The Dark Backward Page 3

  “Tonight we have that red wine that you….”

  “Yes, that will be fine.”

  And then, no matter how crowded the restaurant, the two of them were alone. Nearly everyone knew the famous William Darnell, and those who did not could tell simply by looking at him that he was someone of importance, but no one bothered them, no one came up to the table to introduce themselves, much less to ask for an autograph. Perhaps it was his age, perhaps he seemed too distant and remote, or perhaps it was the way all his attention stayed on the woman he was with, the woman with the lovely eyes and the graceful beauty that age, instead of diminishing, seemed only to have enhanced.

  “Tell me about the case.”

  A sly grin started onto his small pear-shaped mouth.

  “The new one, the one I haven’t taken yet, or the one I just finished, the one where the woman who killed her husband is now free to spend all his money?”

  “Is that what you argued to the jury? ‘If she goes to prison all that money will be wasted’?” She paused. “How much money was there, anyway?”

  “Enough to make divorce unattractive. It’s strange. Tell a woman – or a man, for that matter – that she’ll split ten thousand in a divorce and she won’t think twice about it; tell her she’ll split ten million she thinks of murder. Makes you start to think we were better off when marriages were all arranged and divorce was all but impossible.”

  Summer bent forward, her blue eyes clear and lucid in the candlelight.

  “Are you telling me you think she was guilty?”

  “I’m telling you it was one of the closest cases I’ve seen. It could have gone either way. The only reason it went the way it did was because she never told the truth in her life.” Darnell held up the wine glass and, looking at it, narrowed his eyes. “That isn’t the same as saying she’s a liar.”

  Summer thought she understood.

  “You mean she doesn’t know the difference. She believes whatever she says and says whatever she has to say to get what she wants. Yes, I’ve known a few people like that, women and men both. They never lie about facts, things that can be proven one way or the other; but they’ve never known how to tell the truth about themselves, their feelings, their real intentions. Yes, I think I know what you mean.”

  Darnell was astonished, but then realized he should not be. It was not the first time she had put into words something he had felt but had not been able to express adequately even to himself.

  “She doesn’t think she did anything wrong.” Pausing briefly, he reconsidered. “She blames him for what she did. He was the one who started it, made her life a living hell, and so the question of whether she could have just walked away, filed for divorce and put an end to what she suffered was for her no question at all. Why should he get away with what he had done? They used to build statues to people who had the courage to kill a tyrant; they didn’t put them on trial for murder. What happens to a tyrant is always the tyrant’s fault. Which reminds me,” he asked, suppressing a grin, “have you ever read Mutiny on the Bounty?”

  Summer grasped one connection and immediately guessed at another.

  “The tyrant that deserves his fate, Captain Bligh and what happened to him. And that has something to do with this next case of yours, doesn’t it, the one you can’t wait to start?”

  Darnell had the look of a frustrated conspirator whose perfect plan has just come unraveled.

  “I’d never win a case if you were on the jury, would I? Yes, you’re right, as usual. It has something to do with the case; maybe everything for all I know at this point. Not Bligh, but what happened later: Fletcher Christian and the rest of them, the mutineers who settled and, if I remember the story, died, most of them, on Pitcairn’s Island. But you’ve read it?”

  She had indeed, and not once, but several times, most recently a few months before.

  “You were in a trial,” she explained when he seemed confused that he had not remembered. She sipped on the wine, a look of teasing affection in her eyes. “And during a trial, William Darnell, I could be reading War and Peace out loud in Russian and you wouldn’t notice.”

  “You don’t read Russian.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “But you read it, Mutiny on the Bounty? Read it again that recently?”

  “And the other two as well.”

  “The other two?”

  “It was a trilogy: Mutiny on the Bounty, Men against the Sea – that was about Bligh’s voyage in that open boat, thousands of miles, the longest such voyage in history. An amazing story of seamanship; no one had ever done such a thing; no one but Bligh could have done it from what you’re led to believe. He was greeted as a hero in England and….Did you read it – the trilogy, I mean?”

  Darnell shook his head. He was anxious for her to continue.

  “But you read Mutiny on the Bounty?” she asked.

  “Yes, but a very long time ago. I think I did, anyway; I may have just seen the movie – one of the movies – and now think I did. But that doesn’t matter. Tell me – there was a third novel?”

  “Pitcairn’s Island. What happened there, how things fell apart, how they ended up, many of them, killing each other.”

  A distant smile, a strange enigma, played on her mouth. She was about to say something when the waiter began to serve dinner. The conversation turned to other things, what she had done that week at the hospital, what they were going to do together during this, the first weekend in months that he did not have to prepare for another week in trial. It was only when they were walking home that Summer spoke again about what had happened on Pitcairn’s Island.

  The night was clear and cool, the air fresh and clean, the city shining like a rich man’s dream, bridges made of gold and silver, the streets lit up like money. The shop windows were filled with fine clothing and finer jewels, things dug from mines deep inside the earth, things made in places with exotic names somewhere the other side of the sea, all of it brought here to catch the eye of those who never had to ask how much things cost and whether they could afford to buy. Summer stopped to gaze at a long blue dress draped on a manikin.

  “It was all about a woman, or at least I think it was.” She turned from the window and faced Darnell. “And then, afterward, it was all about women.”

  “What was…?”

  “The mutiny. I don’t think you read the book, or you read it when you were too young, when you were only interested in the adventure. The movie has it wrong. Bligh is this terrible tyrant who brutalizes his men. He’s insane. All he cares about is getting these stupid plants – breadfruit – delivered safely. The men have no choice. Fletcher Christian has no choice. They’ll all die; they’ll all be killed by Bligh’s cruelty, if Christian doesn’t do something to save them.”

  She said this with the kind of concentrated intensity she often had when she was trying to describe a feeling or a belief that went against the grain of settled opinion. The phrase Captain Bligh may have become synonymous with the worst kind of oppression but words, or what other people thought, could never stop her. It was one of the things Darnell had liked most about her, one of the reasons why he trusted her perhaps more than he had ever trusted anyone.

  “But Christian doesn’t think about mutiny until after they’ve been to Tahiti, until after he has met the girl, the chief’s daughter. He doesn’t think about mutiny until they’ve left Tahiti and he knows he won’t see her again. He had put up with Bligh’s insults, with his severity, for months before, but now, suddenly, it becomes intolerable, more than he can bear.” Summer gave Darnell a knowing glance. She was certain she was right. “It’s the girl. He can’t admit that to himself; he’s a British naval officer, sworn to his duty. But it’s the girl. He seizes on something Bligh did and rouses the men to mutiny. They take over the ship and put Bligh and those who wish to go with him in the long boat – and nearly all of the officers choose to do so. In fact, there isn’t room for everyone who would have gone with him, gone to an almost cert
ain death in an open boat in the middle of the Pacific thousands of miles from civilization. And where does Fletcher Christian go after he has the ship? To Tahiti and the girl.”

  They started walking up the street, passing other restaurants where other couples sat across candlelit tables talking about their own lives and dreams, and not many of them, it is safe to say, much concerned with something read in a book or said about the past.

  “You said it was about a woman, and then you said that later it was about women.”

  “They went to Tahiti, but they knew they could not stay there. The British navy was certain to come after them. The girl was in love with him, and he was in love with her, and she was going to go with him. But there were other men as well and while some of them found women to take with them, not all of them did. There were also a few native men who went along as well. Don’t you see? This was the beginning of all the trouble. They sail off in the Bounty, a small group of people, more men then women, to start a new life in a place where no one, including the British navy, will ever find them. What did they think was going to happen? It’s hard to know. They finally discover this speck of land, an island two miles long and only one mile across, burn the Bounty and like something out of Genesis begin a world of their own. Or try to. Because before long the men without women decide it isn’t fair.”

  “And that led to jealousy, and jealousy led to murder,” said Darnell, picking up the thread of the narrative. “Is that what happened?”

  “Yes, but with a strange conclusion.”

  “A strange conclusion?”

  “There was open warfare, and the men killed each other off until there was only one of them left. He was, according to the story, a decent man, filled with guilt over what they had done to Captain Bligh and the others that had been set adrift. He was the only man; all the rest were women. Some of the women had children, and those who didn’t have them wanted to.”

  “And the one man…?”

  “Fletcher Christian had given them what law they had, decided that instead of a captain’s order on a ship, everyone should decide on everything together. In a way, that is what led to all the trouble, the belief that each man should have what every other man had. But when there was only that one last man, he did what he could to give them religion. He could barely read, but he had learned enough to teach himself more, and he had a bible. He did not see the use in teaching the children about hellfire and fear; he taught them only those verses that spoke about loving others more than you love yourself.

  “And the strange and beautiful thing is that it seemed to work. At the end of the book, when a British vessel first comes to Pitcairn, the children, some of them grown to be young men and women, were said to have an intelligence and to move with a grace and charm that reminded those who saw them of what it must have been like when the world was young and the children had all been fathered by gods.”

  Grasping the handle of the front door, Darnell stared down at the sidewalk until she finished. When he looked up, he shook his head at the almost uncanny way it fit together, what had happened all that time ago out on an island no one had heard of, and now, on another island no one could find on a map.

  “That’s almost exactly what the judge, what Evelyn Pierce, said about this client of mine I haven’t yet met. She said the only way she could think to describe him was that he looked like he was born to be a king, the lithe body of an athlete and a mind of pure intelligence.”

  Chapter Three

  William Darnell pushed away from the counsel table, crossed his right leg over his left and began to swing his foot back and forth. Suddenly, and for no apparent reason a favorite line from Hemingway came to him, a line no one now remembered from a book no one any longer read. ‘The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand.’ There was nothing else now, Darnell understood, nothing but that – to see and hear and learn and understand. If he had not been certain of that before, the four months preparing for this trial – or trying to prepare because he still had more questions than answers – had convinced him that it was true. He had poured over documents, read things he had not read in years, studied things he had not studied before – done everything he could think of to make sense of what, the further he got into it, did not seem to make sense at all; or rather to make all the sense in the world if you could only manage to credit the possibility that nearly everything you had thought before might just have been wrong.

  It had been difficult enough to do himself, but how was he going to persuade twelve members of a jury, ordinary men and women who had never had a reason to question the validity of their own beliefs, to see the world in a way that was not just different but in important respects the opposite of everything they had known. He would certainly get no help from the prosecutor. She was going to do everything in her power to convince the jury that the case should be judged as if the crime had been committed here at home instead of in a place none of them had ever heard of and none of them would ever see.

  The bailiff drew himself up to his full height and, as the door at the side of the courtroom opened, announced that “Court is now in session, the Honorable Judge Evelyn Pierce presiding.”

  Her eyes fixed straight ahead, Evelyn Pierce walked with measured steps across the front of the courtroom to her place on the bench. Clasping her hands in front of her, she leaned forward.

  “Let the record reflect that we are here in the matter of People v. Adam. Mr. William Darnell is here for the defense. Mr. Darnell, for purposes of the record, is it indeed the case that the defendant has only the one name – Adam? No other, second, name? Adam is not his first, or his last, name?”

  Darnell rose slowly, but not because of his age. He had always done it this way, slow, unhurried, as if, whatever the question, whatever the situation, he would determine the pace at which things were done.

  “That is correct, your Honor; though I should also point out that Adam is not his real name.”

  “Not his real name?”

  “No, your Honor. Adam was the name given him by the people who found him on the island and brought him here.”

  “And they did that because they didn’t know his name?”

  “I assume so. They didn’t speak his language, couldn’t understand it, and so they gave him a name of their own.”

  “Adam. Interesting choice.”

  “I thought so, your Honor. As for his real name, if he has one, I’m sure I couldn’t tell you either.”

  “I’m not sure I understand, Mr. Darnell. You’re the attorney for the defense. Adam, as we’re calling him, has been your client for some months and you don’t know his real name? You have been able to communicate with him, haven’t you? Forgive me, Mr. Darnell, I shouldn’t have asked you that. The court knows you well enough to know that if you hadn’t been able to communicate with the defendant you would have advised the court of that fact. But you just said that he was given the name Adam because those who discovered him on the island couldn’t speak his language. He speaks English now, though, doesn’t he? He spoke it in court before, when he appeared at his arraignment.”

  “His English is quite good; better than my own, I think,” replied Darnell with a thoughtful and slightly whimsical look. “Far better, to tell the truth; he speaks it the way it should be spoken.”

  Judge Pierce wore a puzzled expression. “But he didn’t speak it before? Well, never mind, that isn’t any of the court’s business. Just so long as he can follow the proceedings and assist in his own defense.” She started to turn away. “But if he speaks such good English, why can’t he tell you his name?”

  “He has,” said Darnell, staring off into the distance.

  “Then why shouldn’t we use that instead of Adam?”

  “Because I can’t tell you what it is. It is a sound I can’t decipher. It seems to be all consonants. I couldn’t even attempt to spell it.”

  Evelyn Pierce wondered if Darnell was playing with her, trying to
draw attention, right at the beginning, to how different, how strange this trial was going to be. She lowered her head and gave him a warning glance.

  “Your client supposedly speaks English as well or better than you do. Have him spell it.”

  “He can’t.”

  “Can’t spell?”

  “Can’t read or write, your Honor.”

  “Can’t read or write?” she asked, astounded. “He learned English in a few short months – and he can’t read or write?”

  Her gaze moved from Darnell to Adam, sitting quietly at the counsel table. He was not anything like what she had first expected. Instead of a dark-eyed, brown-skinned native of some tropical island the young man was blonde with fair skin and, whether or not he could read and write, the most astonishingly intelligent blue eyes she had ever seen. They seemed, those eyes of his, to take in everything at once, to grasp in an instant not just the physical objects they saw but what each of them meant in all their various relations. Watching him that first time when he was brought to court for the arraignment, she had had the sense that nothing confused him, that at the end of those few minutes he could have explained better than any of the lawyers who had been there what had just happened. He had seemed almost to enjoy it, as though he were there to observe the way things were done and that none of it had anything very much to do with him. And now she was being told that this young man with the brilliant eyes could neither read nor write.

  “Can’t read or write? You’re saying he’s illiterate?”

  Darnell stroked his chin. His eyebrows shot straight up and stayed there.