Shrewsbury by Stanley J. Weyman

What the girl answered I did not catch, for as she raised her head again to reply, my ear caught the sound of rising danger. Ferguson was speaking, his words, no longer coherent, a mere frothing of oaths and calling of hideous fates on his head if he had ever betrayed, if he had ever sold, if he had ever deceived, now ran in a steady current of wrathful denunciation. And the men listened; he had their ears again; he was no longer on his trial. Afterwards I learned that while my attention was astray with the women. Smith, by stating what I had stated to him -- namely, that the Secretary had used Ferguson as the intermediary through whom to warn Berwick -- had confirmed the plotter's story, and at a stroke had restored his position. Whereon, full of spite, and desperately certain that however exposed he lay on other sides I at any rate knew enough to hang him, the wretched man had set himself anew to compass my destruction. Deterred neither by the check he had received, nor by the gloomy looks of the conspirators, who responded but sluggishly to his appeal, he drove home again and again, and with wild words and wilder oaths, the one point on which he relied, the one point that was so dear to him that he could not understand their hesitation.

"Waste of time? " he cried. "We would be better employed looking to ourselves and slipping away to Romney, would we? But you are fools! You are babes! There is the evidence that can swear to you all! There is the evidence keen to do it! There is the evidence in your hands! And you will let him escape?"