4127.105 · April 15, 1807 AD
Teeth and Timber
A wooden comb, dark with age and smooth from a hundred hands. It is not much — but in Portsmouth Gaol, on the morning a man walks to his trial, it is everything. Culpepper offers it without ceremony, and William accepts it without words. What follows is a corridor lined with painted judges and whispered names, each step striking the flagstones like a verdict already falling. The courtroom doors stand waiting. There is no turning back.
The cell has held him for a fortnight, but it is the leaving of it that unmakes him. Culpepper stands in the doorway with his ring of iron keys and something else — something smaller, quieter, drawn from the deep pocket of his coat like a secret. A comb. Wooden, worn, unremarkable. The kind of thing a man uses without thinking, a relic of ordinary mornings in ordinary lives. But this morning is not ordinary, and the hand that offers it belongs to a gaoler who has watched more men walk this road than he cares to count.
William drags it through his hair and meets his own reflection in a cracked mirror. The face that stares back is not one he knows. Hollow cheeks, dulled eyes, a shirt that was once white and proud reduced to grey rags steeped in mildew. Yet somewhere beneath it all, something stirs — not hope, not quite, but the refusal to arrive at the dock already broken.
Then comes the walk. Up from the damp stone of the gaol and into the cloying warmth of the courthouse. Junior clerks with crooked wigs and ink-stained sleeves whisper a name as he passes — Blackwell — and the word follows him down a corridor lined with portraits of judges whose painted eyes have never once looked away. Each footstep echoes. Each echo answers.
At the end of the passage, a pair of oak doors rise like a sentence carved in wood. Scales and swords. Iron handles worn smooth by desperate hands. Behind them waits the courtroom, the gallery, the verdict. William touches the comb in his pocket one last time, and steps forward.
