Simon Tolkien - The Inheritance

Everyone was staring at him. He could feel their eyes. He closed his own, but it made him sick. When he opened them again, the jury was filing back into court.

“You’ve got to watch if they look at you. If they do, it’s all right.” A prisoner in the cell across from him at Wandsworth had told Stephen this the night before like it was gospel truth. And several of the jurors did. They definitely glanced in his direction as they took their seats. There was no mistaking it. Stephen felt a sudden hope soaring inside him. It could all be over in a few seconds. Two words, and he would be going home. To Mary and the sunlight.

“The defendant will stand,” said the clerk of the court. But it was hard. Stephen’s legs felt like dead weights. He had to hold on to the front of the dock to pull himself up.

“Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict upon which you are all agreed?” asked the clerk. Stephen swayed gently from side to side.

“Yes, we have,” said a dapper little man with a bow tie who had got to his feet at the far end of the jury box. He was not one of those that had looked at Stephen as they came in.

“On the single count of murder, how do you find the defendant? Guilty or not guilty?”

The moment of crisis: Caesar’s thumb suspended in midair, and Stephen trembling in the dock with his eyes fixed on the lion and unicorn above the judge’s head. Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, he prayed. The two words filled his head like a drumbeat, but the foreman of the jury couldn’t hear them. He was too far away.

“Guilty,” he said. Just one word and Stephen’s fate was decided.

The judge nodded. It was almost imperceptible, but it conveyed all the steely satisfaction that Murdoch felt inside. He looked straight into the eyes of the broken young man in the dock, and he felt no pity at all.

“Stephen Cade,” he said in a harsh voice that filled the courtroom. “Have you anything to say why sentence of death should not now be pronounced upon you?”

Stephen tried to speak, but the words stuck in his throat. It was too dry, and there was no time.

“Because I am innocent,” he eventually managed to say in a hoarse whisper. “I didn’t kill my father.”

“You are not innocent,” said the judge flatly. “You have been convicted by this jury of a heinous crime. The sentence is prescribed bylaw.”

A tall thin man in a frock coat stepped out from behind the judge’s chair. There was something in his hands. A small square of black silk. Delicately he placed it on top of the judge’s wig and then stepped back into the shadows, leaving Murdoch to speak the final words.

“Stephen Cade, you are sentenced to be taken hence to the prison in which you were last confined, and from there to a place of execution where you will suffer death by hanging, and thereafter your body shall be buried within the precincts of the prison, and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.”

The judge spoke the words slowly and deliberately. It was at these moments he felt most alive. He became the law in all its cold majesty. He personified it.

But Stephen didn’t hear his sentence. His legs gave way beneath him, and the prison officers on either side had to support him until the judge had left the courtroom, and it was time to stumble down the stairs at the back of the dock and begin his journey into oblivion.

Sasha visited her father six times during the two weeks after she first brought him the Marjean codex and Cade’s sheet of mysterious numbers. The visits were not a success. He didn’t have any answers to give her, and she found it almost impossible to contain her frustration. And her eagerness to crack the code alarmed him. He feared what would happen to her if she went after St. Peter’s cross. Cade’s search had ended with a bullet. Why should Sasha fare any better? And yet Andrew Blayne could not resist the lure of the codex for very long. It was such a beautiful thing, and in his heart he wanted to know its secret as much as his daughter did. It was as if the monk who had painted the Latin words on to the calfskin all those hundreds of years before was trying to talk to him across time, trying to make him understand. Alone in his attic room, Blayne stayed up night after night, poring over the Gospel of St. Luke, using up all his reserves of physical energy until he looked like a ghost of himself. His hands shook more than ever, and there was a white pallor to his face that Sasha was too preoccupied to notice.

On her last visit, Blayne had become angry with his daughter. It was unlike him, and the experience shook her. She had taken the codex away to the sofa and was trying in vain to make some connection between Cade’s list of numbers and the Latin text in front of her when, without warning, Blayne came up behind her and snatched the book out of her hands.

“Why don’t you leave me alone, Sasha?” he shouted. “You’re in my way. Can’t you see that? How can I work when you’re in my way?”

Sasha had left him alone after that. He had her address, and she felt confident he would get in touch when he had something to tell her. She felt angry too, bruised by the change in her father. And the need to break the code blinded her to almost every other consideration. If leaving him alone was the way to get what she wanted, then she would do just that. She didn’t go back to see her father for a week, and when she did, he was gone.

She realised something was wrong as soon as she got to the top of the stairs and found the door to his room ajar. It was quite late in the evening, and she could feel the force of the cold air even before she went inside. The window over the bed had blown open, and her breath hung in the air like so much white smoke.

Her father wasn’t in the room, and yet he never went out after dark. Fighting down the mounting panic that she felt inside, Sasha ran down to the antiquated bathroom on the half landing below. But it was empty except for her father’s shaving kit and his old green toothbrush planted in a white enamel mug above the discoloured sink. The sight of it made her cry out her father’s name, even though she knew inside that he was nowhere in the house, and the noise brought the tenant of the bed-sit on the floor below to her door. She was a young woman with a wrinkled face, whom Sasha dimly remembered from several previous encounters on the stairs. A baby was crying somewhere in the background.

“Are you all right?” asked the woman, looking up at Sasha, who nodded, unable to speak for a moment because of a sob that was stuck in her throat.

“You’re his daughter, aren’t you? I’ve seen you here before.”

“Yes. Do you know where he’s gone?”

“They took him to hospital this morning. I was the one who went for the ambulance. He was out on the landing when I was going out to buy my milk, and he called down to me. It gave me quite a shock, I can tell you.”

“Why did he call down to you? What was wrong with him?” asked Sasha, hanging on to the stair rail for support as the woman’s words sank into her consciousness.

“Some sort of stroke is what they said. Meant he couldn’t get down the stairs. Strokes do that, you know.”

“Do what?”

“Paralyse you all down one side. I reckon that’s what happened to your dad.”

“You don’t know that,” said Sasha, suddenly angry at the woman’s morbid assumption of the worst. “It might just be something temporary, for all you know.”

“Well, I know he couldn’t hardly move himself,” said the woman defiantly. “He’s been overdoing it, if you ask me, and that’s what’s brought this on. I’ve heard him every night this week, pacing up and down, and he’s looked awful. But you wouldn’t know, of course. You haven’t been round here for a while, have you?”