Cecilia Grant - [Blackshear Family 03] Read Free Page A

seemed to stop here an extra moment, reflecting on the hallowed figures who must have consulted this same timepiece as they’d gone about their business in the Middle Temple.
    William Blackstone and Oliver Goldsmith had each surely stood here—he had only to glance up at Number Two Brick Court to see where the jurist and the writer had slept and studied a few generations ago.
    But so it was throughout the Inns of Court. Just as he always had to stop at the sundial, so must he quietly marvel, every time he took a meal in the Middle Temple Hall, at the serving table whose wood came from the hull of Sir Francis Drake’s
Golden Hind
. So must he always attempt, mid-meal, to picture all the details of the evening, some two hundred years ago, when the benchers and students had been privileged to witness the very first performance of
Twelfth Night
in that same room.
    To be a London barrister was to live surrounded by the best of everything England had to offer, all from men who’d charted their own courses to greatness. A fellow might end up anywhere, who began here. If he was literarily inclined, he could look not only to the example of Goldsmith but also to the poet Donne, the satirist Fielding, the playwrights Webster and Congreve—onetime barristers all. If he aspired to etch his name in big bold letters upon the pages of English history, there were Francis Bacon’s footsteps to follow in, or, more recently, William Pitt’s.
    And if his ambitions ran to the idealistic, he mightpattern himself after William Garrow, reforming the practice of courtroom law before gaining a seat in Parliament, and a role in all the glorious wrangling through which the nation’s daily business was managed. One day, if he, Nick Blackshear, was scrupulous in both personal and professional conduct, he might restore the family name to such respectability as would make any ambition possible. In the meantime, the law itself must be his purpose, a fit exercise for his faculties, a consolation for disappointments old and new.
    Nick swung out from Brick Court into Middle Temple Lane and headed north. Bewigged, black-robed gentlemen made a steady traffic both ways in the lane. His tribe. His species, with all their quirks and crotchets. Some argued as they went along in twos and threes, sawing at the air or jabbing with peremptory fingers. Some presented a hazard to their fellows as they barreled blindly ahead, never looking up from the pages of a brief. He wove through their ranks, long legs and five years of practice steering him clear of collisions while his robes whipped with each sharp turn. At the end of the lane stood the gatehouse, with the Old Bailey looming on the far side of Fleet Street, and—
    “Blackshear!”
    He’d know that voice in his sleep. Partly because he’d spent a good year studying with the man; partly on the merits of the voice itself. Most barristers made an effort to speak well, and almost all had the genteel accents of the well-born, but few could spit a word like Westbrook. His consonants snapped like a flag in high winds; his vowels poured out in measures as precise as medicine into a spoon.
    Nick pivoted, finding the man and stepping clear of traffic in one economical move. He liked to be early to court, and he’d tarried a bit too long already at the sundial.
    Never mind. Westbrook had hailed him, and there was not much he wouldn’t do for Westbrook.
    “Walk on, walk on, I wouldn’t dream of making you late.” The man was grinning as he pulled even with him, wheeling one hand in a move-along motion, because in the course of that year he’d so graciously taken him on, he’d learned Nick’s habits well enough to understand the importance of punctuality. “In the criminal courts today, are you?”
    “Stubbs means to keep me busy with desperate cases all this session. Beginning today with an incident of pickpocketry in Whitechapel.” He gave one smart rap to the bag in which he carried his brief. “I’m to