The Evangeline (20 page)

It was what Darnell had hoped to show the jury: that Marlowe had not put everyone in danger,Whitfield had.Whether through a negligence he was now trying to hide, or through deliberate and inexcusable indifference,Whitfield had placed all those lives at risk. Marlowe had tried to save them, or as many of them as he could. That was the point that Darnell tried to make the second day he had Marlowe on the stand—that he could not save them all, and that to save anyone, others had to die. He knew before he started that it was the last thing anyone wanted to believe.

‘Yesterday you testified that when the
Evangeline
went down some of the passengers and crew were killed instantly, but others got away. Did all of those who managed to get off the
Evangeline
make it to one of the lifeboats?’

Wearing the same suit and tie he had the day before—the same suit and tie, the only ones he had, he wore every day to trial—Marlowe shook his head.‘No.’

‘We have heard testimony,’ said Darnell, moving towards his favourite position at the far end of the jury box, directly in front of the witness stand, ‘that one lifeboat—one of the inflatable rafts—got away but was never seen again.Was that the lifeboat for which Aaron Trevelyn had responsibility?’

‘Yes, but you can’t blame him for that. He was right when he said that there was not any time.’

‘But you managed to reach the boat that was your responsibility?’

‘I was on deck, at the wheel. I didn’t have far to go.’

Darnell placed his hand on the jury box railing. He knew that Marlowe could not help himself—that he believed, and always would, that everything that happened had been his responsibility and his alone.‘I’m not asking you what you think of Aaron Trevelyn and whether he acted honourably. I’m simply asking you to describe what happened. Two lifeboats got away, the one for which you had responsibility and the one for which—had he been able to get to it—Mr Trevelyn would have had responsibility. Is this correct?’

‘Yes.’

‘The other boat—do you know how many people were in it?’

‘No, I barely had a glimpse of it. If I had to guess, I’d say maybe four or five.’

‘Would you say, then—though you just had a glimpse of it— that it had fewer people in it than it was capable of holding?’

‘It seemed to me it was at least half empty.’

‘And the one you were in…? Do you agree with the testimony already given, including that of Mr Trevelyn himself, that it held more people than it should have?’

Marlowe’s look was grave, distant, as if he could not only see it in his mind, but also feel again what it was like, the howling desperation of that fatal storm. ‘We had as many as it could handle.’

Darnell peered intently at him from under lowered eyelids. ‘And there were others, still in the water, trying to get in?’

Marlowe clenched his teeth; his neck and head became rigid. He opened his mouth to answer, but not a word came out.

Darnell took one quick step forward and asked, or rather insisted, ‘Which means that there would have been room for everyone if that other boat had taken as many as it should have— isn’t that correct?’

Marlowe’s head jerked up. ‘If there had been time!’

‘Or if Trevelyn had done his job,’ Darnell fired back. He turned on his heel to face the twelve men and women in the jury box. ‘Tell us what happened then—what you had to do—with a boat already filled to the point of swamping and others trying to get in, to save their own lives. Isn’t this when Trevelyn started swinging an oar at them, beating them away? How did he get into your boat anyway?’

‘He might have jumped; a lot of them did. What else could they do? The
Evangeline
was going down, everything was dark, the wind, the waves … None of them had any choice but to get off any way they could.’

‘He jumped. That’s when he broke his wrist. But he still had the strength to keep others out?’

‘He did what he had to; he did what he was told.’

Darnell gave him a sharp look. He was not certain he had heard him right.‘Did what he was told?’

‘It was worse than you think, Mr Darnell, worse than anyone can imagine. It was not just that the boat would sink, that everyone would drown if even one more person got into it—the boat already
was
sinking with those we had!’

Darnell was frozen to the spot. ‘You mean you…?’

‘Some had to go; someone had to decide. I did that, Mr Darnell. I was the captain—it had to be my decision. I put two men over, members of the crew, both of them men I had hired. I told them they had to take their chances, that there was another lifeboat, that it could not be too far away. I told them to try to save the others, the ones still alive in the water, the ones we would not let on board, the ones we had done whatever we had to— including, yes, hitting them with oars—to keep them out. I had to do it. There was not any choice. The only way to save some of them was to sacrifice the rest.’

Darnell tried to hide his surprise behind a look of stern sympathy, the kind reserved for those forced by necessity to commit cruelties otherwise inexcusable.‘When you were finally away—the survivors in the lifeboat—safe from the storm, how did you…?’

Darnell suddenly remembered what Marlowe’s admission had made him forget.‘Trevelyn jumped, and so did some of the others apparently, but what about Hugo Offenbach? He did not get there on his own, did he? He had a heart attack.You got him into the boat; you saved his life—why? Here’s a man who was dying anyway—you could have left him behind. Instead, you risked your own life to get him—and not only your life, you risked the lives of other people, the ones who depended on you to handle the lifeboat.You kept other people out of the boat so it wouldn’t sink; you put two men into the sea in order to keep it afloat—but Hugo Offenbach was probably closer to death than any of them. Why didn’t you just let him go?’

‘It wasn’t a question of calculation; there wasn’t time to decide whether what you did made sense in terms of what it would do to the chances of others. Mr Offenbach was starting across the deck when I first caught sight of him, hanging on to that case, the one that held his violin. That’s what did it, I think—what made up my mind. Strange, the things that go through your mind at a time like that. I saw him, this frail old man, clutching that violin of his as if it were more important than his life, that it was—what he could do with it—the whole meaning of his life, and I knew I had to help him. It was just when I got to him—he looked at me, tried to say something—but you could hear nothing in that awful wind— when he grabbed his chest and doubled over. I got him into the boat—he wasn’t much to carry—and then, with everything that was going on—all the commotion, all the terrible things that happened, all the terrible things I did—I didn’t think about him again until we were out of the storm and we could start to take stock of what had happened and what we had to do.’

‘You could have just carried him and left the violin.’

‘That would not have been saving his life; that would have been more like killing him. Besides, it wasn’t heavy.’

‘It took up room.’

‘He held it on his lap, when he wasn’t playing it. And if he hadn’t played it, none of us would be here to tell about it. That’s a fact.’

For the rest of the morning, until court recessed for lunch, Darnell had Marlowe describe the way they had rigged a sail and set a course for South America, and what they had done at the beginning for water and for food. It was only in the afternoon that Darnell finally asked the question that everyone had been waiting for. Despite the fact that it was expected, the question was greeted with a sense of disbelief, as if even now there was still the hope that it might not be true, that what the witnesses for the prosecution had said had been the product of minds unbalanced by the trauma of what they had gone through.

Darnell stood now, not at the end of the jury box, but at the side of the counsel table near the two empty chairs. The jury’s eyes would have to move from him to Marlowe and back again with each exchange.

‘There was a point at which you were out of food and water. What did you do then?’

It seemed to Darnell that Marlowe began to age before his eyes. The lines in his haggard face cut deeper into his heavy skin; the corners of his mouth bent under the burden of what he knew. His eyes, never cheerful, became sombre and withdrawn, as if they had pronounced a judgment of harsh unforgiveness on everything they had seen.‘We elected to do whatever was necessary to survive.’

In normal conversation it might have passed unnoticed, but Darnell was in that heightened state of sensibility that comes with total concentration. ‘“We elected,”’ he repeated, searching Marlowe’s eyes for a meaning Marlowe himself was not aware of.

‘You decided that the only way any of you could go on living was from the blood, the flesh, of one of the others?’ asked Darnell. His voice was firm, unyielding, as if the events they were about to explore were unfit for the normal range of human sympathy and understanding. ‘And when I say you, I mean all of you, everyone who was still alive. But it was not a thought that came to all of you at once, was it? Someone thought of it first—someone suggested it to the others.Was it you? Or was it Trevelyn?’

Marlowe bent his head; his brooding lower lip trembled. ‘Trevelyn may have been the first to suggest it; I don’t say he was the first to think it. The possibility we would have to face that alternative was in my mind almost from the beginning, when I realised how many of us were left and how little there was to eat. When that ship—the one Trevelyn described—would not stop to pick us up, then I knew it was only a matter of time before there wouldn’t be any other choice.’

‘But it was Trevelyn’s idea?’ insisted Darnell. ‘He was the one who started it, pushed for it, said it was the only way—that someone had to die if any of the others were to live?’

Marlowe was being offered a way to absolve himself of at least some of the responsibility, but that would be an act of moral cowardice, and Marlowe would not accept it. ‘Trevelyn spoke his mind, said what he thought needed to be said.We were all nearly dead, but he was worse off than most, with a wrist that was broken and a foot black with frostbite, the toes nearly gone. Sure, he spoke from fear, but I wouldn’t fault him too much for that. He could still speak, still make sense; some of the others were already half out of their minds, seeing things that weren’t there and saying things that were plain crazy.’

‘But he was the first to speak of it openly,’ repeated Darnell in a quieter voice. ‘The first actually to suggest that someone be killed…?’

Marlowe’s mind appeared to be elsewhere. He did not hear the question. ‘I knew what we were going to do—what we had to do—when that ship passed by, when they ignored us. I knew it when Mr Wilson jumped in after them.’ Marlowe bent forward. ‘No one tried to stop him. Stop him? They were glad he was gone, glad there was a little more room, glad there would be one less man with whom to share whatever food we could get. That’s when I knew how far gone we were, how starved and demented we had become. I knew before Trevelyn had said a word about it that we were at the point where we had to choose the way we were going to die.’

‘You mean, choose the way at least some of you could live, don’t you?’

There was something stern and implacable in the look that Marlowe gave Darnell, something secret and remote in his dark, impenetrable eyes.‘None of us were going to live; we were all going to die. And I think most of us knew it, whatever we might have said to encourage each other. I knew we weren’t going to be rescued. I thought there was a chance of it until that ship that could have saved us sailed out of sight. We were doomed, and I knew it. We were all going to die; we were never going to be rescued.’

‘But you didn’t tell the others that, did you? You didn’t tell them there was no chance of rescue.You stayed on a course for South America. If you were convinced you were all going to die anyway, why not just give up? Why start taking the lives of one another if you were going to die anyway?’

‘That was just it, you see. That was the one thing we couldn’t do, the one thing I couldn’t let us do.We couldn’t just give up. Tell someone he’s dying of cancer, that he doesn’t have more than a month, would you have him take a pistol and put it to his head? Wouldn’t you tell him that he might still have a chance, that miracles sometimes happen, that he has an obligation—not just to himself, but to others—to set the right example and keep fighting to the end? No, Mr Darnell, you have to go on! We were going to die, I believed that. No, I knew it! And once I knew that, I knew something else as well—that it was just us out there and that none of the normal rules applied.We had to have rules of our own, both about how we were going to live and how we were going to die. All us were going to die, but every death was going to count, every death was going to be a sacrifice, a way to save another life. It was the only way to give any meaning to what was going to happen to us. Some died so others could live. It did not matter how much longer any one would live; it mattered that we did not give up and all die at once. And so we died one by one, instead of all at once; and we lived off their bodies because it was not yet our turn.’

Marlowe gazed out at the courtroom crowd, more concerned, it seemed, for the shock he knew he must have caused them, than for how they felt about him.

‘Whatever the reason it was done, this was something agreed to by all of them?’ asked Darnell.‘There weren’t any who objected to having someone sacrificed so the others could live?’

‘There were some who did, some who argued against it; but they were bound like all the others.We agreed among ourselves that whatever the majority decided, all of us would follow that decision.’

‘You mean the decision on the question of whether someone would be chosen to be killed so the others could use him to keep on living?’

‘Yes.’

‘And once that was decided, lots were drawn to see who the first victim would be?’

‘Lots were drawn.’

‘Why that method and not another? Why not decide the same way the first question had been resolved: by vote of the majority?’