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The prosecution of Courtney Sithe had been…wearing. Not that the others hadn’t been, but much differently so. The rest of the Reaper conspiracy had hurt Barok and Asogi directly. Betrayed them, and it was personal. But Dr. Sithe had been tangential to their torture. She’d helped an innocent man, and she’d been extorted for it ever since. In laying out her crimes, he and Asogi had looked at each other uncomfortably for a moment. None of them were crimes that either of them could swear they wouldn’t have been tempted by themselves. Not in her position.
They had prepared a plea deal. It would be up to Dr. Sithe whether she would prefer to go to trial, and frankly, if he were her, that was a decision Barok might have made himself. Her victim, though influential, had been widely unpopular. Though she was hardly likable, her story could have easily tugged upon the heartstrings of a jury. It wouldn’t be a bad bet. But in Barok’s experience, Dr. Sithe wasn’t a betting woman. She preferred certainty, and he had done all he could to make it possible for her to have it.
All he could do wasn’t everything. She had killed a man, however loathsome a man he’d been, and she’d deflected the blame upon an innocent one. Barok owed it to Albert to make sure she paid a price. He owed it to the Crown. But it was an awkward, mournful business to be a servant of the law rather than a servant of sentiment.
As an awkward, mournful man already, Barok had taken it upon himself to bear that burden.
He wanted to speak to Dr. Sithe’s daughter before visiting the jail. Perhaps the revelations of Klint’s last will had given Barok a sense of sympathy toward the relations of criminals—or perhaps it had been Klint’s last fear that did it. The fear that his daughter could not weather the Professor’s name. That he’d need to take it from her. The fear that that name would destroy his brother, for whom nothing of the kind could be done. An amount of it seemed to be personal shame, that was true: Barok had always known his brother to be prideful, though he was unsure whether Klint had known he had. But Barok also knew that Klint’s last worries hadn’t been entirely unfounded. Perhaps if he could have worried less about the shame his crimes would cast on his family, he’d have felt able to commit fewer of them.
There wasn’t much he could do about the rest of London, but Barok wanted to show respect to Dr. Gorey himself. He knew that would mean something.
To his knowledge, there were no other open cases that she would be working on. He had therefore called at her home first, but she didn’t appear to be in. He’d gone along instead to St. Synner's hospital. He’d gone down to the lower levels, to the laboratory, and indeed there was a light and a curious clacking noise spilling from the doorway.
Barok looked inside, and he blinked. No matter where he found her, he had not expected to find her knitting.
She didn’t seem to notice him, so he knocked on the open door and cleared his throat. “Dr. Gorey?”
The clacking stopped abruptly. She looked up from her needles, her pale eyes wide and luminous. “Lord van Zieks.”
“May I speak to you for a moment?”
“What about?” she asked, tilting her head. “I haven’t had a specimen in days.”
Barok had always found Courtney Sithe’s daughter unnerving. Far more unnerving when she was very young, but an adult woman with that same demeanor wasn’t much less so. She had been raised in the morgue, at her mother’s hip, and it had given her a singularly off-putting manner that she’d never left the morgue enough to shed. But Barok had been raised in the courtroom, after all. He’d left it only to hide. There was little judgment he felt that he was justified in casting upon Maria Gorey.
He gravely lowered his gaze. “It’s with regard to your mother’s prosecution.”
“Oh,” she said, a little sadly. “Come in, then.”
Barok couldn’t tell whether she was reluctant to discuss such a thing, or simply disappointed there hadn’t been a death. Perhaps both.
He ducked into the cramped room and closed the door behind him. He couldn’t help looking around. The last he had visited St. Synner’s forensics laboratory, it had been a different place entirely. Dr. Sithe had kept no curtains and plushes on her shelves, nor bows around her containers. But upon further inspection, most of the room remained untouched. The work areas. The bloodstained table where so many of Barok’s loved ones had lay. It was little more than the lighting that had changed, and yet the place felt so much warmer. More alive.
He supposed a girl who’d been raised in the dead room would see it that way.
“Is Mama going to trial?” Dr. Gorey asked. “Do you need me to testify?”
“If she prefers to go to trial, then she may,” said Barok. “But Mr. Asogi and I have prepared a deal we plan to offer her. I’d like you to look it over, if you would.”
She nodded. He extended the folder he’d brought down to her, and she opened it over her knitting.
“In exchange for her testimony against Mael Stronghart,” said Barok, “we can drop the charges relating to Genshin Asogi’s autopsy.” Dr. Sithe would be one of their greatest assets. Stronghart had known it himself, when he’d barred her from testifying in Barok’s own trial. “But the death of Mr. Asman, however…”
He paused. Officially, murder was a death sentence. Many of those death sentences were never carried out, but even then, it was a serious crime. “I’m afraid that the best we can do is propose her sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.”
Dr. Gorey lifted her head from the plea, and she looked back up at him for a few seconds.
“Alright,” she said.
“…Are you sure?”
“Of course.” There was a lightly confused note in her voice. “Mama killed someone. She knew what would happen if she were caught, and she was.”
Dr. Gorey had always spoken like this. Like everything that made sense to her made sense to everyone else, and frankly, Barok had come to admire it. He nodded. “Very well.”
She handed his papers back. Her eyes slid past him over the shelves. Over what was left of her mother, in this room that she would not return to.
“Though I do wish she’d told me,” she said after a moment. “Before it came to that. I could have helped.”
Barok understood this wish. As furiously as he’d been trying to focus, of late his mind had been full of little else but a similar one.
He’d been doing his best to understand his brother’s decisions. The stress that he’d been under. His own shame; the shame of the country. Barok felt sorrow toward Klint, and pity, and guilt of his own that he was too weak to fight, but beneath them all the frustration still remained. How could Klint have shouldered it all himself? How could he have been so blind as to think that would help more than hurt? So determined as to keep his secrets even in death?
It had certainly made Barok think twice about doing the same himself. Klint’s last lesson to his little brother.
“Actually, Lord van Zieks? May I ask one thing?”
He snapped back to attention. “Certainly, Doctor.”
Dr. Gorey’s gaze had focused across the room, on the case above the table. “Could Mama be allowed to have her tools?” she asked. “I think it would make her feel better if she did.”
By tools, Barok presumed she meant scalpels and bonesaws. He couldn’t see a prison taking kindly to an inmate with such things in their possession. “…I’m not sure that would be permitted,” he said.
“Genshin Asogi was permitted his sword in his cell,” she replied. “You as well. It’s not fair to Mama.”
This was true. Neither Barok nor Genshin Asogi had been imprisoned long-term, but it was a sticking point he could pry at. Perhaps Dr. Sithe could be allowed to see her tools when supervised. When her daughter visited.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
She nodded. “Thank you.”
The words struck loose a bit of embarrassment in the back of Barok’s heart. He’d been giving so many thanks recently, and yet he hadn’t thought to give the doctor hers. “I would like to thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For your diligence and your dedication to your job.” His cape swept the laboratory floor as he bowed. “I believe it saved my life.”
“I did the job I was employed for,” Dr. Gorey said. “There’s no need to thank me for that.”
Barok shook his head. “I don’t believe I need to tell you, Doctor, how rare and commendable a thing it is for one to do their job honestly.”
Her gaze fell. “…I suppose.”
“I admire your resolve to work for the truth and the truth alone,” said Barok. “When you were taught by someone who would go to such lengths to hide it.”
Dr. Gorey paused, tracing a fingertip down the row of stitches on her needle, and then she lifted her head once more.
“But it is what Mama taught me,” she said. “She always said the facts were the most important, and never to distort them.”
Barok knit his brow and drew in a soft, shaking breath.
“…She didn’t want me to know what she’d done,” said Dr. Gorey. “She didn’t want me to do the same.”
“…I see,” said Barok.
He’d learnt the law from his brother. And, God, if not him, then from Mael Stronghart. In spite of their own actions, the pair of them had made Barok intensely, viciously devoted to the truth. Had it been aspirational, to teach him that? If Klint had asked for help, had admitted to his sins at all…had he feared Barok would take that as a lesson?
“Whatever she did wrong,” said Dr. Gorey, “I’m glad she wanted that.”
“…As am I,” said Barok.
They’d both been shaped by those with a vision. Those who couldn’t live up to it themselves, who saw the opportunity to teach as an opportunity to project themselves as they wished they were. He and Dr. Gorey, they’d both been groomed to disapprove of their mentors.
Barok had gone over his brother’s last words so often that he now had them half-memorized. They’d been denied to him for so long that at first they’d felt overwhelmingly rich. A decadence, to have any more of Klint before him. But as the days went by, he found himself beginning to starve. He had so many more questions, so much more ravenous a need to talk with his brother. A hunger that he’d already been denied a decade ago.
Maria Gorey would be able to speak to her mother. To ask her why, and to thank her, and to tell her what she felt. Barok would make sure she could.
“Thank you for your help, Doctor,” he said. “We’ll visit Dr. Sithe as soon as we’re able.”
She smiled, picking up her knitting once again. “Good.”
He swallowed and bowed his head.
