The Evangeline (10 page)

Roberts stood at the end of the jury box, his hand resting on the rail, waiting for Trevelyn to go on. But all Trevelyn did was change position again. He spread his legs apart, the right one dangling free.With his elbows on the curved wooden arms of the brown leather chair, he bent forward, eyeing Roberts with nervous suspicion.

‘Nothing planned,’ said Roberts with a pensive smile as he advanced towards the witness. ‘I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean. The question was how you happened to become a member of the crew.’

‘It was an accident,’ said Trevelyn, repeating himself with mechanical insistence. ‘A mistake.’

Darnell leaned forward, anxious to hear. Marlowe stared straight ahead, his expression unchanged.

‘A mistake?’ asked Roberts. ‘I’m afraid you have me really lost now—and, I imagine, the jury as well.’ Roberts searched his eyes. ‘I know this is difficult,Mr Trevelyn,but it will be much easier if you simply answer the questions you’re asked. Now, again, would you please describe to the jury the circumstances that led you to become a member of the crew of the
Evangeline
? Start this way: Were you hired by Benjamin Whitfield, the owner, or by Vincent Marlowe?’

‘Marlowe brought me on, day before we sailed.’

‘Just the day before?’

‘He was shorthanded. Someone who was supposed to go couldn’t, or had a change of heart—a premonition maybe…’

‘You had not sailed with Mr Marlowe before?’

‘No, never. Had not even met him. But I had sailed a lot in the Mediterranean. I heard they were looking for someone for a trip around Africa, and I was ready for something different. And when I saw the
Evangeline
it was not hard to decide. I had been on a lot of different vessels—some of the biggest yachts in the world. But the
Evangeline
! I’d never seen anything like her. She looked like she could fly.’

‘Was this, then, the first time you had sailed out of the Mediterranean and down the coast of Africa?’

‘Yes, and I wish to God I’d never gone! I should have stuck with what I knew.’

Roberts shoved his hands into his pockets and began to pace back and forth, two steps one way, two steps the other. He waited until Trevelyn’s emotion had begun to subside.

‘“She looked like she could fly.” But she didn’t, did she? She sank. What can you tell us about that, about the storm and how she went down?’

‘I thought I had been in weather before,’ said Trevelyn with a shudder. ‘Weather? I hadn’t seen anything. It was like you know what rain is and then you see a typhoon; or you once felt a tremor, a slight shifting of the ground, and then a real earthquake comes and levels a city.Weather? That storm wasn’t weather; that storm was pure evil, the end of the world. It was the day of judgment; it was hell. The winds so loud you thought you would go deaf; the seas so high you thought you were buried.’

His eyes grew distant, remembering with a kind of stupefied wonder the start of the storm and his own dim refusal to believe that it could keep getting worse.‘It was what we expected, that’s what we told ourselves. We were in the south Atlantic; you expect some weather that time of year. And to tell the truth, we welcomed it, those first few days as the winds gathered and the swells became heavy.The
Evangeline
seemed to come alive,to breathe—the way she cut through it, the speed she had. The sun was shining, not a cloud in the sky, that’s what it was like at first. Everything was smiles and laughter, people cheering when she broke through a wave and landed with a thump. Because, you see, it was perfect weather, blowing sun and wind. And you could almost taste it in the air, the sense that it was going to be like this,or even better,every day we were out.’

Trevelyn’s haggard face grew tense, his gaze turned rigid. He looked at the jury.‘But it didn’t get better. The winds got stronger and the sea got rougher and the sky turned grey. It didn’t matter. The
Evangeline
could sail through anything. We all knew what weather was like.’

Trevelyn fell into a silence that became a kind of permanent fact, a condition of existence, the only true expression of what lies at the heart of things.

‘But the weather got worse,’ said Roberts, prompting him gently.

‘Yes, it got worse. And it kept getting worse.’

‘But didn’t you have warning that it would? Wasn’t the
Evangeline
equipped with all the latest technology? Surely you could track the weather by satellite.’

‘It didn’t work, that’s what I was told; some of the equipment had broken down. But it wouldn’t have made any difference. Before we knew it we were in the weather, in the middle of the storm. There was nothing we could do but ride it out.’

‘What happened then?’

‘It kept getting worse, and we kept thinking that it was as bad as it could get. And then it happened, sudden like, hit by a wave fifty, sixty feet high. It just ripped her apart.We were taking water, tons of it coming through the companionways. She was getting heavier and heavier, lying deeper and deeper in the water. She was sinking so fast, it was as if the bottom had broken out of her as well. It was the middle of the night, about two, two-thirty in the morning. The passengers—some of them were caught below.’

‘And the rest? How many of the twenty-seven passengers and crew managed to get to the lifeboats, and how many of the lifeboats got away?’

‘One of the Zodiacs … I got to it first; managed to tear away the tarpaulin—it was filled with boxes; there wasn’t time to get them out.’

‘Boxes? In a lifeboat?’

‘The lifeboats were never going to be used. It was a pleasure cruise,’ said Trevelyn, tossing his head in derision.‘A cruise down the coast of Africa for a few of Whitfield’s rich and famous friends. The boxes were crates of champagne, caviar, all the fine things people like that expect. There was not room for all they needed in the galley, so why not use the lifeboats? What other use could they have?’

‘Lifeboats? Were more than one of them used like this?’

Trevelyn shrugged.‘All I know is about the one, the one I tore my hands up trying to get ready before I found out what it had inside.’

‘What did you do next, after you discovered that the lifeboat—the Zodiac—was not usable?’

Trevelyn gave Roberts a mocking glance. ‘I wasn’t on some careful search, some examination of what was fit to use and what wasn’t. People were screaming, falling all over each other, things were flying everywhere. Every wave that hit her sunk her lower. All you could think about was how you were going to get off the
Evangeline
before she finally sank. When I saw what was in that lifeboat, I thought I’d never get off, that I was as good as drowned.’

‘But somehow you got to the other lifeboat, the one where Marlowe and the others were?’

‘I must have.’

‘You must have? That’s the lifeboat you were in, the one in which you and the others were eventually found.’

‘I don’t remember how I got there. The
Evangeline
was heaving up, breaking apart. All you could do was hang on, try to get away. When I was looking inside that lifeboat, the one all filled up—it went straight up in the air. I was hanging on with my hands, my feet below me, those boxes banging all around.Whether I crawled my way to the other boat or was thrown there, I couldn’t really say. There is a lot I don’t remember about what happened—then or later,’ he added with a dark, ominous look.

Roberts pushed his head forward, returning Trevelyn’s look with a warning of his own. ‘There is a difference between not being able to remember and not wanting to.’

‘I can’t remember that much about what happened then. There was so much going on; it’s all a blur. Somehow I got off. Maybe I hit my head or something, because I can’t remember anything until some time later, when the storm was nearly over. I was in the lifeboat, with all the others, and Marlowe was there, giving orders.’

From the counsel table, Roberts picked up a list of the passengers and crew and began to read the names, asking after each one whether that person had been in the lifeboat. Beyond the five other survivors, Trevelyn identified seven others. Roberts gave him a puzzled look.

‘That makes only thirteen. If I’m not mistaken, there were fourteen people in the lifeboat at the beginning.’

‘He wasn’t on the list.’

‘Who wasn’t on the list?’

‘The boy—the cabin boy. He wasn’t old enough to be a regular member of the crew. He worked, though, he did his part— I’ll give him that.’

‘And do you know this boy’s name?’ asked Roberts.

‘Billy. That was the only name I knew. No one told me his last name.’

‘What happened to him…?’ Roberts started to ask, then changed his mind. ‘No, tell us first, if you would, how you survived; how fourteen people survived in a lifeboat, lost at sea. In the beginning at least, there was food and water?’

Trevelyn bent forward, scratched his head, looked around and then stared at the floor—concentrating, as it seemed, on remembering correctly and in the right order the things that had happened.

‘A little water, very little food. Maybe a gallon of water to start; three or four cans of food. That was all we had.’

‘For fourteen people?’

‘We managed to collect some water from the rain, and we had a line we rigged, with a hook to catch a few fish. Then there was the seaweed—we ate that as well.We lived like that for more than a week, all packed together, no room to move.We were going to die out there. No one was going to find us.We knew that.’

‘Why do you say that? Why didn’t you think you would be found?’

‘No one knew the
Evangeline
had sunk. No distress signal had been sent. It happened too fast; and even if there had been time, nothing worked.We made a sail, followed the wind, but we were thousands of miles from anywhere, and we were going to starve to death before we had gone two hundred. And besides, luck wasn’t with us.’

‘Because the
Evangeline
had sunk? Because the storm had become so violent so suddenly?’ asked Roberts in a solemn, sympathetic voice.

‘No luck because we could have been found three different times in those first few days and we weren’t. Three times freighters passed us.We could see them just a few miles off, riding high on the horizon, but twice they did not see us.’

‘Twice? But you said three times you saw…?’

‘That ship was less than a mile away, and there isn’t any chance they didn’t see us. Maybe they were carrying some cargo they didn’t want discovered—or maybe it was a ghost ship come to taunt us. That was when we gave up all hope of rescue, when we watched that black and red freighter pass right by us as we shouted after her—those of us who still had voices.We watched that bastard ship disappear over the horizon, that long wisp of smoke trailing behind it, dissolving with our hopes.’

Trevelyn paused, a bleak expression in his haunted, hollow eyes.

‘That was when it happened: when the first one died. Wilson…’

‘Arnold Wilson?’ asked Roberts, checking the name against his list.

‘He jumped into the water, started swimming. Thought he could catch her, I suppose; did not last but a few minutes.’

‘Did anyone try to stop him, to go after him?’

Trevelyn looked at him like he was a fool.‘There was nothing anyone could do, we were all so weak with hunger and thirst. No one cared that he was gone.We were all going to die. Some were already sick.’

Roberts remembered the boy. ‘Billy.What happened to him?’

‘What happened to him? He was sicker than the others. It was only a matter of time. That’s why he was chosen.’

‘Chosen?’

‘Chosen to die, so the rest of them could live, even if it was for only a little while longer. Chosen to die, Mr Roberts, so they could eat him.’

Chapter Ten

L
AWYERS TELL OTHER LAWYERS THAT YOU TAKE your witnesses as they come. Like most things lawyers tell each other, it gives a kind of comfort to the evils of the trade.Witnesses are not chosen because they are good and honest people; they are called to testify because of what they know. Michael Roberts did not call Aaron Trevelyn as a witness for the prosecution because he thought a jury would like him; he called him because Trevelyn was the only one of the survivors of the
Evangeline
who would talk.

The jury despised Aaron Trevelyn. Part of it was the twitching insincerity in his eyes, the way he never looked at anything or anyone for very long. What might have been interpreted as nervousness or fear at the beginning of his testimony yielded to a judgment far less forgiving once they detected the caustic resentment in his voice. Others had died, but he had lost a foot. The others had no meaning to him. They were abstractions, names of the sort we read in the papers; names of people we never knew. Why would he think about them when a part of him was missing? Why would he grieve over anyone else when, for the rest of his life, he would bear the pain and the curse of his own disfigurement?

Roberts had been visibly stunned by Trevelyn’s brusque indifference. A boy had been chosen to die, and it was as simple as that? No emotion, no regret, not so much as a passing thought for the tragedy of a life lost at such an early age? The only clear feeling, glaring and almost obscene, vindictiveness about what others had done? Whether Roberts, with his eyes fixed on the witness, had seen the horrified looks that spread over jurors’ faces, he could sense the change of mood. He tried to rescue what he could.

‘It must have been awful, what you went through. But the jury was not there; they only know what you tell them.’

‘And perhaps not even that much!’ exclaimed William Darnell in a loud voice from his chair at the other side of the courtroom.

Roberts shot him an angry look. ‘Your Honour, I…’

‘My apologies, your Honour,’ said Darnell, rising part way up from his chair.‘Sometimes I hear myself talking when I thought I was only thinking something to myself.’

With a single glance, Homer Maitland cut dead the laughter that rippled through the courtroom. He peered over his glasses and, with a certain suppressed admiration at Darnell’s incorrigible smile, shook his head. ‘Don’t depend too much on the tolerance of the court, Mr Darnell. You might find the consequences somewhat disagreeable should I find it necessary to give voice to what at moments like this
I
might be thinking. Are we clear?’