Prince of Secrets (25 page)

Cobie, however, could not sleep. He held Dinah tenderly to him, and thought again of Belita, for the first time without feeling guilt for her death.

He remembered what Hendrick had said, that he was not God, could not take the world's troubles on his shoulders, and could not, should not, try to remedy them all.

Tomorrow, when this was over, he would tell Dinah what he should have told her long ago: that he loved her dearly, and that in future all that he did, all that he planned, would be done in the knowledge that he must not jeopardise her, nor spoil either her, or what lay between them. Cobie Grant
would settle down at last, and tend his own backyard, the world might wag as it list.

Finally, sliding towards sleep, he thought again of his father and mother, Jack and Marietta, who had loved him—and doubtless still did love him. He began to feel the most bitter regret that he had cut himself off from them, had rejected not only their love, but also any acknowledgement that they were his father and mother. No, Sophie must not be allowed even that triumph.

Somehow, one way or another, he must become reconciled with them, try to make up to them for the last ten years. Finally, as though he had had a great burden lifted from his shoulders, he slept more peacefully than he had done for as long as he could remember, his hand in Dinah's.

And in his dreams he met her, but when dawn came and he awoke, all that he could remember of them was her eager, loving face…

Downstairs Sophie Massingham's letter lay in the fire-grate. Grey ashes, to be swept away by the little maid in the morning.

The courtroom was as crowded as ever. The judge swept in, superb in his robes. Both counsel, who had been joking together in the robing room, were now scowling at one another. The defendants looked serious but cheerful. Only Sir Ratcliffe Heneage, feeling his doom upon him, sat there, glowering at them all, and at Jacobus Grant in particular. He hoped that he had enjoyed reading Sophie Massingham's letter. The Prince of Wales was absent—on official duties.

Out of sight, Walker and his minions waited—for the action would surely end today, and they would have their man where they wanted him.

Both counsel excelled themselves in their closing speeches. Sir Halbert lauded Sir Ratcliffe to the skies. He
dealt lightly with the other defendants, but with Cobie, he went for the jugular, describing him as an adventurer of the basest kind. He knew that nothing he said could wipe out the favourable impression which Mr Van Deusen had made, but he did his level best to try to suggest that he was as dubious as his friend.

He called the evidence of cheating against Sir Ratcliffe flimsy, and could not understand how the Prince of Wales could believe it, unless Sir Ratcliffe had been vilely traduced even before the evidence was presented. He also argued that signing the paper was not proof of Sir Ratcliffe's perfidy, but rather of his loyalty in wishing to spare the Prince scandal.

‘I beg of you,' he said to the jury, ‘to send Sir Ratcliffe back into the light again, to resume once more the career which has been so cruelly destroyed by these mistaken accusations. Let him rejoin his friends and be once more the subject of public and private acclaim.'

To the judge's annoyance, the gallery, where the spectators knew nothing of Sir Ratcliffe, merely seeing him as a victim of the Prince of Wales, began to clap in his support as Sir Halbert sat down. The spectators seated downstairs, who knew more of the matter, by virtue of knowing Sir Ratcliffe, made no such demonstration.

‘Silence,' roared the Lord Chief Justice, ‘This is not a theatre, nor—' with a glare at Sir Halbert ‘—a music hall.'

Sir Darcy was restrained, and spoke more in sorrow than in anger. He chose not to refer at length to the pointless and unsupported accusations against Mr Grant, as he called them, but concentrated on the strong points of the defendant's case. ‘Too quixotic,' he called the notion that Sir Ratcliffe had merely signed the paper to save the Prince.

Finally all that was left was the judge's summing up.

Lord Justice Coleridge left no doubt that he thought that
Sir Ratcliffe Heneage had no case. He flew at Sir Halbert's handling of his brief, the personal attacks on all the defendants, particularly on the unfortunate Mr Jacobus Grant, who had merely been doing his duty as an honest man by bearing witness to what he had undoubtedly seen.

‘I am left to assume,' he said, ‘that the assault on Mr Grant's reputation was precisely because it was his evidence which was the clincher in this case. He is an American, a guest in our midst. I hope that this graceless attack on him, so long pursued, and revealed by Dr Van Deusen to be baseless, will not cause him to think less of the system of justice in this country.'

Sir Halbert was purple—no less than Sir Ratcliffe. Gossip had it that the Lord Chief Justice and Sir Halbert were at odds with one another and the judge was taking this opportunity to attack him on what he saw as weaknesses in his case.

The judge supported Sir Darcy's claims that no man would be quixotic enough to destroy his reputation for another who had not asked him to do so.

‘You may,' he told the jury, ‘be entitled to think that once Sir Ratcliffe Heneage placed his signature on the paper, that alone was good and sufficient reason for thinking him guilty. Can one believe that an innocent person would do any such thing? One recalls Shakespeare's words, “Who steals my purse, steals trash…but he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed.”

‘That being so, it is impossible to believe any man would willingly brand himself dishonourable. Gentlemen of the jury, it is for you to decide.'

‘By God,' whispered Kenilworth to Cobie, ‘He has left them nothing to decide. I could not have believed such a summing up. He has left Heneage's case in tatters.'

The jury retired. People stood up, yawned, moved about restlessly. Dinah gave Cobie a little wave, the first time she had acknowledged him publicly in court in the week which the trial had taken. He felt an immense relief. What had begun with his rescue of Lizzie Steele would soon be over. He had little doubt of what the verdict would be, however many reservations Sir Darcy Spenlow might have privately made to him.

Hidden away, Walker was still waiting, to seize his man once the verdict had been brought in. Not here, in the courtroom, one supposed, but in the street outside.

There was a sudden excited buzz of sound. Not ten minutes had elapsed and the jury had signified that they were ready to return!

‘Should have had a bet on it,' Rainey whispered to Cobie. ‘Was a fool not to.'

Cobie said nothing. He saw that none of the jury looked at Sir Halbert when they filed in, and that the foreman of the jury avoided looking at Sir Ratcliffe when he stood to give the verdict against him and for the defendants in a firm, confident voice. At last, he thought, Lizzie Steele and her fellow victims will be avenged.

He had won his shadow battle with Sir Ratcliffe, but what he felt was not triumph, but a great sadness. The same sadness which he had felt when he had shot down Belita's murderer, for no revenge could bring the poor victim back to life, and Lizzie Steele and her fellow-victims would still lie in their unknown graves.

Boos and cheers filled the courtroom. ‘The three noble peers' and Cobie shook hands with one another. The gallery, very anti-Prince, and what it saw as the Prince's cronies, was particularly noisy in its disapproval. A crowd had gathered in the street outside. The news of the verdict soon
reached it, and cheers and counter-cheers told how it was divided.

Violet and Dinah ran up to Kenilworth and Cobie. Dagenham's wife was not far behind.

‘Oh, I'm so glad it's over, Cobie,' Dinah whispered to him. ‘Now we can celebrate.'

Cobie put his arm around her, and murmured in her ear, ‘I hope so, Dinah. When we reach home we'll tell Giles to run the bath for us.'

He began to push his way through the crowds. Most of those present in the body of the court were friendly, and called encouragement to him and the other defendants in their slow procession down the aisle, some patted him on the back, offered to shake his hand. Only Hendrick Van Deusen was missing.

Lord Kenilworth shook him by the hand again, and said, a broad smile on his face, ‘By God, Grant, you clinched it for us with that masterly display of memory in court, and Van Deusen finished Parker off when he was able to prove that the evidence about you from the States was a fabrication.'

Dagenham and Rainey nodded agreement. Only Dinah's eye on him, he saw with inward amusement, was sardonic, as she stood on tip-toe to kiss him on the cheek, murmuring into his neck, ‘Appearances often deceive!'

Behind the defendants celebrating victory, Sir Ratcliffe, whose face had assumed a gallows' hue on hearing the verdict, stood irresolute.

His counsel came up to him, and said abruptly, all his suave charm to his client gone now the case was over and lost, ‘A word to the wise. I believe that the police are waiting for you outside the court to arrest you on another matter. I would advise you to delay leaving for a few minutes until the crowd in the street outside has dispersed.'

Sir Ratcliffe nodded, and offered Sir Halbert his hand, which the latter refused to take. He was bitterly aware of the curious and hostile stares from those about him. It was immaterial whether the gallery thought him innocent, or whether the police arrested him: the jury's finding meant that his life was over whether the law punished him for his crimes or not. Prisoner or free, he was doomed. Even if he escaped the gallows, social and financial ruin awaited him.

Outside the court, walking down the steps, Cobie turned to Dinah. ‘Where's Hendrick gone? I want to thank him. He saved the day for me and for all of us.'

‘Amen to that,' agreed Kenilworth. ‘Between you, you did for Sir Ratcliffe. The rest of us made a sorry impression.' He looked about him.

The police were attempting, unsuccessfully, to try to move the mob on so that their carriages could be brought up for them.

Dinah said, ‘Oh, Mr Van Deusen kissed me when the verdict came in—and then told me that he had an important engagement elsewhere and must leave immediately. He asked me to offer you all his congratulations.'

Sir Ratcliffe appeared in the doorway behind them. He could see Walker and the uniformed constables waiting for him at the bottom of the steps—and he knew that his doom was upon him. None of Kenilworth's party saw, or heard him, until he suddenly called Cobie's name.

‘Hey, Grant! Hey, you there, look at me!'

Cobie turned—to see his enemy, a pistol in his hand, an expression of hate and fury on his face, shouting at him.

‘Damn you, Grant, you've ruined me! But, by God, you'll not live to enjoy it.'

The noise of the shot which took Cobie at almost point-blank range and sent him backwards down the steps past a
horrified Dinah, who flung herself down beside him, calling his name, was succeeded by the crack of another.

This one lifted Sir Ratcliffe off his feet, and deposited him dead in front of the doorway by which he had just left the court.

Where the second shot had come from, no one knew.

Pandemonium reigned. Screaming, the crowd ran in all directions lest the gunman fire again.

Walker raced up the steps, hallooing to Bates to go to Sir Ratcliffe, to Alcott to try to find the man who had shot Heneage, whilst he fell on his knees beside the fallen Mr Dilley—with the hope, shared by a frantic Dinah, that some magic trick might yet save him.

H
e had been talking to Dinah. Someone had called his name, and he had turned—to be struck a dreadful blow.

The world about him was shattered. It disappeared. He was soaring high into the air, on wings, free as he had never been, making for the golden light which shone above him, the great ball which was the sun.

For a moment he looked down. There, far, far below him, on the dirty pavement outside the court, lay the shell of what had once been Jacobus Grant. A woman knelt by him, a man on her left hand. Then they were gone. He was springing at the sun, desperate to reach it. He no longer knew who, or what, he was, only that this was what he had always wanted. The freedom from self which he had never yet found.

He rose higher and higher, drawn inexorably towards the light. He knew, without knowing, that beyond it lay those who had gone before him, and transformed, were waiting for him, friends and enemies alike.

Time had gone: he knew only infinite space and infinite light. It was there just above him, the blazing orb. One last leap, and he would have it in his hands. He reached out, eager to forget himself and all he had been. Indeed, he no
longer knew who he had been. At the last moment a great sound broke in on him, splintering and shattering the purity of the nothingness which he was about to embrace.

Someone was calling a name over and over again. His name. He tried to ignore it, but could not, and even as his fingertips reached out again to touch the light, the name came again and again. ‘Cobie…Cobie…Cobie…'

It was a woman's voice, reminding him of whom he had been.

He tried to leap up once more, but failed, and began to fall. He was dropping from the light into the dark. He could hear Sir Alan's voice, and Hendrick's, tolling out, ‘Those who fly too near the sun may do so once too often and be consumed by it.'

Oh, but he wanted to be consumed. He tried to rise again, but could only fall like Icarus—the legendary Greek being who had fashioned wings and ambitiously tried to fly with them—dropping towards earth, back to the shell on the ground.

He opened his eyes, and saw Dinah sobbing above him and Walker's grieving face. This time, when his eyes closed again, it was not to leap into the light but to fall even further into the dark—earthbound once more.

‘He's not dead,' Walker told Dinah, ‘Not yet.' He was too shocked to be tactful. ‘Best to get him home.'

Kenilworth, standing by, like most of those who had been around Cobie when he was shot, was in a profound state of shock. He was able to say through numb lips, ‘Doctors, surgeons. Leave that to me, Dinah.'

Cobie was bleeding profusely from his wound: the bleeding showing that he, at least, still lived, if only barely. Walker, before he had gone to Dinah, had already sent his officers to search for the man who had killed Sir Ratcliffe but, ham
pered by the crowds and hardly knowing from which direction the shot had come, their efforts were futile.

Walker wanted to ask Dinah where Mr Van Deusen was, but under the dreadful circumstances he could hardly do so without appearing callous beyond belief. Besides, he was shocked himself at the unprecedented sight of two men shot down in a London street.

A police surgeon had arrived. He had been acting as a witness in another action, and one of the more enterprising constables had fetched him to the spot. He pronounced Sir Ratcliffe dead, and Mr Grant nearly so. He would first try to staunch the bleeding wound before accompanying him home.

Dinah had placed her fur stole under Cobie's head. She could not bear to see him lying, white and unknowing, on the cold grey pavement. When he had opened his eyes to look at her, after she had wildly called his name again and again, she had hoped that he might remain conscious, but he had closed them again almost immediately.

Now all that she could do was climb into the Kenilworths' carriage, to be driven back to Park Lane behind their own in which her husband lay, the surgeon beside him. One litany, and one alone, ran through her head for the next few terrible hours, ‘Oh, if only I had told him about the baby last night. Now he might never know.'

Mr Hendrick Van Deusen walked rapidly away from the alleyway in which he had waited, prepared to deal with Sir Ratcliffe if he attempted to attack his friend. A spectator in his line of fire had stopped him from shooting at Sir Ratcliffe before he had fired the shot which had laid Cobie low.

That morning he had been visited by a sense of foreboding so strong that he had fetched his six-shooter and shoul
der holster out of the locked trunk in which he had kept them, and had loaded the gun so as to be ready for anything.

It seemed ridiculous to believe that Sir Ratcliffe, or anyone else, would make an attempt on his friend's life in London but—back-up, Professor, back-up, he had told himself. Once before, on Jake's return to Bratt's Crossing, seeking revenge, he had acted as back-up. Well, Jake hadn't asked him to do so today, but he had thought that Sir Ratcliffe had a wild look in his eye when he had been giving the evidence which cleared Jake's name—and who knew what the fool might get up to next?

He had taken up his watch, out of sight, feeling that perhaps he was the fool, and oh, how he now wished he had been. He couldn't even go over to see whether Jake lived or died, for he had deliberately told Dinah that he had to leave as soon as the action was over. He must not be found near the spot where the killing—or killings—had occurred.

He must also rid himself of the six-shooter, probably in the Thames, in case someone from Scotland Yard wondered how truthful the story he had told in the witness box really was. They might ask themselves that if Jacobus Grant had truly been a boy gunman in the West, then what had his friend, Hendrick Van Deusen, been?

After that, he would allow himself to learn of what had passed outside the court, for the story would be on everyone's lips, and the newsboys would be shouting out the lurid details on every street corner.

Only then could he go to Park Lane, either to mourn, or to keep vigil.

Afterwards Dinah was to wonder how she managed to endure the next few days. If she had been told beforehand that she would have to live through that length of time while
Cobie hovered between life and death, she would have said that she could not have borne it.

Bear it she did, although when she went into his bedroom where he lay quiet and still, so unlike the active man whom she had known since those early days at Moorings, she could hardly contain her grief. Would he ever laugh and talk with her again? Would he ever know that she was carrying his child? Would he live to see his child?

The doctors came and went, looked gravely at him, and puzzled over why he did not regain consciousness—for there was no reason why he should not. There were nurses, several of them, working in shifts, all of them a little surprised at Lady Dinah's unwavering self-control. But he would not want me to weep and wail and be a nuisance, she told herself severely, for how would that help him?

What she really wanted to do was shriek at the heavens, at God, for doing this to them when they were at last coming to terms with one another. She would not use the word love, for to think of it was almost enough to cause her to break down.

She was never sure whether the constant stream of visitors and their revelations made it easier, or harder, for her to carry her burden. First of all Mr Hendrick Van Deusen arrived. He had, he said, heard the newsboys shouting about the tragedy, and once he realised that it was his friend whose life was in danger, he had come to see her.

He stayed at Park Lane, sitting quietly in a corner of the library, waiting for Jake to recover—or not. Dinah gave him a bedroom, and saw him fed. One afternoon he came to her after she had been keeping vigil at Cobie's bedside, and said, ‘No news?'

Dinah shook her head. ‘None, neither good nor bad. The doctors say that he ought to recover, but they are worried that he has not regained consciousness for any length of
time. He wakes up and drinks a little, but he never speaks. He then falls asleep again, except that it is not really sleep for no noise ever awakens him. There is no medical reason for it, they say.'

‘Oh, doctors say many things,' returned Hendrick gloomily.

‘Mostly wait and see,' sighed Dinah. ‘Shouldn't you rest, Mr Van Deusen?'

‘Not yet,' he said. ‘You are kind to let me stay here, and I am selfish to do so, but you must understand. He is my son. The one I lost, many years ago.'

He paused, before lifting his grey face to stare into her eyes.

‘You would bear with me if I spoke of it. I have told no one, not even Jake. I lied in the witness box, you know. Oh, no, not just about Jake, as I am sure you, at least, realise, but about myself. It was no mid-life crisis which took me to the West. I was what I said I was, an academic. I had everything I wished for in life, a good brain, and a successful career based on it, I was shortly to become Dean of the Faculty, I had a wife, and a clever little boy. The gods had blessed me.

‘What the gods give, the gods can take away. Call no man happy till he dies, Lady Dinah, is something useful to remember. One morning we all went to the bank together, to open an account for young Guy. He was twelve years old, and I was already teaching him about the practicalities of life… There was a bank robbery. Two thugs came in, and made us all stand in a line against a wall.

‘One of the tellers had a gun beneath the counter and fired at them, killing one of the thugs. The other shot him down, then turned to face us. Someone rashly tried to attack him, and the wretch sprayed bullets around. My wife and Guy were killed instantly. He ran out, but not before club
bing me unconscious after I had gone for him and pulled the mask from his face.

‘The police tracked him down and arrested him. He was tried for murder. It was an open-and-shut case, I and several other witnesses identified him. But his lawyer found a flaw in the indictment: it had been wrongly drawn up. He pointed it out to the judge, and the murderer of my wife and child was acquitted on a technicality.

‘I shall never forget it, never. He walked by me, laughing. My wife and son were dead, and I was denied even the dubious satisfaction of revenge. My life was in ruins. It was not only that I had lost my family, but that I had nothing left to live for. The doctor of philosophy, who had lived his life in such quiet superiority over ordinary mortals, had disappeared for good.

‘I had believed in the Lord God Almighty, Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, the American Constitution and the Rule of Law. False gods, every one! If I wanted revenge—and, oh, how I wanted revenge—on the criminal, the judge and the law, then I must get it for myself. I learned to shoot. I found that I was a good shot, and then I hunted down the man who had killed my wife and son, and killed him, secretly—none knew of my crime.

‘The only thing was, that having lost my belief in what I had been, I could no longer stay at Harvard, no longer practise a philosophy which had become hateful to me. I threw up my position and went to the South West to make a new life for myself—as a desperado who thought the law a bad joke.

‘There I met Jake. I flattered myself that Guy might have been like him if he had lived. I had found a son. A son to whom I owed my life—for that is what he did, Lady Dinah. He saved my life when I was ambushed, and nursed me back to health after he had killed the two men who would
have killed me. For that I shall eternally owe him. But I couldn't tie him to me, Lady Dinah, that wouldn't have been right.

‘Besides, Jake didn't want a father. He hated all fathers, and all authority—other than his own—with an abiding hate. So when we left the South West, for I had decided to make a new life for myself back home, I let him go. Back-up, I was, back-up I am, and shall remain, so far as he is concerned.'

He fell silent. Dinah had said nothing during his halting tale, had not moved, save once when she had taken his hand when he had told her of the death of his wife and son, and she had held it until he had finished speaking.

‘I've never told anyone of that before,' he said, with a little wonder. ‘What a wise child you are, my dear. One who knows when to speak and when not to. No wonder he values you so.'

‘What is there for me to say?' she told him gently. ‘Words cannot help you.'

‘No, indeed. At last I have found a certain peace, Lady Dinah, but I don't think that I could bear it if Jake were to be killed by the wicked as well.'

He did not tell her that he had shot Sir Ratcliffe down, he did not need to. Nor did she ask him, or speak of it.

It wasn't only Hendrick who made his revelations to her. A constant procession of visitors called at the house, some of whom she had never met before, and some whom she had. They all came to bear witness to Cobie Grant and to what he had done for them.

The day after the shooting, she was told that a Father Anselm, from a parish in the East End, and a captain in the Salvation Army were waiting to speak to her.

‘Yes, gentlemen, what can I do for you?'

Father Anselm, an Anglo-Catholic by his person and dress, and who seemed a strange companion for a Salvation Army captain, said, ‘Inspector Walker has told us, Lady Dinah, that our benefactor, Mr Dilley, who has paid for the establishment and running of a home for abandoned children, and for other acts of charity in the parish, is in reality your husband, Mr Jacobus Grant, who lies gravely injured.

‘He was due to perform his magic show for us at the Christmas concert for the poor of the parish, which is why the inspector informed us—since Mr Dilley…Grant might not be able to come to amuse us after all. We are here to pay our respects to him, and to offer you our deepest sympathy, and our hopes for his recovery.'

The captain said, ‘We have a little girl outside, from the home he finances. She has a basket of flowers for you which the children have paid for, through their pocket money. We wondered if you would allow her in to present it to you.'