my words all this way and that. I know Margery. I know she would no more murder a man in cold blood than she would . . . I don’t know . . . bake a cake.”

This prompted laughter in the courtroom and a furious outburst from the judge, and Nancy put both hands to her face, guessing, probably correctly, that even that simile would add to the idea that Margery was somehow transgressive, that in her non-baking habits she went against the laws of nature.

The prosecution counsel got her to talk some more, about how isolated the route was (very), how often she saw anyone up there (rarely) and how many people regularly made the trip. (Only Margery, or the odd hunter.)

“No further questions, Your Honor.”

“Well, I would like to add one thing,” Nancy announced, as the court clerk made to lead her out of the witness box. She turned to point at the dock. “That there is a good, kindly girl. She’s brought us reading books through rain and shine, both for me and my sister who ain’t left her bed since 1933, and you so-called Christian folk judging her might want to think hard about how much you do for your fellow man. Because you’re none of you so high and mighty that you’re beyond judgment. She’s a good girl, and this is a terrible wrong you’re doing her! Oh, and, Mr. Judge? My sister has a message for you too.”

“That would be Phyllis Stone, older sister of the witness. She is apparently bedridden and could not make it down the mountain,” murmured the clerk to the judge.

Judge Arthurs leaned back. There may have been a faint roll of his eyes.

“Go ahead, Mrs. Stone.”

“She wanted me to tell you . . . ‘Y’all can go to Hell, because who’s going to bring us our Mack Maguire books now?’” she said loudly. Then she nodded. “Yup, y’all can go to Hell. That was it.”

And as the judge began to bang his gavel again, Beth and Kathleen, on each side of Alice, couldn’t help but let out a small burst of laughter.

* * *

• • •

Despite that moment of cheer, the librarians left the building that evening in muted mood, their faces drawn, as if the verdict could only be a formality. Alice and Fred walked together at the rear, their elbows bumping occasionally, both deep in thought.

“It might improve once Mr. Turner gets his say,” said Fred, as they reached the library building.

“Perhaps.”

He stopped as the others went inside. “Would you like something to eat before you head off?”

Alice glanced behind her at the people still spilling out of the upper level of the courthouse and felt suddenly mutinous. Why shouldn’t she eat where she wanted? How much of a sin could it be, given everything else that was going on? “That would be lovely, Fred. Thank you.”

She walked up to Fred’s house alongside him, her back straight, daring anybody to comment, and they moved around each other in the kitchen, preparing a meal, in some strange facsimile of domesticity, one that neither of them felt able to remark upon.

They didn’t talk of Margery, or Sven, or the baby, even though those three souls were lodged almost permanently in their thoughts. They didn’t talk of how Alice had divested herself of almost all the belongings she had acquired since arriving in Kentucky, and that just one small trunk now sat in Margery’s cabin, neatly labeled and awaiting her passage home. They remarked on the good taste of the food, the surprising harvest of apples that year, the erratic behavior of one of his new horses and a book Fred had read called Of Mice and Men, which he wished he hadn’t, despite the quality of the writing, as it was too darn depressing just now. And two hours later, Alice set off for the cabin and, while she smiled at Fred as she left (because it was almost impossible for her not to smile at Fred), within minutes of her departure she found that, behind her benign exterior, she was filled with a now semi-permanent rage: at a world where she could sit alongside the man she loved for only a matter of days more, and at a small town where three lives were about to be ruined for ever because of a crime a woman had not committed.

* * *

• • •

The week slid forward in fury-inducing fits and starts. Every day the librarians took their seats at the front of the public gallery, and every day they listened to various expert witnesses expounding and dissecting the facts of the case—that the blood on the edition of Little Women matched that of Clem McCullough, that the bruising to the front of his face and forehead was consistent with a blow from the same. As the week drew on, the court heard from the so-called character witnesses: the purse-mouthed wife who announced that Margery O’Hare had pressed upon her a book she and her husband could only describe as “obscene.” The fact that Margery had just had a baby out of wedlock, and with no visible shame whatsoever. There were the various older men—Henry Porteous for one—who felt able to testify to the length of the O’Hares’ feud with the McCulloughs, and the capacity for meanness and vengeance in both families. The defense counsel tried to pick apart these testimonies in the interests of balance: “Sheriff, isn’t it true that Miss O’Hare has never been arrested once in her thirty-eight years for any crime whatsoever?”