The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ at commerce with their blood money.

      Malise felt the quiver of hostility. ‘I will prove this to be true and when I have, I will expect reparation from you. As I trust the justice both of God and man to punish this youth for murdering my brother.’

      Malise looked around in the silence and saw the assessing looks. ‘It was seven years ago, and the boy was only seven at the time. Is this how you conduct the business of your company…wrestling truth and reason to the ground on the dusty memory of a fallible child? Sir James …?’ He turned in appeal to Sir James Balkwell.

      ‘We are all as shocked as you,’ said Balkwell to Malise. ‘And we regret your monstrous introduction to our Company. As to our business dealings, sir, we examine all propositions calmly and without prejudice. No one here has yet laid a hand on either truth or reason.’

      ‘Am I the one on trial, then?’ demanded Malise. ‘That man …’ he pointed at George Beester ‘… has as good as accused me of murder when his Satan’s whelp of a nephew has just killed my brother!’ His eyes returned to the slack limbs and oddly angled jaw.

      ‘The boy must be tried,’ said Balkwell. ‘It needs no examination to conclude …’

      ‘It was an accident!’ protested George Beester. ‘It was surely an accident. He may have meant to attack – and with good reason – but not to kill!’

      ‘We have more than enough witnesses to what happened,’ said Balkwell. ‘Intelligent men who have eyes and will report honourably what they saw.’ He turned to Edward Malise. ‘I’m sorry that you feel on trial at such a tragic moment. But the boy has also made a claim against you, and we must deal with it as judiciously as any other matter. Whatever my feelings, I cannot agree with his uncle that the death was an accident. Like you, I saw clear intent in his face. I wish, therefore, to examine why the boy is so enraged against you.’

      I killed a man in rage, John thought. I should feel such a mortal sickness of my soul. But he still felt only the rage.

      In prison, his newly acquired memory was still sharp as freshly broken glass. Time had had no chance to dull it. Seven years of rubbing and grinding took place in mere days. He lay on his cot, hearing, smelling, seeing, and feeling, again and again and again. Smoke, roasting meat, the screams of the horses and of his mother. His own hair on fire. Malise’s beak. His father’s groom who had saved him and almost certainly been killed while John slipped away through the bushes to fetch up at the farm. The thrust of his mother’s hands as he flew through the window. They had saved him and died.

      John hoped that rehearsing his memories might wear them out, but rage, grief and guilt wore him out first. Rage was the most bearable; he spun it into a case around himself like a silkworm. Then he raged that he had not paid heed in that firelit room to what Edward Malise had said – to the reason his life had been destroyed – instead of staring in a trance at Francis Malise’s shoe soles. Then he sieved the memories again, for a detail, a phrase, a name, anything to give his uncle as evidence against the Malises.

      Then he suddenly asked, why? Why did the Malises hate my family so desperately? That ambush had been a desperate act. He found the word ‘vulture’ lodged in his memory. He closed his eyes and saw again the flickering light on Francis Malise’s body, and his brother’s face. More words surfaced like dying fish. John curled tightly on his cot. Had the Nightingales truly been vultures?

      After three weeks in prison, it finally occurred to John to become afraid, not of death but of how he would die. The rope – he had once watched friends of a condemned man hang on his feet beneath the Tyburn gibbet to speed the terrible slowness of strangulation. At best, he would be given a gentleman’s way out on the block. He tried to tell himself that he would merely leap cleanly from this life into the next. He would never see the bloody mess and the strange turnip thing that had once held his soul.

      He knew he would be judged guilty, because it was the truth. He had killed Francis Malise, in rage.

      He knew that men had the right to punish him under temporal law, but he had expected to suffer in spirit as well. On the contrary, he was still glad he had done it. This realization shook him profoundly. At fourteen, he began to suspect that Good and Evil, the works of God and the works of Satan, were not separated after all by a boundary as clearly marked as a river bank. As a child, you were good or you were bad. Usually you knew the difference, and if caught you were punished. If you didn’t know the difference, you had merely failed to understand God’s Will.

      Now, at a time when he most needed his childish faith, he was most filled with wretched doubt. He called on God to explain the ambiguity that surrounded His Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ If John felt unrepenting triumph, what about soldiers fighting in the King’s name? And what about the soldiers fighting on the other side? There were long hours of opportunity, as John waited in his prison cell, for a Divine reply. The Lord did not seize the chance.

      Is this one of the adult secrets, John wondered. That we walk as uncertainly as blind men? That to believe is merely to prescribe and to hope?

      His uncle had bought John lodging in a room among the debtors of the Fleet Prison instead of a cell below ground. He also dropped the coins of his own suspicion into the pockets of gossip and influence. Sir James Balkwell had not been alone in feeling that John’s accusation might be true. He and the others were easier in their minds when there seemed to be no hurry to bring the boy to trial.

      ‘Bogus Englishmen as well as murderers,’ George Beester said of the Malises wherever an ear would listen. ‘Catholics…French name. Whipped off to the Netherlands in King Henry’s time and now they’re slinking back again, encouraged by the marvel of a French Catholic queen on the throne of England and protected by her papist cronies.’

      A successful, self-made man, Beester understood the close connection between principles and pockets and had the means to make this connection work for his nephew’s cause. Even so, though he found many sympathetic ears, his efforts were not enough.

      He visited the prison six weeks after John’s arrest. John scrambled up from his cot.

      ‘They’re going to try you next week,’ said Beester. The majority of those honourable men who witnessed Francis Malise’s death have agreed, however reluctantly, that you intended harm. The plea of accident has been rejected. And Edward Malise is pressing his case among the Catholic faction that has the Queen’s ear. It’s her word against the other side’s reluctance to act.’

      Beester settled on a little stool and spread his legs wide to balance his bulk. ‘I don’t think I can save you in court unless we can find a strong enough case ourselves to bring against Malise. One last time – try to remember more! Even one detail…a name called out…livery.’

      John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been trying…Uncle, did the Malises have any right on their side?’

      ‘Has the Devil been pissing in your brain?’ George Beester flushed. ‘You ignorant, evil young …’ He stopped himself. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a fair question for a boy in your position.’ He studied his sturdy knees. ‘They had no right, only what they pretended was a reason. And Malise was canny enough to admit that straight off. His grandfather chose the wrong side, against King Henry while your own grandfather did not. The Malises tried every means to win their lands back. Your father had won a final lawsuit four months before he died.’

      ‘Lands,’ said John in wonder. ‘My parents’ lives for lands?’

      ‘The Malises claimed injustice and persecution.’

      ‘In СКАЧАТЬ