The Evangeline (25 page)

‘I’m afraid that is exactly what would have happened.’

‘But Marlowe made sure that did not happen,’ said Darnell, glancing at the jury to reinforce the full significance of this. ‘Instead of the rule of the jungle, everyone for himself, he established a kind of government, a set of rules by which all of you could live. And everyone agreed to this?’

‘Yes. There were some—and who could blame them?—who did not want to be part of any killing, who thought it better to let death come when it would; but even they agreed that we should all be bound by what the majority decided.’

‘And everyone whose life was taken, everyone who died so the others could live, was chosen by chance?’

‘Yes—or so I thought before I read what Mr Marlowe said about the death of the boy. At first, I must tell you, I did not think it was true; I did not think he could have done that. But then I realised that it was exactly what he would have done—tried to spare the boy from having to live, even if only for a little while, with what we were about to do. The boy worshipped him and Marlowe knew it.When we were on the
Evangeline
, the boy followed him everywhere. Marlowe was harsh with him, barking at him when he was not doing what he should, giving him one of those stern looks when he told him he had work to do.The boy would just stare at him,waiting for the change that always happened, the sudden sparkle in Marlowe’s eye, the reluctant laugh as he sent him on his way. Marlowe did not believe there was any chance of rescue—he told me that, when we made our agreement—but I wonder whether he would not have done the same thing anyway to spare the boy from learning about the awful things human beings can be made to do. Marlowe was strong enough for that … The look on his face when he had to kill the boy—It must have been what Abraham looked like when he was told by the Lord that he had to sacrifice Isaac.’

‘The agreement?’ asked Darnell. ‘You said “when we made our agreement”. Do you mean the agreement that all of you made to decide by lot who would die?’

A troubled smile crossed Offenbach’s lips. ‘Marlowe told me that I had to play the violin; I said I would not. He said I had to help the others forget for a while what they were suffering and how they had no hope. I told him I was barely alive, that my hands hurt so much I did know if I could even hold the bow. I told him that there was no point to it, that it was a fool’s game he was playing to pretend that we had any chance of being saved. That’s when he told me that I was right, that it was as good as certain that we were all going to die.’

Hugo Offenbach stared into the silence, fascinated by what he was watching in his mind. ‘Marlowe said that was the reason we had to do it, why we had to stay alive; we had to make the others think that there was a reason to live because it was the only way to make them believe that there was a reason to die. I told him I wanted to die myself. He asked me what good God had done to give me this talent if He had made me too much of a coward to use it when it was most needed.’ Offenbach looked around the courtroom at the sea of uplifted faces. ‘As you might imagine, I had no answer for this. So I agreed to what he wanted; but he was right about me, you see. I was a coward, and so I said I would do it, play as often and as well as I could, but on one condition.’

‘One condition?’ asked Darnell, almost mesmerised by Offenbach’s bright, piercing eyes. ‘What condition was that?’

‘That when it was all over, when we were the only two left, that he would kill me first; that he would not kill himself and make me live alone.’

‘And did he agree to that condition?’ asked Darnell, his voice a whisper. ‘Did he make you that promise?’

‘He promised he would kill us both.’

A death-like stillness descended on the courtroom, the only sound the slow creaking of the chair as Darnell pulled it back from the counsel table and sat down.

‘Do you have any questions, Mr Roberts?’ asked Homer Maitland in a voice that sounded tired and distracted.

‘Just a few, your Honour.’

Roberts stood at the end of the table, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He glanced down at the tablet on which he had scribbled half a page of notes.With his head still bent to the side, he raised his eyes and studied Offenbach for a puzzled moment.

‘This agreement you had with the defendant, Vincent Marlowe—this was a systematic plan for murder, was it not?’

‘No, I reject that categorically!’ was Offenbach’s immediate reply. ‘It was just the opposite. It was the only way to stop them killing each other.’

‘It’s a strange logic, is it not, to argue that the only way to keep people from killing each other is to kill them yourself?’

‘It was the only way to keep us from becoming even worse than we were. And, as you might remember, it is only because of Marlowe that any of us are still alive!’

‘But by your own testimony, that wasn’t the way you planned it. By your own testimony, you agreed—you and Marlowe—that there was no chance of survival and after all the others had been killed, Marlowe would kill the both of you. Isn’t that what you just said?’

‘Yes, but is that really so different from how we live anyway?’

Roberts was stunned, confused. He stared at Offenbach with a look of utter incomprehension.

‘I mean, all of us—you, me, everyone sitting out there.We live for a short while, a few years—sixty, seventy—and at the end, always death.Why do we do it? What drives us?—Isn’t it for most of us the thought that we’re leaving something behind? And what is that for most of us but the use we made of our bodies— children, their existence, the extension of ourselves.

‘We were all going to die. What meaning could we give our death if it wasn’t so that others could live?’

‘And so you think that cannibalism was permissible? And not just permissible,’ said Roberts, giving vent to his growing irritation, ‘but—what was it you said?—made you “a little more human”?’

‘That’s not what I meant!’ cried Offenbach. ‘Not
what
we did—never that—but the
way
we did it.What Marlowe did was to bring what would have been pure barbarism under the kind of rule that left us at least a little of our dignity and self-respect. Do you imagine, Mr Roberts,’ said Offenbach, his eyes burning with such brilliant clarity that it was impossible to underestimate the power of the intelligence behind them, ‘do you imagine that it was any different in the beginning, when our ancestors first raised themselves out of the swamp, before they first began to sense there might be some difference between what they were and the other living things around them, when their first impulse when they saw each other was to kill? It took millions of years to become what we are now, beings who understand something about what we are supposed to be; but do you think that even now we’re really that far from where we started? Do you really believe that, if it weren’t for people like Marlowe, we would be any better than we were?’

‘You believe, then, that what Marlowe did was right, that it was not murder?’ asked Roberts sharply.

‘Marlowe did what he had to do. That’s the tragedy of it, don’t you see? He did what he had to do and he’ll never tell you that what he did was right. Why are you charging him with murder? Don’t you know he’s already convicted himself of that? Do you think you can punish him for what he did? That you can make him feel remorse? Don’t you understand that to his dying breath he’s going to wish that he had died out there instead, that he had died and not the boy or any of the others who died so we could live? Don’t you understand that, worse than any of it, is the knowledge that if he had to do it all over again, he would, because it was the only thing he could have done—there was no other way?’

‘No other way? You’re alive; all those others are dead. The other way would have been to let each of you die in turn, not murder anyone. But this way, because of your agreement, you and Marlowe are still alive!’ cried Roberts with one last withering glance.‘No more questions, your Honour!’

Darnell jumped to his feet, his own face red with anger at what Roberts had done.

‘You haven’t given a concert, you haven’t performed anywhere in public, since your rescue, have you?’

‘And I never will,’ said Hugo Offenbach, staring down at the hands that had lifted the spirits of millions and, if Marlowe were to be believed, saved the lives of the other five survivors of the
Evangeline
. ‘I have too much respect for the music,’ he explained, raising his eyes to Darnell’s waiting glance. ‘I won’t become a sideshow, nor will I tolerate pity.’

‘The violin you had, the one that Marlowe saved, the one you played during your long ordeal—There was no mention of it in Captain Balfour’s list of contents of the lifeboat. Do you know what happened to it?’

A sigh, and then a shudder, passed through the witness. A sad, distant look clouded his eyes.‘I let it go, buried it at sea, when the
White Rose
came; buried it at sea with the people buried there; buried it at sea and wished I had been buried there as well.’

Chapter Twenty-Three

R
OBERTS KNEW THAT DARNELL NEVER DID anything without a reason, but he still was not sure why the defence would call as a witness the man who designed and built the
Evangeline
. John Mulholland was by all accounts one of the most respected naval architects in the world, but there was no dispute about why the
Evangeline
had sunk and he could not know anything about what had happened to those who had survived it. Darnell appeared to offer an explanation when he began to ask his questions, but Roberts suspected that the old man had something more in mind than simply giving the jury a better sense of what the
Evangeline
had been like to sail.

‘Mr Mulholland, you designed and built the
Evangeline
?’

John Mulholland was of middle height, with clear brown eyes and short blondish hair greying at the temples. He had the crisp, clean look of a man in his early fifties who enjoyed perfect health, the only sign of age a pair of glasses he slipped on with a certain self-consciousness when he was asked to look at a document. ‘I was the chief designer, but there were dozens of people involved in building her.’

‘Yes, I understand,’ said Darnell in an easy, amiable manner as he fiddled with the pages in an open file that lay on the table in front of him.‘That would be at the Wiegand Shipyard in Seattle?’ he asked, glancing at the page on which his fingers had stopped.

‘Yes, it would.’

Darnell flashed an embarrassed grin. ‘Before we go any further, perhaps you could help me with a difficulty. I’ve never been quite certain what to call her—the
Evangeline
. It doesn’t sound right to call her a ship; but on the other hand, a boat doesn’t sound right either.’

‘The
Evangeline
was a yacht, the finest one we ever built—and, I would venture to say, one of the finest in the world.’

Darnell lifted his eyebrows, a look of sober admiration in his eyes. ‘Most of us think of a yacht as a pleasure craft, something slow and stable, perhaps fifty or sixty feet in length. The
Evangeline
was not like that, though, was she?’

‘She was certainly made for pleasure; but no, she wasn’t like that. She was something different altogether. She was not fifty or sixty feet in length; she was more like three and a half times that— one hundred and ninety-eight feet, ten inches, to be precise. I said she was a yacht, and she was, but the actual category is “cruising sailboat”.’

‘Put this in some kind of perspective for us, Mr Mulholland, if you would. I read somewhere recently that back in the l830s or 1840s the United States sent out a six-ship expedition to map the islands of the South Pacific, and that the largest ship—a frigate of the United States Navy—was one hundred and twenty feet in length. Does that sound right?’

‘Yes, I’m familiar with the accounts of that expedition.You’re right, that was the length of the frigate on which the commander sailed. If I remember correctly, it carried a crew of nearly two hundred.’

Darnell appeared incredulous. ‘Two hundred? On a ship not even two-thirds the size of the
Evangeline
?’

‘In length, yes; but a frigate like that was broader at the beam and had several decks below. Also, you must remember, in those days the crew slept in canvas hammocks with barely any room between them.’

‘Nor, I suspect, was that the only difference, Mr Mulholland,’ said Darnell with a shrewd glance at the jury.‘The
Evangeline
had every kind of modern advantage, didn’t she? State-of-the-art technology, electronic navigational equipment rather different from the compass and sextant used by the sailing ships of the nineteenth century. I have here a list of devices that were used on board; would you mind reading off just a few of the most important ones so we can get a sense of just how extraordinarily sophisticated the
Evangeline
was?’

The clerk took the two-page document from Darnell and walked to the witness stand. Mulholland put on his glasses, glanced down the list and then went back to the beginning.

‘An Anschutz Nautopilot D and Gyrostar Gyrocompass.’ He looked up. ‘The
Evangeline
had direct cable steering that was perfectly balanced. You could control her with the tips of your fingers. When the autopilot was engaged she could be steered hydraulically. The gyrocompass told you your exact position anywhere at sea.’

His eyes ran further down the list.‘B & G Hyrdra 2000 depth, wind, navigation tec., Furuno depth sounder, 2 x Furuno radar FR8100, Satcom A ABB Nera Saturn 3s 90.’ He turned the page, about to continue, then shrugged. ‘She had the most advanced navigational system in the world. If you want, I can go through each item and explain what it did, but they were all to the same purpose: the certain acquisition of perfect knowledge. That is, everything about where she was, where she was heading, and what—wind, water current, depth—she was going to encounter. We built her so she would be ready for anything; there would be no surprises.’

‘No surprises?’ asked Darnell, with a quick sidelong glance. ‘You mean no surprises while everything—all this wonderful, sophisticated equipment—was working?’