It was a perfect day, with a cloudless blue sky and blazing sun, and all
the windows were opened wide. Those inside dripped with perspiration,
but felt cold chills below their blue guernseys each time they looked at
that stark figure with the upturned feet beneath the cold white sheet.
Outside the barricade stood Elie Guille, the Constable, and his
understudy Abraham Baker, the Vingtenier, to keep order and call the
witnesses.
The Seigneur, Mr. Le Pelley, was away or he would undoubtedly have been
there too. In his absence the Senechal conducted the proceedings.
In the front row of school-desks, scored with the deep-cut initials of
generations of Sark boys, sat the dead man's widow, tense and quivering,
her eyes consuming fires in deep black wells, her face livid, her hands
clenched still as though waiting for something to rend.
More than one of the men who sat beside her at the desk found, with a
grim smile, his own name looking up at him out of the maltreated board.
And one nudged his neighbour and pointed to the name of Tom Hamon, cut
deeper than any of the others and with the N upside down.
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