“Can you help my father?”
“He sinned!” said Grandfather, and it is hard to think how any other man on one knee could have spoken with such condemnation. “He sinned against Lord God.”
“Yes, I know. He’s suffered for it.” I controlled myself. I would not cry. “He doesn’t have anything, just me. I don’t have much. My father—”
“Do you know who I am?” he interrupted. “What I have done this day?”
“You are the man Israel calls the Minister of Fire.”
“Does he? That is what he would say, the Jew. Hear me close! This morning, your father was sentenced to death for what he did. I cannot reverse that decision. His execution is imminent.” “Please!” I remember then touching him, for one of the few times ever. “If you are my grandfather, help me. Help my father. There must be something you can do. Will you?”
“I am the only one who can save him,” said Grandfather. “Will you?”
He braced himself. The negotiation he had enjoined with Israel had been nothing before the profound deal he fought to close with me and for me. Now the paramount bargain was struck. My memory is that he said “Yes.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said to his assent.
“Don’t talk so! Remember this, Grim Fiddle. Make right by doing right. What men say of you does not matter. You shall be judged swiftly and finally by Lord God.”
Grandfather pulled me down to one knee beside him. He prayed for us, a long, deep, militant psalm that began, “Lord God is my light and my salvation, whom should I fear? Lord God is the refuge of my life, of whom then should I go in dread . . . ?” Then he got us both to our feet, handed me the Fiddle Bible (which is here at my hand as I write, and from which I have learned that Grandfather chose Psalm 27 that day, which ends with good counsel, “Wait for Lord God, be strong, take courage, and wait for Lord God”), and then he took me to the window. He pointed to a tarpaulin-covered two-masted schooner tied up behind Black Crane’s single mast—a big, lovely, fierce-looking ship, what the ancient Norse would have called a “wave-cutter.” He asked me if I could handle her. I told him I had never managed so large a ship in open sea. He told me that he meant from there to the King’s prison island, that night, near midnight. I gave a boastful nod. With that Grandfather pounded me on the back and told me he had waited all the days and nights of his life to have a son who could captain Angel of Death. I balked at the name. He did not notice, already throwing on his coat, throwing back the sliding doors to announce to the assembled his plan for the rescue of Peregrine Ide, who had been condemned that very morning to die that very night by an extraordinary tribunal of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Evangelical Republic of Sweden, a revolutionary vigilante court that had been given its mandate two days before by one of the leading strong men—in plain language, despots—of the revolution, the Reverend Mord Fiddle, my grandfather, Minister of Fire.
The details of the rest of All Saint’s Day do not concern me now. It was a rush to flight from a Norse reign of terror. I learned as I worked. Not just Sweden but all of the Baltic was afire. In Finland, there had been a murderous bombing at a rally called by the government’s opponents. And for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Konigsberg, the anarchistic revolution in Poland (millions starving as winter approached, crucifixions commonplace, battle-tanks out of petrol being overrun by teenagers with petrol bombs) had awakened slumbering Slav chauvinism. There was street-fighting in Riga, food-rioting in Tallin, and an interminable dock strike in Leningrad. Panic was omnipresent and pitiless out there. Whole populations scattered, seeking shelter, asylum, mostly food. Stockholm harbor was filled with those clever enough, brutal enough, to procure oceangoing transport. The radio crackled with lies in twenty tongues. The news in Stockholm was mostly rumors, and they were dreadful. The King was said to have retired to Uppsala, was said to be very ill. There was strong word that the government had fallen; other talk that the King had abdicated in favor of replacing the parliamentary monarchy with an Evangelical Republic. But there was also talk that the King had denounced the Loyalist League and their so-called Provisional Revolutionary Government, that the King had called them all traitors and insurrectionists, and that the King’s illness was in fact gunshot wounds, or perhaps poison. The Prince, at sixteen, was believed a Loyalist sympathizer, and it was equally assumed that he was implicated in a long struggle to wrest the right of succession from his elder sister, the Crown Princess, who had been sent overseas for safekeeping. In all, the weather in Sweden was revolution.
One certainty in Stockholm seemed that the Provisional Revolutionary Government had taken control of the security network, especially of the King’s Spies, now called the Evangelical Brigade. A nation of law had become a nation of men, some very bad men. One of the first declarations by the PRG had been posted at the King’s castle that morning; it said that Peregrine Ide would be executed on the King’s prison island before another sunrise, along with more than one thousand arsonists, rapists, assassins, saboteurs, and other “godless ones.” Another certainty in Stockholm seemed that, once the new government was in place, there would be an end to so-called tolerance of so-called undesirable elements; this meant that aliens, half-breeds, and socio-sexual deviants were marked for terror.
All this should explain why, as I directed my family and our new allies, the Furores, to load and ready Angel of Death, it was wisest to post Babe, Wild Drumrul, and one of Thord’s most loyal lieutenants, Otter Ransom, on guard at the pier. The city was stricken. There were hangings and crucifixions. There were immolations. Stockholm was pursued by demon Purity. There was no refuge there for either the righteous or the wronged. There were sirens, fires, and faraway howls—a larger, more obscene version of what I had fled the night before in Vexbeggar. Columns of refugees wound from the foreign quarter to the quays. Columns of smoke wound from the foreign quarter to spread a stench over the docks, the air sometimes so thick that it was necessary to wear moist cloths on our faces as we worked. The harbor changed for the worse as the day faded, steamers shifting for safer berths away from the smoldering depots, small craft ramming smaller ones, ragwomen in open boats bartering for food, rafts of armed thugs guarding their ships from raiding parties. None hesitated to shoot, and there were bursts of gunfire all day, a few gray lumps, which were probably bodies, to be seen floating in with the evening tide. I thought I saw the worst of mankind that day—far short of it, as I know now. It was still hard on us, more disorienting than any of us admitted. Our known world disintegrated irreparably, and none of our grand assumptions about the intrinsic decency of human nature could protect us. We felt beyond mortal succor. If not for our obsession with delivering Peregrine, I do not rule out the possibility that we would have collapsed with the North. It was a near thing. Molly and Thord suffered a wordless hysteria. Israel started drinking again, passed out at least once, not from spirits, from despair. We had to force Earle to eat for strength, and even sturdy Guy lost his temper at me over stowing a crate. I watched the Furores more suspiciously than was right, and thought badly of Lazarus without call.
Thord took leaving the worst. He saw the rightness of it, and did not grieve for his lost warehouse. He had grown tired of what he had become in his own land—a persecuted deviant, a marked man. But he and the Fljotson brothers, Orri and Gizur Sail-Maker, were the only full Swedes among us, without links to any other culture (Otter Ransom was part Ukrainian). Sadder, Gizur Sail-Maker’s young wife had died the year before of meningitis, a disease he insanely ascribed to Sweden’s irreligion. He had not been rational since. He wanted us to take along her gravestone; Orri had to lie to him. As Orri’s protector, Thord suffered the Fljotson dilemma acutely. More, he could not forgive himself his powerlessness to save us. He felt, with a bleak conviction, that he had brought on our jeopardy by remaining silent about the truth of my birth.
I must include here that I also learned that day that if not for Charity Bentham, there would have been no escape. She was the heroine, and t
he mystery, had been from the first. Her motives in discarding her widowhood and retrieving her first husband are beyond me. I declare here that Charity Bentham made her own mysterious bargain with her own mysterious conscience, and the particulars that contributed to such seem lost to me now in her love for Peregrine Ide and Cesare Furore. I can guess that she longed for order, decency, kindness, a fragment of happiness; she longed for an end to her self-torment; she reached for peace of mind and found Peregrine and a few more years of love and remorse. I could go on, but what would it serve?
What I do know with some certainty is how Charity Bentham went about gathering back to herself her Peregrine. She did not attend Peregrine’s trial. Israel hated her for that, a bias that would create difficulties. Afterward, Charity Bentham bribed Israel’s whereabouts from American draft dodgers who had returned to America (Peregrine used Israel’s name the night of our joint interrogation, the crucial clue that led Charity to search for Israel). She contacted Israel through agents during Peregrine’s first year of imprisonment. Israel spurned her. She persisted by letter. The first plan she proposed for helping Peregrine—having him transferred to an American prison to serve out his sentence—not only was rejected by Israel as self-serving, but also was discarded by Charity Bentham because of the Loyalist campaign against Peregrine.
She then funded two legal appeals on Peregrine’s behalf, one in her own name to the King, asking for mercy, another on legal technicalities to the court. Both were overwhelmed by politics. Charity Bentham next traveled to Stockholm to visit the King, the Queen, and the Prime Minister to plead for Peregrine. She even petitioned the President of the United States; for that she suffered the wrath of the Furore family in America. Rather than argue with them, Charity forfeited her inheritance from Cesare Furore, abandoned her teaching and lecturing posts, committed herself to traveling back and forth from America to Sweden to seek a solution. When all this seemed futile, she contacted, again through her agents, the Loyalist League for Swedish Homelife and arranged an audience with Peregrine’s chief persecutor, my grandfather, Mord Fiddle. That meeting never took place, for at the last Mord Fiddle refused her, claiming more pressing matters than mercy.
After nearly five years of tireless pursuit that had cost her fame, fortune, family, the respect of her colleagues and the fruits of her Nobel Prize, Charity Bentham was desperate. She shed more than widowhood; she shed patience, pride, law. Learning of the Loyalist move to overthrow the government, and anticipating Peregrine’s final peril, she returned to Stockholm at the beginning of the summer. She was near collapse. Her children, Cleopatra and the brothers, were aware of their mother’s state and followed her, either to help or to get her safely away.
Charity Bentham pleaded by letter to Israel for his help. He still ignored her, for the same unfair reason—he blamed her for Peregrine’s ruin. She took to visiting Thord’s manse at odd hours, hoping to catch Israel. She acted like a beggar, stood outside, weeping, waiting.
Thord Horshead finally took pity when he saw that none of the others would challenge Israel, and met with her, permitting her to talk, confess, ramble, beg. That was Thord’s way, the listener and not the confider. It is a credit to Charity Bentham that somehow in her wildness she was able to intuit that Thord knew more about Peregrine, me, all of us, than he should have or was telling. She drew the secret out of him. She used that brilliant and by then overwrought mind of hers to open up that large but guarded heart of Thord’s. Their roles reversed, she the confessor, he the penitent.
Thord Horshead had kept my true identity from my family for many reasons—fear of candor, fear of rejection, fear of loss, fear of his own motives—at least in part because of his deep regret for disappointing his father, Anders Horshead, the attending physician at my birth. Thord’s homosexuality seemed to preclude a natural family; the weight of that had split father and son, more Thord’s doing than Dr. Horshead’s. Thord adopted me and the rest (and he had sought us out, allowing it to seem a chance convergence) in order to offset his seedless destiny. He had actually learned of my abandonment by Grandfather from his father, had moved to right the wrong. In doing it the way he did—not telling us—he had done more wrong. That is hindsight. It is unfair to him. He took pity on us, the same pity he took upon Charity Bentham before his manse. I was never his son, but I was his child as much as everyone else’s in his house, and in Thord’s way he fought to keep me and to protect me. Once Charity Bentham discovered the truth, she gave Thord the strength to confront his deception; she showed Thord how he could repair the damage he had done. The two of them found, in their pity and regret, a way to act for the good. I wonder if she called it the greatest good? In any case, she accompanied Thord that same afternoon (this was August, just before Israel wrote me to prepare the ketch) to Mord Fiddle’s church, the Pillar of Salt. They were blocked by Grandfather’s coterie of seminarians. Thord thereby exercised his power to get where he wanted to get, strong enough even then to penetrate the Loyalist screen. They confronted Grandfather in his own chancellery, under the guise of bringing a petition from Cesare Furore’s widow. They told him what they knew to be true. Grandfather rose from his desk, placed the Fiddle Bible down before Charity Bentham, and told her to swear. She obliged. Grandfather then asked her if she had proof. She said she could produce living proof. Grandfather ordered them to withdraw.
That was a month before Cleopatra arrived to fetch me from Vexbeggar. In that time, Charity Bentham had taken control of my family, had ordered them all to prepare for Peregrine’s rescue and their own escape. Israel, persuaded at last of Charity’s sincerity, furious at the twists and joyful for the hope, argued that something rash must be done, that Mord Fiddle would never admit to what he had done. He counseled that they should expose the connection between Mord Fiddle and Peregrine Ide. Charity Bentham counseled faith and resolve. Her opinion was that Mord Fiddle must be given time to consider the revelation, and that as he did, he would help them.
Grandfather nearly confounded Charity Bentham’s wisdom. He followed through, remorseless, determined, hard-set on his plot to establish the PRG and to convene the tribunal to judge and sentence the enemies of his Evangelical Republic. Only then, after Peregrine was sure to be sentenced to death, had he sent for Charity Bentham. That was All Saint’s Eve, and she, anticipating her moment, had dispatched Cleopatra and her sons (with Thord’s help) to provide proof to Grandfather that he must cooperate completely, unconditionally.
Why did Grandfather wait to the brink? The answer is the man. He primarily saw himself as a servant of his Lord God first. I can suppose that he felt that his duty was to his Evangelical Republic, that only after he had discharged his tasks in a way that not even he could have upset its destiny, did he believe he could step away from his call as Minister of Fire to attend to his own desire. I see the conflict—mask or heart—and make sense of it, if I do not approve. I have made similar choices, to similar dark ends.
More important, why did Grandfather collapse to the truth of what he had done to me? He was neither simple, nor sensible, nor qualifiable, and I do believe that if any man ever born could have stood unmoved, unbent, before such a crime, it was Grandfather. He agreed to rescue Peregrine, and then he agreed to help my family, for a reason that is profoundly simple, equally fetching. It still wins me. He wanted his grandson, Grim Fiddle.
And yet I hesitate at this explanation now that I have written it. It can seem to me now not complex enough, or rather, too straightforward. It makes Grandfather as selfish as he was self-elected. I want him to be more. I want my memory to be more fulfilling. I want to believe that he was not only a great fury, an edifice of self-serving God talk and a flame of self-aggrandizing vengeance. I want to believe that he had a secret, unexamined reason for rescuing Peregrine, one that makes him human, even gentle. Somewhere in him was a husband who had lost a wife, who had driven away a wife, because he had been Mord Fiddle and she had rejected him for it. I cannot speak to the failure of that marriage, though if
it can be judged by the antipathy between Lamba and Grandfather, it must have been a bleak conflict of wills. I would like to believe that Grandfather had loved Zoe greatly. The fact pertinent here is that Zoe abandoned Mord. And when she had gone, I choose to suppose, Grandfather had frozen a part of his heart in time—just as Peregrine had done when he had lost Charity.
I argue that Grandfather, as he considered what Charity Bentham revealed to him of me, Peregrine, herself, was able to perceive the misery of Peregrine Ide more completely than could the rest of my family, than even could Charity. I argue that Grandfather understood Father, at least the aspect of Father that had moved Peregrine to murder. I argue that Grandfather, sitting there in his chancellery, wrapped in black robes and blacker mood, might have asked himself what it must have been like to murder out of jealousy and longing and loneliness. If it did happen, it would have been a brief insight. Grandfather was not the sort to offer compassion or to put himself in another man’s place.
I have no proof of this, unless it is me, living proof that my Grandfather and Father were of the same bolt of cloth, romantic outlaws, desperate self-deceivers, proud, sorrowful lovers who would not let themselves mend their ways. And their reward for lifetimes of regret was dark confusion, until chance, or luck, or this one woman, Charity Bentham, sacrificed herself to give Peregrine the possibility of love regained, and to give Grandfather the possibility of a new course, hopeful and dangerous, out into the world with his grandson beside him.
It was Charity Bentham who charged this affair, then, heroine and provider, a woman of intellect and theory became a conspirator of action and heart: for she and Cleopatra were to accompany Grandfather, supposedly to witness the scheduled execution of Peregrine Ide at the King’s prison that night; for she and Cleopatra were central masqueraders in Grandfather’s proposed plan of rescue and escape.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 11