A High Wind in Jamaica (24 page)

“Now,” said Mr. Mathias gravely, “there's something I want you to tell me, Emily. When you were with the pirates, did they ever do anything you didn't like? You know what I mean, something
nasty
?”

“Yes!” cried Rachel, and every one turned to her. “He talked about drawers,” she said in a shocked voice.

“What did he say?”

“He told us once not to toboggan down the deck on them,” put in Emily uncomfortably.

“Was that all?”

“He shouldn't have talked about drawers,” said Rachel.

“Don't
you
talk about them, then,” cried Edward: “Smarty!”

“Miss Fernandez,” said the lawyer diffidently, “have you anything to add to that?”

“What?”

“Well...what we are talking about.”

She looked from one person to another, but said nothing.

“I don't want to press you for details,” he said gently, “but did they ever—well, make suggestions to you?”

Emily fixed her glowing eyes on Margaret, catching hers.

“It's no good questioning Margaret,” said the Aunt morosely; “but it ought to be perfectly clear to you what has happened.”

“Then I am afraid I must,” said Mr. Mathias. “Another time, perhaps.”

Mrs. Thornton had for some while been frowning and pursing her lips, to stop him.

“Another time would be much better,” she said: and Mr. Mathias turned the examination back to the capture of the
Clorinda
.

But they seemed to have been strangely unobservant of what went on around them, he found.

V

When the others had all gone, Mathias offered Thornton, whom he liked, a cigar: and the two sat together for a while over the fire.

“Well,” said Thornton, “did the interview go as you had expected?”

“Pretty much.”

“I noticed you questioned them chiefly about the
Clorinda
. But you have got all the information you need on that score, surely?”

“Naturally I did. Anything they affirmed I could check exactly by Marpole's detailed affidavit. I wanted to test their reliability.”

“And you found?”

“What I have always known. That I would rather have to extract information from the devil himself than from a child.”

“But what information, exactly, do you want?”

“Everything. The whole story.”

“You know it.”

Mathias spoke with a dash of exasperation:

“Do you realize, Thornton, that without considerable help from them we may even fail to get a conviction?”

“What is the difficulty?” asked Thornton in a peculiar, restrained tone.

“We could get a conviction for piracy, of course. But since '37, piracy has ceased to be a hanging offense unless it is accompanied by murder.”

“And is the killing of one small boy insufficient to count as murder?” asked Thornton in the same cold voice.

Mathias looked at him curiously.

“We can guess at the probabilities of what happened,” he said. “The boy was undoubtedly taken onto the schooner; and now he can't be found. But, strictly speaking, we have no proof that he is dead.”

“He may, of course, have swum across the Gulf of Mexico and landed at New Orleans.”

Thornton's cigar, as he finished speaking, snapped in two.

“I know this is...” began Mathias with professional gentleness, then had the sense to check himself. “I am afraid there is no doubt that we can personally entertain that the lad is dead: but there is a legal doubt: and where there is a legal doubt a jury might well refuse to convict.”

“Unless they were carried away by an attack of common sense.”

Mathias paused for a moment before asking:

“And the other children have dropped, as yet, no hint as to what precisely did happen to him?”

“None.”

“Their mother has questioned them?”

“Exhaustively.”

“Yet they must surely know.”

“It is a great pity,” said Thornton, deliberately, “that when the pirates decided to kill the child, they did not invite in his sisters to watch.”

Mathias was ready to make allowances. He merely shifted his position and cleared his voice.

“Unless we can get definite evidence of murder, either of your boy or the Dutch captain, I am afraid there is a very real danger of these men escaping with their lives: though they would of course be transported.—It's all highly unsatisfactory, Thornton,” he went on confidentially. “We do not, as lawyers, like aiming at a conviction for piracy alone. It is too vague. The most eminent jurists have not even yet decided on a satisfactory definition of piracy. I doubt, now, if they ever will. One school holds that it is any felony committed on the High Seas. But that does little except render a separate term otiose. Moreover, it is not accepted by other schools of thought.”

“To the layman, at least, it would seem to be a queer sort of piracy to commit suicide in one's cabin, or perform an illegal operation on the captain's daughter!”

“Well, you see the difficulties. Consequently we always prefer to make use of it simply as a make-weight with another more serious charge. Captain Kidd, for instance, was not, strictly speaking, hanged for piracy. The first count in his indictment, on which he was condemned, sets forth that he feloniously, intentionally, and with malice aforethought hit his own gunner on the head with a wooden bucket value eightpence. That is something definite. What
we
need is something definite. We have not got it. Take the second case, the piracy of the Dutch steamer. We are in the same difficulty there: a man is taken on board the schooner, he disappears. What happened? We can only surmise.”

“Isn't there such a thing as turning King's Evidence?”

“Another most unsatisfactory proceeding, to which I should be loath to have recourse. No, the natural and proper witnesses are the children. There is a kind of beauty in making them, who have suffered so much at these men's hands, the instruments of justice upon them.”

Mathias paused, and looked at Thornton narrowly.

“You haven't been able, in all these weeks, to get the smallest hint from them with regard to the death of Captain Vandervoort either?”

“None.”

“Well, is it your impression that they do truly know nothing, or that they have been terrorized into hiding something?”

Thornton gave a gentle sigh, almost of relief.

“No,” he said, “I don't think they have been terrorized. But I do think they may know something they won't tell.”

“But why?”

“Because, during the time they were on the schooner, it is plain they got very fond of this man Jonsen, and of his lieutenant, the man called Otto.”

Mathias was incredulous.

“Is it possible for children to be mistaken in a man's whole nature like that?”

The look of irony on Thornton's face attained an intensity that was almost diabolical.

“I think it is possible,” he said, “even for children to make such a mistake.”

“But this...affection: it is highly improbable.”

“It is a fact.”

Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than to show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.

Mathias, as he conned these paradoxes, smiled to himself a little grimly. It would never do to give utterance to them.

“I think if they know anything I shall be able to find it out,” was all he said.

“D'you mean to put them in the box?” Thornton asked suddenly.

“Not all of them, certainly: Heaven forbid! But we shall have to produce one of them at least, I am afraid.”

“Which?”

“Well. We had intended it to be the Fernandez girl. But she seems...unsatisfactory?”

“Exactly.” Then Thornton added, with a characteristic forward jerk: “She was sane enough when she left Jamaica.—Though always a bit of a fool.”

“Her aunt tells me that she seems to have lost her memory: or a great part of it. No, if I call her it will simply be to exhibit her condition.”

“Then?”

“I think I shall call your Emily.”

Thornton stood up.

“Well,” he said, “you'll have to settle with her yourself what she's to say. Write it out, and make her learn it by heart.”

“Certainly,” said Mathias, looking at his finger-nails. “I am not in the habit of going into court unprepared.—It's bad enough having a child in the box anyway,” he went on. Thornton paused at the door.

“—You can never count on them. They say what they think you want them to say. And then they say what they think the opposing counsel wants them to say too—if they like his face.”

Thornton gesticulated—a foreign habit.

“I think I will take her to Madame Tussaud's on Thursday afternoon and try my luck,” ended Mathias: and the two bade each other good-bye.

VI

Emily enjoyed the wax-works; even though she did not know that a wax-work of Captain Jonsen, his scowling face bloody and a knife in his hand, was already in contemplation. She got on well with Mr. Mathias. She felt very grown-up, going out at last without the little ones endlessly tagging. Afterwards he took her to a bun-shop in Baker Street, and tried to persuade her to pour out his tea for him: but she turned shy at that, and he had in the end to do it for himself.

Mr. Mathias, like Miss Dawson, spent a good deal of his time and energy in courting the child's liking. He was at least sufficiently successful for it to come as a complete surprise to her when presently he began to throw out questions about the death of Captain Vandervoort. Their studied casualness did not deceive her for a moment. He learnt nothing: but she was hardly home, and his carriage departed, than she was violently sick. Presumably she had eaten too many cream buns. But, as she lay in bed sipping from a tumbler of water in that mood of fatalism which follows on the heels of vomiting, Emily had a lot to think over, as well as an opportunity of doing so without emotion.

Her father was spending a rare evening at home: and now he stood unseen in the shadows of her bedroom, watching her. To his fantastic mind, the little chit seemed the stage of a great tragedy: and while his bowels of compassion yearned towards the child of his loins, his intellect was delighted at the beautiful, the subtle combination of the contending forces which he read into the situation. He was like a powerless stalled audience, which pities unbearably, but would not on any account have missed the play.

But as he stood now watching her, his sensitive eyes communicated to him an emotion which was not pity and was not delight: he realized, with a sudden painful shock, that he was afraid of her!

But surely it was some trick of the candle-light, or of her indisposition, that gave her face momentarily that inhuman, stony, basilisk look?

Just as he was tiptoeing from the room, she burst out into a sudden, despairing moan, and leaning half out of her bed began again an ineffectual, painful retching. Thornton persuaded her to drink off her tumbler of water, and then held her hot moist temples between his hands till at last she sank back, exhausted, in a complete passivity, and slipped off to sleep.

There were several occasions after this when Mr. Mathias took her out on excursions, or simply came and examined her at the house. But still he learnt nothing.

What was in her mind now? I can no longer read Emily's deeper thoughts, or handle their cords. Henceforth we must be content to surmise.

As for Mathias, there was nothing for it but to accept defeat at her hands, and then explain it away to himself. He ceased to believe that she had anything to hide, because, if she had, he was convinced she could not have hidden it.

But if she could not give him any information, she remained, spectacularly speaking, a most valuable witness. So, as Thornton had suggested, he set his clerk to copy out in his beautiful hand a sort of Shorter Catechism: and this he gave to Emily and told her to learn it.

She took it home and showed it to her mother, who said Mr. Mathias was quite right, she was to learn it. So Emily pinned it to her looking-glass, and learnt the answers to two new questions every morning. Her mother heard her these with her other lessons, and badgered her a lot for the sing-song way she repeated them. But how can one speak naturally anything learnt by heart, Emily wondered? It is impossible. And Emily knew this catechism backwards and forwards, inside and out, before the day came.

Once more they drove into town: but this time it was to the Central Criminal Court. The crowd outside was enormous, and Emily was bundled in with the greatest rapidity. The building was impressive, and full of policemen, and the longer she had to wait in the little room where they were shown, the more nervous she became. Would she remember her piece, or would she forget it? From time to time echoing voices sounded down the corridors, summoning this person or that. Her mother stayed with her, but her father only looked in occasionally, when he would give some news to her mother in a low tone. Emily had her catechism with her, and read it over and over.

Finally a policeman came, and conducted them into the court.

A criminal court is a very curious place. The seat of a ritual quite as elaborate as any religious one, it lacks in itself any impressiveness or symbolism of architecture. A robed judge in court looks like a catholic bishop would if he were to celebrate mass in some municipal bath-house. There is nothing to make one aware that here the Real Presence is: the presence of death.

As Emily came into court, past the many men in black gowns writing with their quill pens, she did not at first see judge, jury, or prisoners. Her eye was caught by the face of the Clerk, where he sat below the Bench. It was an old and very beautiful face, cultured, unearthly refined. His head laid back, his mouth slightly open, his eyes closed, he was gently sleeping.