At five minutes to ten, Edward Savidge and a younger assistant made their way to the defense table, which was arranged at right angles to the bench. Savidge, robed in black and wearing an incongruous-looking white wig, laid out his papers and notes and began to shuffle hastily through them as if he were looking for something he had lost. The prosecutor, a rather youngish man whose robe and wig gave him a dignity beyond his years, strode in confidently, followed by his assistant. The table in front of him was bare.
At five minutes after ten, the pretrial activities began. It happened that not a single juror who had been summoned had failed to respond, and twelve were soon seated in the jury box and sworn in. At half-ten, the prisoners were escorted into the dock, without their handcuffs but with their ankles shackled. The usher called sternly for silence, and everyone stood while one of the London aldermen entered through the door at the back of the court, followed by the High Court judge of the City of London, stooped and scholarly, with chiseled features and penetrating blue eyes. The alderman and the judge were seated, papers were rustled, volumes of law books rearranged, pens and pencils moved about with the flourish of a magician, and the trial began with the hearing of the pleas.
“Adam Gould, how do you plead?” asked the judge.
Kate watched as the first of the prisoners stood. He was blond, well-built, and good-looking, even in the ill-fitting clothing provided for the trial. “Not guilty, Your Honor,” he said in a firm, ringing voice.
Pierre Mouffetard, the next to plead, did not present such a handsome appearance. His dark hair was raggedly cut, his face was set and hard, and his eyes blazed with radical fervor. He replied to the judge in a snarling, heavily-accented voice: “I do not recognize the authority of this court.”
Savidge, getting to his feet, said calmly, “With Your Honor’s permission, I enter a plea of not guilty on Mr. Mouffetard’s behalf.”
“Not guilty,” the judge said, and rapped his gavel. With a glare at Savidge and a dark look at the judge, Pierre stepped back to his place.
“Ivan Kopinski,” said the judge.
Ivan, his brown hair hanging in lank, dirty strings around his face, stood with his mouth closed, his eyes darting around the courtroom as if he were searching for someone. He wore, Kate thought, a look of stoic resignation, as if nothing that happened to him made a great deal of difference. After a moment, Savidge again said, “Not guilty, Your Honor,” and the three pleas were entered. Kate settled back, avoiding the sharp elbow of the woman to her right. The trial was about to begin.
The Crown prosecutor, whose name was Sims, laid out the case for the jury with an elegant if rhetorical simplicity. The three defendents-two of them employees of the Anarchist newspaper, the Clarion, and the third a well-known trade-union organizer-were charged under the Explosive Substances Act of 1883 with the possession of explosives with intent to endanger life. He would not trouble the gentlemen of the jury with a lengthy and tedious presentation of the argument that would shortly be developed; he would simply note that he expected the jury-whose careful attention to and thoughtful consideration of the arguments he very earnestly and humbly solicited-would have no difficulty at all finding the defendants guilty of a most heinous crime against the persons of their fellow men, indeed (spoken in a hushed voice and with a wide flourish of his robed arms) against the very persons of the innocent members of the jury and the spectators assembled in this courtroom. For bombs were no respecter of persons, and a bomb would as gladly kill innocent men, women, and children as anyone else. There was a stir in the courtroom as Mr. Sims sat down, and many of the better-dressed spectators were seen to look nervously over their shoulders, as if fearing that a bomb might be tossed into their very midst.
Mr. Savidge then rose and reminded the jury that no man might be found guilty of a crime committed by an associate, except upon the evidence of relevant facts demonstrating his own guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It was their duty as jurors to carefully sift the meaningful facts from the useless arguments and theories and discard as if it were chaff every meaningless rhetorical flourish. And with a sharp glance at the prosecution, he sat down. The spectators stirred with what seemed to be a restless disappointment, as if they had expected a more eloquent statement.
The counsel for the prosecution began by summoning Inspector Ashcraft, of Special Branch, Scotland Yard, to the witness box-the man, Kate recalled, whom Charlotte Conway accused of having her and the others followed. He was thickset and round-faced, and carried himself with an assertive confidence, standing firmly in the witness box. Having been sworn, he related how the Anarchist group-the Hampstead Road cell, as he called it-had originally come to his notice through the offices of a certain “reliable source” who had identified one of the defendants, Mr. Ivan Kopinski, as potentially dangerous. Thereby alerted, he had taken special pains to read each page of the Clarion, to determine whether it was printing seditious material.
The prosecutor then introduced into evidence an article taken from the Clarion and asked the inspector to read the marked paragraph. Putting on a pair of gold reading glasses, Ashcraft read a paragraph urging all British Anarchists to support their foreign comrades “by any and all available means” and concluding, “Violence is the only thing the oppressors understand.” He raised his eyes, looked around the packed courtroom, and rendered the final sentence with an excess of gravity. “An ounce of dynamite is worth a ton of paper.”
There was another nervous stir, this one so prolonged that his lordship the judge was required to gavel it into silence. The prosecutor then inquired whether the inspector felt that the statement was seditious. Inspector Ashcraft was about to answer, but Savidge interrupted him, objecting on the grounds that the question called for an opinion.
The prosecutor looked down his nose. “May it please your lordship,” he said to the judge, “this witness is an expert.”
“Perhaps,” Savidge said in a level tone, “learned counsel would care to submit the inspector’s credentials for his lordship’s examination. On what basis does Inspector Ashcraft qualify as an expert in the matter of determining what is seditious and what is not? In what capacity has the inspector previously served as an expert on this question? How-”
Sims threw up his hands with a great show of weariness and spoke to the judge. “I’ll withdraw my question, my lord, rather than prolong these proceedings unnecessarily.” He turned back to the witness and said snappishly, “Having read the article, Inspector, did you take any action?”
It had been his duty to act, the inspector replied with calm assurance. After the article appeared, each of the key members of the Clarion staff was placed under police survillance. He himself had kept a close watch over the activities of the paper’s editor, Miss Charlotte Conway, and had assigned experienced detectives to the others. Then one of the employees, a young Anarchist named Yuri Messenko, had died in a violent bomb explosion in Hyde Park on Coronation Day. Fearing that the Clarion was the center of a dangerous bomb-making ring, the inspector had ordered a raid on the newspaper and taken the suspects into custody to prevent their flight to the Continent. When one of the suspects, Pierre Mouffetard, was searched, he was discovered to have on his person a letter containing certain bomb-making instructions.
“I show you Exhibit A,” the prosecutor said. “Is this the letter?”
The inspector peered at it. “It is a translation of the letter, yes. And quite detailed, too. Anybody could make a bomb, following these instructions.”