The Lazarus Engine – Chapter 24
The Trial
The trial of Charlotte March and Lady Isolde Vane began on a gray Monday in January. The Old Bailey was packed. Journalists sketched furiously in their notebooks. Society matrons whispered behind their fans. And in the dock, two women stood side by side—one young, pale, her hands bound in bandages; the other older, composed, her eyes fixed on the gallery where Thorne sat.
The charge was murder. Multiple counts.
Sir Humphrey Wells. Dr. Percival Hale. Three unnamed victims whose bodies had been found in March’s workshop. Plus conspiracy to commit acts of grave robbery, unlawful experimentation, and tampering with the dead.
Charlotte pleaded guilty. Isolde pleaded not guilty.
The prosecution called Thorne first.
He walked to the witness box, placed his hand on the Bible, and swore to tell the truth. The barrister, a sharp-faced man named Mr. Lockwood, approached.
“Dr. Thorne, you discovered the engines. You examined the bodies. You confronted the accused at the clock tower. Can you describe for the court what you saw?”
Thorne spoke for two hours. He described the locked carriage, the ticking engine in Wells’s chest, the mechanical hand, the workshop beneath St. Paul’s. He did not embellish. He did not exaggerate. The facts were terrible enough.
When he finished, the courtroom was silent.
Lockwood turned to the jury. “The defense may cross-examine.”
Isolde’s barrister rose. He was an older man, silver-haired, with eyes like a shark.
“Dr. Thorne, you are a resurrectionist. A body snatcher. You were expelled from the Royal College of Surgeons for performing unauthorized experiments on the dead. Is that correct?”
Thorne’s jaw tightened. “Yes.”
“And you yourself have admitted to stopping a dead man’s heart—and restarting it. For thirty seconds, you brought a corpse back to life.”
“His heart restarted. He did not live.”
“Semantics.” The barrister smiled. “Is it not true that you are as obsessed with conquering death as the accused? That you are, in fact, cut from the same cloth?”
Thorne looked at Charlotte. Her eyes were on him, waiting.
“I am guilty of curiosity,” he said. “I am guilty of arrogance. I am guilty of believing that science could answer questions that belong to philosophy. But I never killed anyone. I never built a weapon. I never tried to replace the human soul with clockwork.”
The barrister’s smile faded. “No further questions.”
Charlotte took the stand in her own defense.
She spoke quietly, without tears. She described her father’s death, her years of isolation, her desperate belief that she could bring him back. She described the engines, the victims, the mechanical hand.
“I killed them,” she said. “Not because I hated them. Because I needed their hearts to learn. To perfect the engine. To save my father.”
The judge leaned forward. “And did you save him?”
Charlotte looked at her bandaged hands. “No. He’s still dead. He’s always been dead. I just couldn’t accept it.”
The jury deliberated for six hours.
When they returned, Charlotte was found guilty of manslaughter, not murder. The jury believed she was driven by madness, not malice. She was sentenced to life in Bethlem Royal Hospital—Bedlam.
Isolde was found guilty of conspiracy and accessory to murder. She was sentenced to hang.
As the verdict was read, Isolde smiled. She turned to Thorne.
“You’ll visit me in prison, won’t you, Dr. Thorne? We have so much more to discuss.”
Thorne did not answer.
He walked out of the courtroom, into the cold January air, and did not look back.