Chương 173: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-THREE: THE SECOND DAY

Calla spoke on the second day. Her portion of the case was the accountability question — the argument that answered the charge's underlying concern rather than its factual particulars. Holloway had established that the operation had not caused the death. Calla's task was to establish that the practice should not be punished even so. She had been preparing the argument for fourteen days and had rewritten it six times. The final version, she wrote in her notes the night before, was four minutes long. She stood.

"The advocate's case," she said, "is not really about Orin Haldsey." Ferrin looked up sharply.

"I intend no disrespect," Calla said.

"I mean that the charge is not manslaughter. It is unauthorised practice resulting in death. The death is an element of the charge, but the offence is the practice. If Orin Haldsey had lived, my client would still have been operating without sanction. The court knows this. The advocate knows it. I would like to address it directly rather than pretend the case is about causation alone." Kessling said: "Proceed."

"The prohibition exists for a reason," Calla said.

"I want to state the reason accurately, because I think it is a good reason and I do not want to argue against a version of it that is weaker than the real one." She paused.

"The reason is not that the Church wishes to control healing. The reason is that a person who treats the sick holds power over them at the moment of their greatest weakness, and power at that moment must answer to something. A sanctioned healer answers to the priory. An unsanctioned one answers to no one. That is the danger. It is a real danger and I do not dispute it." She had rehearsed this.

She had rehearsed the specific decision to concede the strongest version of the opposing case first, because Holloway had taught her that in the two weeks of riding: concede everything you can afford to, early and completely, and the court will believe you on the thing you refuse to concede.

"My client answered to no institution," she said.

"That is true. I would like to tell the court what she answered to instead." She picked up the records.

"Four hundred and eleven cases in nine years. Every one written. Every outcome recorded, including the four patients she lost, including the reasons, including the one where the reason was that she hurried." She set them down.

"No one required this of her. No one would ever have known. She had no colleague, no supervisor, no institution and no expectation that any person would ever read a single page. She wrote them anyway, for nine years, in a language nobody here can read." Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. She paused.

"The court asked yesterday why a person would do that. I would like to offer an answer." She looked at Kessling directly.

"She did it because she was trained to. Where she comes from, the record is part of the treatment. You write it because a patient is owed an account of what was done to them, whether or not anyone ever asks for it." She paused.

"She was severed from that place and everyone in it. She kept the practice anyway. For nine years. Alone." The room was very quiet.

"That is what she answered to," Calla said.

"Not a priory. A standard she carried and would not put down. I would submit to the court that this is not the absence of accountability. It is the hardest form of it, because there was nothing enforcing it but herself." She let that sit.

"But," she said, "I would also submit that it is not sufficient, and that the prior is right to be concerned." Bertrand's head came up. She had argued for this with Holloway for three days on the road. He had thought it was too dangerous — that conceding insufficiency invited the court to find against her. She had argued that a partial concession that the prior could not himself have extracted would be worth more than a defended position he could dismantle. She made the concession.

"A practitioner who reviews only herself has one reviewer, and that reviewer is the person most likely to be wrong in the same direction she was wrong," Calla said.

"My client's own record shows this. When she hurried and a man died, she caught it in the follow-up. She caught it two days late. A colleague standing beside her would have caught it in the room." She paused.

"So I do not say her practice was safe. I say it was as safe as one person alone can make it, and that one person alone is not safe enough, and that the remedy for that is not to kill her." She placed two documents on the table in front of the magistrate.

"The Warden's March maintains a medical establishment of eleven practitioners, a training programme in its sixth year, and a formal review structure under which every practitioner's cases are examined quarterly by two colleagues. Its senior medical officer has provided the court with a written undertaking." She touched the first document.

"If the court permits my client to live, she will be placed under that structure. Her practice will be reviewed. She will not practise alone again." She touched the second document.

"The second is a professional assessment of my client by that same officer, who trained in the same tradition and who practised alone herself for eleven months in her first year in this world and knows exactly what it costs." Calla paused.

"The court will have read it. I will not read it aloud. I will say only that the officer who wrote it has fifteen years of practice and describes my client's nine years as something she does not believe she could have done herself." She stepped back.

"The advocate asks the court to end an unaccountable practice," she said.

"So do I. We differ only in method. He proposes to end it by ending the practitioner. I propose to end it by giving her the colleagues she has not had for nine years." She paused.

"One of those methods produces a dead woman and no more healers in this township. The other produces a supervised practitioner and, I would hope, an arrangement under which the people of this place have somewhere to go when they cannot pay the priory's fee." She sat down. Her hands, she recorded in her notes that night, had been shaking for the last ninety seconds. She did not know whether it had been visible. Holloway's case record, on the same moment, reads: She was steady throughout.

She made the concession I had advised against and she was right to. I have practised for eighteen years and I would not have had the nerve.