Elizabeth Webster and the Court of Uncommon Pleas

by William Lashner

  “Have you been there?” I asked.

  “I have not yet had the pleasure—or the misfortune, depending. It is a difficult thing to go back and forth, it takes much from you, and I was not made of such stern stuff. One glass of milk and I am flatulent for days. Imagine what a voyage like that would do to my system. It was left to my father and my son to make that journey.”

  “My father? He goes back and forth?”

  “There are courts there, too, my dear. Lawyers are needed. Since Old Scratch’s promise to your great ancestor, there has always been a Webster on the other side, defending the damned. Usually they are deceased themselves, but sometimes they must make the unsettling journey from this side to do their work. Every soul departing from that train is judged before heading to its rightful place, and even the worst of the scalawags deserve representation. How’s your Italian?”

  “Not so good,” I said. “I can order a pepperoni pizza, but that’s about it.”

  “Pity, because a fellow named Dante had a pretty good take on what it is like over there, and like most things it is better in the original. There are many levels and many seas and many islands, and somewhere in that world is a spot for each of us to inhabit, until it is time for us to get on that train again. The courts on the other side determine what that spot is and, as with all courts, mistakes are made and injustices arise. It is those injustices that cause the disturbances in this world. One can’t solve them only on this side of the wall, my dear. One must have representation on the other side, too. And that is the noble work that your father does.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “The travel is, yes, like flying on a plane through a hurricane with a cargo of monkeys, I am told. But even more dangerous are the guardians of the lower depths, fallen angels who rule their fiefdoms like cruel kings. And the cruelest of those is a fallen angel known as Abezethibou. As he plummeted from above, some of his fellow angels grabbed hold of a wing to stop his fall. The wing tore off, causing his other wing to turn the color of blood.”

  “Ouch,” I said.

  “Ouch indeed,” said my grandfather. “Nothing stings like a torn wing, just ask Avis. Now, those condemned to live under the demon’s hand call him Redwing. And it was Redwing who sent the old witch to those rocky cliffs to fetch our Isabel.”

  Redwing had gained dominion over Cutbush after the murderer had been dispatched to the other side through a noose. The hanged man, bitter and demented, blamed his crime and all his misfortune on the she-wolf Isabel, who, he claimed, deceived him with her soft voice and quiet manner.

  Cutbush spent so much time going on about Isabel that Redwing naturally grew curious. So he peered through the lens of fate from that world into this and spotted Isabel walking along the rocky cliffs of Sussex with her regal posture and mournful silence. The fallen angel was so taken by the vision, he decided then and there that he must possess her. And so he dispatched a witch to intercept the young woman’s path. The old woman brewed her foul concoction and Isabel, without ever dying, was sent directly to the other world.

  But the law of this world and the next states that one cannot be taken unwillingly to the other side before death. Isabel would soon have to be returned to the world of the living. So Redwing, in order to possess that which he desired, induced Barnabas to climb down from the higher levels with the promise of seeing once again his betrothed. When Isabel arrived at Redwing’s domain in the other world there was a moment of joy when she and Barnabas embraced. But that moment lasted only as long as Redwing permitted before the fallen angel came between them.

  He appeared in his unadulterated form, a fearsome demon with hooves for feet and claws for hands and one red wing rising from his broad back. His horns were as red as his wing and glowed like embers. His tail writhed, and his voice…his voice was like the crackling blaze of doom.

  With that voice, Redwing offered Isabel, out of the goodness of his fire-crusted heart, the opportunity to send Barnabas back to our world. To resurrect her lover by taking his place. While Isabel was more than willing, Barnabas refused to allow it. Isabel was inclined to respect his wishes, until Redwing explained, patiently and with a note of kindness in his voice, the painful situation the two lovers faced.

  Often the betrothed-but-never-married were sent to different levels of this many-layered world, he said, and even after centuries of searching most would never see their loved one again. But Redwing swore that if Isabel agreed to stay with the fallen angel in Barnabas’s place, and Barnabas promised to refrain from interacting with any figure from the spirit world, then when Barnabas returned to this world, Redwing would ensure that he and Isabel would be together for all eternity.

  The offer felt wrong—evil, even. Barnabas urged Isabel to refuse, to return to her life and find someone new. But Isabel, hoping against hope for a future together with her one great love, agreed to the terms. In a flash, Barnabas was returned to our own world, and Isabel’s fate was left in the clawed hands of the demon Redwing.

  When Barnabas found himself back in our world, he was naked and adrift in the sea off the coast of Sussex. He determined to drown himself immediately to get back to Isabel. He swam down as deep as he could go and breathed in the sea. As his lungs filled with the frigid salt water, he felt the life ebb out of him, yet he awoke once again in the same turbulent waters. He tried a second and then a third time, failing and failing again to die. As he swam to the shore he let the waves crash him upon the rocky coast, but when he climbed onto the rocks, he observed that not only was he still alive, but his pale skin was unmarked.

  And that was when he knew. Redwing, to keep his grip on Isabel, had made Barnabas immortal.

  When he returned to the town, clothed in burlap from feed bags he had stolen along the way, no one recognized him. When, properly dressed, he tried to take his place before the bar of the court where he had practiced, he was thrown out of the courthouse. Everyone knew that Barnabas was dead and no imposter would be allowed to stand for him.

  After years of roaming the landscape as a vagabond, trying and failing to kill himself over and over, he heard tell of a firm of lawyers in the New World who made a practice of representing the damned. Certain that no one qualified more than he, Barnabas hired on as the lowest-level seaman on a cargo ship heading to America.

  “That is the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” I said. “And so romantic.”

  “It is the cliffs,” said my grandfather. “Even I would be a striking figure on the cliffs. Imagine me there, leaning forward on my cane, peering out at the sea, the wind ruffling my eyebrows. Who could resist? That good man Barnabas has been with us now ever since he arrived on these shores.”

  “Is my father representing him?”

  “Yes indeed, and he represents Isabel, too. The story is a travesty of justice that must be reversed. Barnabas now, being of neither this world nor the next, is ineligible to stand himself before the Court of Uncommon Pleas, but he is a crackerjack clerk, and in exchange for his work the firm of Webster and Son has been litigating this case against Redwing for over a century. Even your great ancestor Daniel Webster took a shot at it after he died. The case has taken twists and turns, yes indeed—your father has inherited it from my father, who inherited it himself—but we are getting close. In fact, your father was pressing what he believed would be the winning argument to the court on the other side when he failed to return as expected.”

  “And you believe this Redwing is responsible.”

  “He must be,” said my grandfather. “And now, somehow, your father is communicating with us through the spirit of Beatrice Long. ‘Save me, save him.’ Your father is undoubtedly the ‘him.’ We must find her head, Elizabeth. We simply must. Are we getting any closer?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’re at least getting people all in a twist, which is sort of fun.”

  “That’s always a grand first step. Nothing gets done without plucking a few feathers from the poultry. Keep on working. Every day that p
asses increases the risk to your father. But first, before you do anything, you must take care of the Wedderburn petition.”

  “Yes, Grandpop, I know. Wedderburn must be fed.”

  “Precisely,” he said.

  I carried the Wedderburn petition out of my grandfather’s office and headed to Barnabas’s tall writing desk to ask for his help. He leaned over a scroll and carefully scratched out words with his feather pen. His long pale face seemed to glow as if lit by the document laid out before him.

  I had become comfortable enough with Barnabas that I could crack jokes with him, not that he ever smiled at any of them, but now I hesitated. He was no longer merely an odd-looking man with kind eyes and long pale hands, he was a man with a tragic past. For me, he would never look the same again, and I was proud that my father was trying to help him.

  I looked around the office, at Avis behind her desk and at the odd assortment of clients waiting in their chairs for time with my grandfather—Sandy with the wild blond hair, the giant in his brown suit, hump-man—and all of them looked different. I couldn’t help but wonder at the tragedies that brought them to my father’s office. And I began to think of the Frayden twins, Charlie and Doug, in the cafeteria. I had always been so preoccupied with my own insecurities that I hadn’t been able to imagine what, or who, might have been tormenting the two of—

  I caught myself mid-thought. Really, Lizzie? What was I doing worrying about the Fraydens’ emotions? That was a little creepy. If the ceremony where I received my credentials had indeed changed me, maybe it wasn’t for the better.

  “Mistress Elizabeth,” said Barnabas when he raised his attention from the document on his desktop and saw me. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “My grandfather gave me the Wedderburn petition.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Barnabas. “The Wedderburn petition.”

  “I’m supposed to do all kinds of stuff to it and then take it to the judge.”

  “I’m sure you are,” he said. “But I think you can dispense with those tasks for the time being.”

  “My grandfather said I had to get to it right away. He made it sound really important.”

  “I’m sure he did,” said Barnabas kindly, “but he gave that same petition to me last week. The petition has already been fact-checked and filled with citations and filed with the clerk. The judge should rule momentarily. Your grandfather is a brilliant attorney and has forgotten more about the law than most ever learn, but lately the quantity he has forgotten seems to grow each and every day.”

  I looked at the document in my hand. “Is that a problem?”

  “Oh no, not at all. He has your father and Avis and me and now you to help him. He is such a brilliant resource, not just in legal knowledge but in his spirit and outsized humanity. It is an honor for all of us to help him in any way we can.”

  I looked at the papers in my hand. “My afternoon seems to have freed up.”

  “How goes the search for our ghost’s head?”

  “It’s going. Maybe out to sea, but it’s going all right. So, I was thinking—”

  “Splendid,” said Barnabas. “Perhaps I should alert the heralds.”

  “Barnabas,” I said, “did you just make a joke?”

  “Certainly not,” said Barnabas. “The heralds like to celebrate even the smallest victories.”

  “I think that was a joke.”

  “I can’t disabuse you of your fantasies. Now, about that thinking you were doing.”

  “Well,” I said, “if my father is being detained on the other side, why don’t we just file something with the court? Maybe that habeas corpse thing my stepfather told me about.”

  “Ah, habeas corpus,” said Barnabas. “The great writ. Very good, Mistress Elizabeth. You are picking up things quite smartly. Habeas corpus would be the way to go.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  “We would have filed it already, except there is a problem. In order to file such a petition in the Court of Uncommon Pleas, we need to know first where your father is being held. The other side is vast, and Judge Jeffries has made it abundantly clear that it is not enough just to point and say someone is being unfairly held over there. For the judge to order the prisoner brought to his court to determine the legality of a detention, we must have a precise location.”

  “So as soon as we find out where he is we can file the habeas thing?”

  “Yes. We need the location in order to bring him physically into court. Now, in a normal law case, we are allowed to get information from the other side. It is called discovery, and we’re permitted to look at documents and ask questions face-to-face in a procedure called a deposition.”

  “My stepfather mentioned that when he got us out of the police station. So let’s do a deposition.”

  “We would, Mistress Elizabeth, but to compel such a thing, we at least need to know to whom we should ask our questions. Your father could be held only with permission of the ruler of the realm where he is being detained, so that is whom we need to depose, but without a location we don’t know who that might be.”

  “Then how do we find the location?”

  “Aye, there’s the rub.”

  “Rub?”

  “The difficulty. It is a bowling term. Have you ever played at lawn bowling?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you haven’t missed much. We have sent word to our clerks on the other side and they are scouring all the landscapes. When they find your father, they will send us the information we need to begin. But as I said, the other side is vast, and the hiding places are many, and as of yet our emissaries have had no luck. And so we must wait.”

  “I’m not good at waiting,” I said.

  Barnabas looked at me and a great sadness welled in his eyes, a sadness that I now believed I could understand.

  “Neither am I,” he said, “but sometimes we have no other choice.”

  Just then my grandfather barged out of his office, banging the floor with his cane. “What about ‘The Magnificent Websters’? Talk about a firm name with pizzazz! And you know, I always wanted to join the circus. I was born for the flying trapeze. What say you, Elizabeth? Barnabas? The Magnificent Websters. Brilliant, no?”

  “No,” we both said at the same time.

  “Beatrice Long?” said Delores Baird, seated in a blue armchair, her white hair knotted at the back of her neck, her back straight and her ankles crossed. Henry and Natalie and I were sitting around her with notebooks on our laps. “That’s a name from the past. I haven’t heard anyone mention Beatrice Long in at least a day and a half.”

  I didn’t realize that she was joking until the slightest of smiles creased her lips.

  “Who’s been talking about Beatrice?” said Natalie, as if someone had been gossiping about a friend behind her back.

  “Oh, don’t worry yourselves about it,” said the old woman. “I certainly won’t. What can I do for you now?”

  “We have some questions about the murder,” said Henry.

  “There are some out there, to be sure,” said Delores. “Too many to count.”

  Once Natalie had dug up her location, Delores Baird, who had written the newspaper articles about Beatrice Long’s murder, agreed to meet us in the lobby of her nursing home. It was the Saturday after our run-in with the chief. I had expected rows of rocking chairs and bowls of mashed peas and people shouting into each other’s hearing aids. But we were sitting in a beautiful building with nice furniture and old people crossing the lobby with determined steps. Some of those steps were steadied by metal walkers, true, but it still seemed like a cozy place. I wondered just then where my grandfather lived. I had never asked. I had never visited. I had never brought him a plate of home-baked cookies, not that I knew how to make them.

  “We are doing a school project,” lied Natalie so easily it was almost breathtaking. “Henry lives in Beatrice’s old house and the assignment was to discover the secret history of our homes.”

  Delores
sniffed the air, as if there was some foul scent. “That’s not rightly so, at least not according to Chief Johansson,” she said. “According to Chief Johansson the three of you are simply looking into the past to stir up old waters.”

  “Chief Johansson already talked to you?” I said, feeling like a soccer ball with the air leaking out. The chief was running interference. He wasn’t going to let us learn what we needed to learn to help Beatrice or save my father.

  “Oh yes, he came by personally,” said Delores Baird. “He said he had already warned you three in the strictest terms about asking these questions. Is that correct?”

  “Sort of,” I admitted.

  “And yet here you are. Imagine that. The chief has advised me in the very same terms not to cooperate with you in any way, shape, or form. He was quite adamant.”

  “I guess that’s that,” said Henry, closing the notebook on his lap. “We’re sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No bother,” said Delores. “In fact, it does my heart good to see you disregarding the good chief’s advice.”

  “Really?” said Natalie.

  “Oh, sweetie, when I was still reporting, if I let every public official with a puffed-out chest push me around, I never would have written a word worth reading. All they want you to do is publish their press releases, but that wasn’t my job. My job was to stir up those waters. You never know what you’ll find. Sometimes the most illuminating things rise up from the muck. Not that they always let me keep on stirring.”

  “Was there something about Beatrice’s murder they didn’t want you to stir up?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s a story and a half,” said Delores. “I found something about the case that sparked my curiosity, all right. It wasn’t definitive, but it was surely worth some more digging. My editor disagreed and spiked the investigation dead.”