This ostentatious respect for the law and eagerness to see it properly enforced led the noblemen and merchants of Teirbrun to be exceedingly particular in their attitude to the rights of property and crime of theft. Whenever the town’s mayor had to give a speech to a select company of the men who had put him in his office, he was always took care to assure them—even though the assertion was unsupported by much evidence—that there was nowhere else in Bretagne where property was safer, that this safety resulted from the fact that thieves were nowhere so fearful of the rewards of judgment as they were in Teirbrun, and that there was no other town in the entire kingdom in which the scaffolds were so frequently hung with the broken bodies of already-handless miscreants who had dared to repeat such heinous offences as stealing a loaf of bread or poaching a rabbit.
In view of the enthusiasm with which its people publicly expressed their respect for morality and the law, an innocent visitor might have imagined that Teirbrun was an exceptionally happy and orderly town. The people of Bretagne have, however, always been inclined to discontent and disorder, and there were many among Teirbrun’s common inhabitants—especially among the ungrateful poor—who were embittered by the pretensions of their masters, and resentful of the various ways in which ostentatious attempts at rigorous law-enforcement of the law inhibited their spirit of adventure.
“How could we live if stealing were to become impracticable?” some ragged townsmen would often remark to one another, when the two happened to meet in one of their secret dens of vice or filthy taverns. “Would we be obliged to go back to the land, to spoil our hands and break our backs in the planting and the reaping? What are towns for but to gather property together in cupboards and strongboxes, so that its redistribution might be facilitated?”
“What possible benefit would we obtain from going back to the land?” his friend would observe. “The best grain goes to the rich, who neither dig nor pick, and the people who work the fields are left with the turnips and the beets.”
“Nor is it practicable for us to seek work as watchmen or constables,” the first would add, “for we are the ones for whom watchmen need to watch and constables must chase, and our new masters would soon perceive that we had nothing to do if we were to become traitors to our own cause.”
On the rare occasions when they had coin enough to get thoroughly drunk, these shoeless philosophers sometimes became bold. “We need to reclaim the night for those who have stealthy business to conduct,” they would proclaim “We ought to discover among our ranks a robber of true daring, who can thumb his nose at the mayor and his magistrates, and defy every effort made by the constables, the watchmen and the militia to bring him down. We need a hero.”
Alas, as is so often the way with drunken proclamations, these stirring words were usually forgotten by the time dawn broke; time after time, appeals to the patron saint of pilferers went unheard, despite being elaborately clad in alcoholic eloquence, and years passed while no robber of true daring emerged to play the hero and recover the night for the fearful thieves of Teirbrun. In fact, the town’s underdogs knew only too well that no such paragon of cleverness was ever likely to be found among their ranks. When winter came to Bretagne, Teirbrun’s poor folk grew lean, and many became less capable in their various imaginary trades as they were caught in risky business and returned to their families lightened by a hand.
The day did eventually dawn, however, when a series of robberies commenced in Teirbrun that caused a sensation, and relit the flame of hope that the dead hand of the law had extinguished in the town’s most wretched homes. The robberies in question were not petty thefts of food, household implements and underclothing from the marketplace, nor even a matter of the skillful cutting of fat purses. They were burglaries of the boldest kind: the work of a daring housebreaker, who was able to scale high walls and pick sturdy locks. He not only carried away jewels and coins but bottles of fine wine, cheeses, instruments of household discipline—whips, scolds’ bridles and the like—and magical objects of every description, and he seemed to have a particular fondness for daggers and pistols.
Only a handful of the people who were robbed in the early days of the burglar’s career caught so much as a glimpse of this menace to society, and they were unable to offer a useful description of him. All that they were able to report to the constables was that he went about his business cloaked in black, and that he wore a black silk mask to hide his face.
The only person came near to laying hands upon the mysterious thief in those early days was a fat grocer, who was at the time clad only in a linen nightshirt, and he lost all further enthusiasm for a tussle when he discovered that the thief was armed with an exceedingly sharp and stout dagger, whose blade was razor-sharp on both sides. The robber used this weapon—which was more a poniard than a mere dagger, according to the grocer’s testimony—to slice through the nightshirt from top to bottom with a single casual sweep, exposing the honest tradesman’s belly and unmentionables, albeit without shedding a single drop of blood.
“He stole the bag of coins that contained my life savings and the best stock from my larder,” wailed this unlucky man, when he told his anxious friends of his terrible ordeal, “and he did not hesitate to add insult to injury when I confronted him and cursed him as a truffle-digging pig, for he took my powdered wig from my nightstand and impaled it on a spike upon my gate as he left the premises.”
In another realm, the grocer’s audience might have laughed about the wig; in Bretagne, however, a merchant who apes the nobility by playing the fop is not reckoned a figure of fun, at least by his own kind. The fact that the robber carried such a deadly weapon was taken very seriously, for it was held to be clear proof of his murderous intent, and rich men began to quiver in their beds for fear that the thief might puncture more than their wigs.
Within a matter of weeks, every man of quality in the town who had not yet been visited by the master-thief was fearful that his turn to be robbed would come soon enough, and a howling chorus began imploring the mayor for adequate protection. “Such horrors are doubtless an everyday occurrence in the dreadful city of Is,” they cried, “but this is ancient Teirbrun, where the law is legendary for its firmness and the peace has been sternly kept for a hundred years. This kind of thing cannot be tolerated.”
The mayor soon became desperate as his popularity plummeted, but the strenuous efforts to which he roused the watchmen, constables and the militia were all to no avail. It was evident—to the beleaguered mayor, at least—that stronger measures would have to be taken. “This is some kind of phantom that is plaguing us,” the mayor informed an extraordinary meeting of the Town Council. “He is evidently no merely human robber, but a black magician, who is able to evade our every precaution by means of cunning spells! We must petition the Church to send us a skilled witchfinder to deal with the phenomenon!”
The Councillors were not entirely convinced by the mayor’s conclusion, but they could see the wisdom of it. They were, in some sense, responsible for the failures of the watchmen, the constables and the militia, but they could not be held responsible for the failure of an expert witchfinder. Unfortunately, when they petitioned the Archbishop, he replied that his witchfinders were far too busy identifying members of murderous heretical cults and tracking down witches’ sabbats to be distracted by mere matters of common theft—but he did agree to send an investigator to make a careful analysis of the situation, in order to determine whether there were indeed diabolical forces at work. No one in Teirbrun had much confidence in the outcome of such an investigation, but the fact that they had issued the appeal meant that they were forced to pay for the accommodation and feeding of the investigator—who turned out to be a short, stout Benedictine monk named Odo—and treat him with due deference.
Rumor of the mayor’s judgment that supernatural forces were at work reached the houses of the poor some time before the news of the Archbishop’s response—which, when it eventually came, redoubled the merriment thus generated.
From that moment on, the robber was universally known as “the Phantom”—a term that was thenceforth on everyone’s lips, whether its users hailed him as an exemplary hero or damned him as a vile villain whose activities were undermining the very fabric of society.
The only comfort that the gentry and mercantile classes of Teirbrun could find in the midst of their sore distress was to say to one another: “If he persists in his daring depredations, which he shows every sign of doing, then he will surely be caught in the end, one way or another—and then we shall have our revenge. We can certainly rely on Monsieur Sevanter and Jean Funeste to make a fine example of him!”
II.
The names of Alphonse Sevanter and Jean Funeste were very often coupled whenever they were mentioned within the walls of Teirbrun, although they were men of very different quality. They had been friends since boyhood, in spite of the yawning gulf between their social stations.
Alphonse Sevanter’s father, Gabriel, claimed that his full surname was Sevanter d’Ys, that he was descended from the mysterious royal family that had founded the town that eventually became the city of Is, and that he was, in fact, the legitimate Duc d’Ys, although the wicked princes who had usurped his position and reduced Is to its present state of degeneracy stubbornly refused to recognize that he had any meaningful title at all. These claims were not taken seriously by anyone in Teirbrun either, but the town’s residents were politely sympathetic to the fantasy because it echoed their own delusions of precedence and superiority. Anyone in Teirbrun who suggested that the old man was a suitable candidate for the lunatic asylum in Is—which kindly received all the madmen in Bretagne, and from which few of them ever returned—received short shrift from his neighbors. The old man’s madness never worked to the social disadvantage of his son within the town’s walls.
The manor-house in which the so-called Duc and his family lived—situated about a league outside the town wall—was certainly suggestive of a glorious ancestry, but the state of extreme disrepair into which it had fallen was incontrovertible evidence of the hard times on which the family had fallen as its generations had been subjected to the process of inexorable exhaustion that saps the virility from oft-inbred aristocratic lines. Alphonse, like his father before him, was an only child, but he had demonstrated a robustness of constitution in infancy that had filled Gabriel Sevanter with the hope that a glorious renascence of the ancient feudal blood might yet be possible. Before Alphonse was five years old, Gabriel became convinced that he was destined to revive and restore the family’s fortunes and status. The inevitable result of this conviction was that Alphonse was spoiled by his father and mother alike, many of his whims being granted that wiser parents might have declined. When Alphonse demanded that the son of his father’s gardener be allowed to keep company with him, initially as a playmate and later as a fellow pupil of the tutor hired to educate him, his wish had eventually been granted, at no more expense than a sequence of unendurable tantrums.
Alas, Gabriel Sevanter’s vague and fantastic hopes were soon dashed when they came into conflict with harsh reality. The self-styled Duc d’Ys had imagined his son going to Is and taking up the apparent life of a dandy, aided by his astonishing good looks, while secretly training in swordsmanship in order to fight his way to a position of power and influence that would ultimately enable him to send all the corrupt merchant princes packing and establish Is as a true jewel among western cities—the capital not merely of Leonais or even all Bretagne, but of Western Christendom entire. Unfortunately, Alphonse did not grow up as handsome as his father hoped, and exhibited no particular talent for dandyism or swordsmanship, but did possess sufficient intelligence to realize that if he were to make any kind of economic or social progress in the world, he would have to acquire a profession.
Fortunately, Alphonse’s tutor had been graciously permitted to introduce him to the fundamentals of the law in his youth, and it was a simple matter, once Alphonse decided that he needed to make his own living, to extend that elementary education into an intense and focused training, in order that he might take the requisite examinations in Is and be licensed as a local magistrate. This enterprise proved wholly successful, and Alphonse Sevanter—who never used the supplement to his name to which his father clung so stubbornly, in honor of the sacred but oft-ignored principle that all men are equal before the law—became the first Magistrate of the High Court of Teirbrun when the town was granted such an institution. It was, of course, a great honor for the town to be given that privilege, rather than merely forming part of the circuit followed twice a year by a representative of the Royal Court of Is.
Because Jean Funeste, the gardener’s son, received exactly the same education as his childhood friend while continuing to serve as his companion and assistant—although he could not, of course, be entered for any examinations—Monsieur Sevanter the Magistrate had no hesitation in appointing him his clerk. The close association between the two men therefore continued throughout their adulthood, and was always far more than merely professional.
When Alphonse Sevanter decided that he ought to be married, for much the same reasons that he had decided that he ought to have a profession, he begun paying court to the beautiful daughter of one of the town’s most wealthiest and most influential citizens, the wine-merchant Paul Mansard. Naturally enough, he made considerable employment of Jean Funeste as an assistant in his suit. On the one hand, the clerk served as a go-between, carrying the formal correspondence conducted between the magistrate and the merchant and the informal correspondence conducted between the magistrate and the merchant’s daughter, Blanche. On the other hand, and even more usefully, Funeste accepted the awkward diplomatic task of explaining to the self-styled Duc d’Ys exactly why it made perfect sense for his son to marry the beautiful daughter of a rich merchant rather than the daughter of some worthy nobleman—although he was, of course, far too diplomatic ever to mention that only a nobleman in exceedingly dire circumstances would ever contemplate marrying even his plainest daughter to the son of such a crazy poseur. When the marriage took place, Jean Funeste loyally swore to remain a bachelor for life, in order that he might continue to serve the interests of his master’s household without distraction—and he stuck to that resolution, even when Madame Sevanter died, a mere five years later, having borne Monsieur Sevanter one son and three daughters.
The friendship that existed between these two men behind the scenes of public life was, however, universally regarded as the minor and trivial part of their association. What gave rise to the very frequent coupling of their names on the lips of others was their conduct in Teirbrun’s court-room, which almost amounted to a theatrical performance. Their long intimacy had given them an ease of mutual understanding and a deftness in their conversation that was extremely rare in the courts of Bretagne.
Whereas most clerks simply wrote down what the law required them to write, while maintaining a dutiful silence, and most magistrates spoke only the formulas specified by protocol, Jean Funeste and Alphonse Sevanter maintained a continual exchange of significant expressions and perceptive remarks. Their dialogue was as full of clever quips as it was of incisive comment. Their exchanges frequently evoked wild laughter in the public gallery of the court, even when the said gallery was packed with the friends of the butt of their jokes. They were capable of demolishing any defense with insidious sarcasm and subtle ridicule. Most of their scathing remarks were, of course, directed at the accused persons brought before them, but the advocates pleading for the accused were by no means immune to their subtle assaults, especially if they were strangers in the town—which they usually were, because the lawyers of Teirbrun became understandably reluctant to represent their neighbors.
To say that there was a certain lightness about his manner of conducting a trial is not to suggest that there was any leniency in Monsieur Sevanter’s sentencing. Even in that matter, though, the cleverness and wit of the great man shone through. Skillfully aided by Jean Funeste, Monsieur Sevanter
was quite inventive in his choice of punishments, sometimes devising penalties that were previously unheard of in the whole of Bretagne, even though most of the kingdom’s subjects believed that the customary scheme of punishment to be perfectly adequate and not inapt. Although it certainly has to be admitted that there is a certain natural justice in the practices of hanging murderers and repeat offenders of every sort, depriving first-offending thieves of a hand, and burning traitors and heretics at the stake, many hearers of this tale will probably agree with Monsieur Sevanter that the simplicity of this scheme is conducive to a certain monotony and tediousness, and that its full deterrent effect is best maintained by occasional ingenious embellishment.
Visitors from Is occasionally opined that Monsieur Sevanter’s method of conducting trials was not entirely in accordance with the principle of fairness that was supposed to underlie the law, and that his sentencing was sometimes frankly atrocious. The poorer townsfolk of Teirbrun were inclined to agree with them, but the town’s wealthier citizens opposed such opinions fervently. The judgment of the gentry—who were obliged by local pretension to consider the law as a beautiful instrument designed to protect them from the anarchic tendencies of the poor—was that Monsieur Sevanter’s sentencing embodied the true spirit of the law far more closely than any pre-ordained scheme of punishment. For his own part, Monsieur Sevanter only said that he did his best to make a punishment fit the crime by which it was earned. For example, a thief apprehended for the first time was often sentenced by Monsieur Sevanter not merely to lose a hand, but also to be branded upon the forehead—with the actual imprint of the object he had stolen, if it were made of metal, or by a sketch drawn with a branding-iron if not—so that he would present his fellow men thereafter with a permanent warning of his covetousness.
The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies Page 4