Laura Kinsale (32 page)

“Splendid,” the barrister said smoothly. “One would think your ancestors were nobility, Mr. Doe.”

Gryf looked up. He met Serjeant Wood’s mild blue eyes, “What is this?” he asked in a low voice.

“This,” the Serjeant said, “is an attempt to patch up the royal shambles you seem to have made of your life. Are you quite ready? I’m afraid they’ll have to put these handcuffs back on…Would you prefer them in front or in back?”

Out again into the long halls, with Serjeant Wood setting an enthusiastic pace, Gryf was carried along in the little knot of police. He had been in Westminster once before, on a morning tour to pass the time one day during that faraway spring spent in London. The halls and corridors were indistinguishable, but when a narrow door was opened quietly for them by a uniformed man-at-arms, Gryf suddenly knew exactly where he was.

The gilded pavilion with its empty throne, the high ceiling and galleries on two sides, the tiers of seats—empty when he had seen them before, and full now with the distinguished company just taking their places—all were unforgettable. And unmistakable.

They had brought him to the House of Lords.

I
n the little office where Serjeant Wood had left her, Tess paced. She was supposed to be “resting,” an impossibility suggested to her with perfect seriousness by her physician. The solicitors and barristers seemed to have some idea that after being delivered of a fine and healthy boy some four months ago she was liable to collapse at the earliest opportunity.

But there had been no time to collapse. The terror of those days before the execution were still with her: the rush to the capital, the interview with Serjeant Wood, the intolerable strain of waiting for two days to gain an audience with the Queen and the home secretary, when Serjeant Wood would not let Tess speak, but told her story for her, piecemeal, not nearly as much as she would have told herself. She had not slept all night. On the morning of the execution, word had gone out from the home secretary’s office by telegraph.

Commuted sentence.

It wasn’t enough for Tess, or for Serjeant Wood. He had put Tess’s solicitors and his own junior barristers to work. He had hired investigators. He interviewed Tess until she felt like a squeezed fruit: drained of every recollection of
the time she had spent with Gryf. From the signet ring and the name of Gryphon Meridon on her marriage license, Serjeant Wood had put together a past. The more he probed it, the more solid it became. Good evidence;
hard
evidence, as the serjeant-at-law began to gloat. By the time Robert Gryphon Meridon came in December, Tess was certain her son was the next heir to Ashland.

Which did not clear his father of a charge of murder.

Tess put her hands to her temples, trying to subdue the headache that raged behind her eyes. He was here; she was going to see him, after all the helpless months of waiting. She had no inkling of his condition or spirit: to the smuggled messages for which she had paid so handsomely, not one response had ever come. She did not even know if they had reached him. Every one had disappeared without a trace into the grim machine of the Queen’s “reformed” prison system, that vast, inhuman darkness that swallowed its victims whole and refused to give them up.

The door opened behind her and she whirled. It was one of Serjeant Wood’s juniors. He said only, “Come with me, ma’am, if you please. He wants you to hear.”

She followed the barrister with a thumping heart, slipping behind him into an unobtrusive spot in the lords’ chamber. She pressed herself close against the wall, hoping to attract no notice, for she knew she had no right to be there at all. Her attention was riveted by the opening of the far door.

It was Gryf. He entered escorted by two men-at-arms, walking steadily despite the shackles that bound his hands behind him. He eyes were lowered. He stopped at a touch from one of his guards, and remained there, staring blankly at the floor.

Tess bit her lip. She had tried to prepare herself, but even so…

The familiar tan was gone, and his hair was a darker gold, no longer sun-bleached. His cheekbones seemed too prominent and the tailored coat could not hide the unnatural leanness beneath. But mostly—mostly it was the look of vacancy on his face that frightened her. It was as if he were not really there, not even alive, but only a wax figure set to motion, obedient and mindless.

A sergeant at arms stepped forward, crying, “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” He thumped his staff on the floor. “Our Sovereign Lord the Queen strictly charges and commands all manner of persons to keep silence upon pain of imprisonment.”

A man stood up, magnificent in white shoulder-length wig and scarlet robe. The lord chancellor. From his position in front of the cushioned bench Tess knew as the woolsack, the chancellor announced, “Her Majesty’s commission is about to be read. Your Lordships are desired to attend to it in the usual manner.”

Stepping forward with the document handed to him by the lord chancellor, a clerk began: “Victoria Regina by the Grace of God of Great Britain, Ireland, and India, Defender of the faith, and so forth, to our right trusty and right well beloved counselor, Lord Chelmsford, Chancellor of Great Britain, Greeting. Know ye that…”

Tess could barely follow the convoluted language of the commission: it was full of “wherefores” and “afore-saids,” and Gryf’s John Doe alias peppered every line. She watched him anxiously, looking for his response to the charges of felony and murder. There was none. He might have been carved of stone. But then another name was mentioned, and suddenly his head came up.

“…is alleged to be in fact Lord Gryphon Arthur Meridon, the Most Honorable the Sixth Marquess of Ashland,” the clerk read solemnly. “We, considering
that justice is an excellent virtue, and being willing that if said personage of John Doe should be judged by our present Parliament to be in fact Lord Gryphon Arthur Meridon, Marquess of Ashland, said personage, of and for the felony and murder whereof he is indicted, in our present Parliament, may be heard, examined, sentenced, and adjudged; and that all other things which are necessary on this occasion may be duly exercised and executed. By the Queen Herself, in her Own Hand.”

The sergeant at arms intoned, “God save the Queen.”

And Tess saw the first evidence of emotion in Gryf, as he turned a stare of silent fury on Serjeant Wood.

The intensity of that look astonished and dismayed her. Relief, hope, gratitude; those reactions Tess would have understood. She would even have understood no reaction at all, as a sign of incomprehension. But it was clear that Gryf had divined exactly what was happening, and his response was pure rage.

She squeezed her hands together in confusion. What did this mean? Didn’t he want to go free? Didn’t he want another chance? As John Doe, Gryf had been tried by his equals and convicted. But as the marquess of Ashland—no provincial jury in a circuit court could claim to judge a peer of the realm. The House of Lords alone had the right to pass final judgment on one of their own. If Serjeant Wood could prove it…

But Gryf looked far from appreciative. From his contemptuous glare and hard-set jaw, it appeared as if the shackles alone kept him from going for the famous barrister’s golden throat.

The lord chancellor said, “Bring the prisoner before the House.”

Between two men-at-arms, Gryf was taken to stand at the foot of the long table, facing the seated figure of the lord chancellor. Behind the lord, up the steps beneath
the canopy, the pointed back of the empty throne glittered in silent majesty. Gryf leveled his gaze on that. His mouth was set in stony pride as he ignored the stirring and the interested eyes.

“Are you,” the lord chancellor asked, “in fact, Gryphon Arthur Meridon, the present marquess of Ashland?”

Bitterly aware of the chains at his back, Gryf met the dry look of the questioner. The chamber hushed. In the expectant silence, Gryf felt their concealed amusement; the smug anticipation of a jolly laugh at this convicted felon who had the audacity to demand an appeal to the very lords of the realm. He damned Ruxton Wood, and whoever else was behind it. He would rather have stood on the scaffold again than to endure their scorn.

And yet—how could he lie, in the House where his grandfather and great-grandfather and twelve more generations of Meridons had taken their rightful places? Before, it had been different. No one had known. No one could have guessed. It had been an omission to withhold his name, not a lie.

But to stand up now and deny his heritage because he was afraid that they would laugh was cowardice.

“Your Lordship,” he said. “I am.”

And he waited for the jeers.

They did not come. There was only the subdued stirring again. After a moment, the chancellor said, “I will entertain evidence for the assertion that this man is in fact Lord Gryphon Arthur Meridon, the Most Honorable the Marquess of Ashland.”

A white-haired lord, an obvious plant, stood up and asked for permission for Serjeant Wood to speak. It was given. Serjeant Wood did not look at Gryf. He came forward empty-handed, without notes or prompters, and surveyed the packed seats of the House. The length
ening pause he left before he spoke was pure theater, but somehow, even to Gryf, it was magic. It drank in every cough and rustle until Gryf could hear his heart beat in the silence of the chamber. Ruxton Wood addressed his audience with a bearing of such quiet power that it shamed the gilded throne itself.

“My lords,” he said, in a soft voice that yet carried to the height and breadth of the room. “In rising to the task which it now becomes my duty to perform, I feel a heavy responsibility. If I fail, the consequences of my failure are simple. Simple unto death, or—perhaps worse—to a lifetime spent in hopeless incarceration and waste behind the bleak walls of prison.” He scanned the chamber. “I want to tell you a story today, my lords. A story based entirely on external sources, not one kernel of which was provided to me by the prisoner himself. It is a remarkable story, an incredible story…a tragic story. But I believe that when you have heard it, and the evidence which supports it, you will have no honorable choice but to agree with me that this man’s conviction and imprisonment has been an appalling miscarriage of justice.”

At the merest turning of Serjeant Wood’s head, a junior barrister leaped forward and handed him a thick volume. The serjeant placed the book on the table, opened it to a ribbon marker, and lifted it again. “Allow me to read to you from a number in the
Naval Chronicle
of 1851. It is a copy of a letter from Captain Nathaniel Eliot to Vice Admiral Sir Colin Shee, dated on board of H.M.S.
Mistral,
17 December, 1850.”

Gryf could have quoted from memory the letter that Wood produced. The official story of the pirate attack on the
Arcturus
made Nathaniel Eliot out to be a hero, and Lord Alexander an arrogant and uncooperative civilian who had deliberately left the protection of Her
Majesty’s warship and blundered into disaster. The
Arcturus
had been sighted after the attack, Eliot wrote. Dismasted, with decks already a mass of flame. No survivors. Pursuit of pirate and gallant battle, enemies destroyed to the last man.

Serjeant Wood reached the end of the vivid account and closed the book. He laid it gently down, and looked directly at Gryf.

Gryf stared back fiercely. It was lies, all lies, but if Ruxton Wood thought Gryf was going to stand up now and tell the truth for the benefit of his esteemed counsel, the barrister was far off the mark. Gryf had no intention of prostituting himself and Ashland on the altar of an ambitious criminal counsel’s sensationalistic career. Gryf had admitted who he was, but not for Wood’s sake. Not for anything, except to live up to the honor of his name in the only way he had left. He wasn’t going to beg these robed and powdered lords for mercy. He didn’t want their mercy. He didn’t want anything, except an end to his misery. Let them hang him. Maybe it would work this time.

The serjeant addressed no word to Gryf, but turned instead and spoke to the gallery. “Sadly, Captain Eliot, who writes with such poignant sensibility about the murder of his relatives, passed away himself, safe at home in his bed, some four years ago, so he cannot be questioned about his account. I have, however, a witness to the events of 8 through 16 December, 1850, aboard H.M.S.
Mistral:
one Colonel Malcolm Jones—at that time lieutenant—of the Royal Marines. Your Lordships will find that he tells a somewhat different story of those dreadful days. With your permission…”

Malcolm Jones had a limp and a set of glossy red sideburns streaked with gray. From her corner Tess watched him closely, knowing that Serjeant Wood had
used all of his considerable powers of persuasion to drag the shy ex-marine before a full sitting of Parliament. Colonel Jones did not look particularly comfortable to be addressing the House of Lords. He looked, in fact, as if he would rather be storming the heights of Sebastapol.

“Will you tell us,” Serjeant Wood asked, “in your own words, what happened aboard the
Mistral
on 15 December, 1850?”

“Yes, sir,” Colonel Jones said nervously. “There ain’t much to tell, sir, for the morning. The marines stayed belowdecks, mostly. All hands was called in the afternoon watch, and then in about an hour, or just under, Captain Eliot ordered the marines on deck. When I come up, there was another ship, lying close by. She was adrift, it looked to be; hove to and drifting. There was bodies on the deck. The captain sent the first lieutenant and me on board to look for survivors.”

The colonel paused then. Serjeant Wood prompted gently, “And what did you find?”

“We found—” Colonel Jones stopped again. He seemed to have trouble speaking for a moment. “We found a massacre, sir. They was butchered. Even the little girls.”

Tess saw Gryf close his eyes. He gave no other sign of hearing, but the tiny move was like a shaft to her heart. For the first time, the awful reality of what he must have experienced came fully clear to her. To have lived through that; to have seen his family slaughtered before his eyes, and then be left alone…He was there, so close and hurting, and no frustration in her life equaled the helpless longing to rush to him now and smooth the hardened lines of grief from his face.

“All dead?” the serjeant asked. “You found no one alive?”

“We counted thirty bodies, sir.”

“Was there any sign of fire?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you have time to examine any of the bodies?”

“Not many, sir. I was just startin’ that when the lieutenant ordered me off the ship with him. After we captured the pirate, we went back and spent two days searching, but we never did find her again.”

“Never found her. Did she sink?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“What was the name of the lost ship, Colonel Jones? Did you see her name when you boarded to look for survivors?”

“Oh, yes, sir. Painted beautiful on her bows. She was the
Arcturus,
sir.”

Serjeant Wood stood back. “Thank you, Colonel.”

There were four more men to testify. Four more times Gryf had to listen to the story, and his mind filled in the details that the others left out. It all came back, from the dark corners of Gryf’s memory, a waking nightmare he had tried to bury and never quite succeeded. He stared unseeingly, his ears full of screams and his heart full of a boy’s panic, more real than the polished table in front of him. When Serjeant Wood announced that he would call the
Mistral
’s first lieutenant, it seemed only one more phase of the torment. Gryf half-turned, blindly, with some idea that he could not listen to any more; that he had to get away in spite of his hands in chains and the men at his back. They caught him, and turned him again.