A Far Better Thing, page 2
Barsad had named three further witnesses against my changeling: Mr. Lorry, Cruncher’s employer; and a father and daughter Lorry had been escorting across the Channel four years ago. As I’d told Stryver, I hadn’t been concerned about their testimony. Allegedly, they had come across from France on the same packet-ship that had brought Darnay to England. I couldn’t imagine they had anything damning to offer. More to the point, knowing Mr. Lorry as I did, I couldn’t imagine he would want to do anything to ensure the death of another human being.
Sure enough, the banker’s kind face was utterly miserable as he took the stand. His hands fiddled anxiously with the herbs strewn about the witness box. If anyone had brought my changeling and I together, it wasn’t him. I couldn’t imagine anyone less likely to be involved with fairy trickery.
“Mr. Lorry, please look upon the prisoner. Have you seen him, to your certain knowledge, before?”
Mr. Lorry looked at my changeling, who met his eyes with neither the plea for help nor the ill will that would be natural under the circumstances. In fact, he managed a pale smile.
“I have,” Mr. Lorry conceded reluctantly.
“When?”
“I was returning from a visit to France in November 1775. At Calais, the prisoner came aboard the packet-ship in which I returned, and made the voyage with me.”
“At what hour did he come on board?”
“At a little after midnight.”
“In the dead of the night,” the attorney-general rephrased more colourfully. “Were you travelling alone, Mr. Lorry, or with any companion?”
“With two companions. A gentleman and a lady. They are here.”
“Had you any conversation with the prisoner?”
“Hardly any. The weather was stormy, and the passage long and rough, and I lay on a sofa, almost from shore to shore.”
“Thank you. No further questions.”
Mr. Lorry resumed his seat with an apologetic glance at the prisoner. The courtroom buzzed.
The judge cleared his throat. “Miss Manette!”
On reflex, I looked at the woman rising from the gallery. That was when I received my second shock of the day. It was a good thing that I had already been numbed by the first, because this one would otherwise have felled me.
Miss Manette was a changeling too. She was Ivy’s changeling.
I must have been the only person who had not looked at her until that point, simply because she was so excessively beautiful. Fine golden hair, a quiet, graceful head, blue eyes that looked at the prisoner with a very touching appeal. Ivy was ten when she died, so this woman must have been about twenty-two, three years younger than me, though she could have passed for even younger. Her eyes, of course, were the same unearthly blue as Darnay’s, and her features were smoothed to changeling perfection. Ivy would have had dark eyes, crooked eyebrows, a nose a little too long. I didn’t care about such tiny details. This was an image of Ivy grown, and she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Now I knew something really was awry. For me to encounter my changeling in a courtroom could be chance. For me to encounter my changeling and Ivy’s, and for them to encounter each other, could only be planned. I could no longer hope this was just an unusually terrible day. This was something else entirely.
“Miss Manette,” the attorney-general was asking, “you are the young lady referred to just now?”
Miss Manette looked at the prisoner, and her breath caught as their eyes met. Glancing quickly at my changeling, I saw the same expression of bewildered recognition flicker over his face.
“Miss Manette?” the judge prompted impatiently, and she shook herself.
“Yes.” Her voice had a trace of a European lilt, but I recognised it. “Most unhappily, I am.”
There was a murmur at that, and the judge glared before barking, “Answer the questions put to you, and make no remark upon them.”
Miss Manette inclined her head, but did not apologise. I saw a flash of Ivy’s defiance.
“Miss Manette, had you any conversation with the prisoner on that passage across the Channel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Recall it.”
You could hear a pin drop in the courtroom. I watched through my eyelashes, with my head still tilted back to the ceiling.
“When the gentleman came on board—” she began.
“Do you mean the prisoner?” the judge interrupted.
Again, that flash of Ivy’s fire across the mild changeling face. “Yes, my lord.”
“Then say the prisoner.”
She drew a breath. “When the prisoner came on board, he noticed that my father was much fatigued and in a weak state of health. My father was so much reduced, that I was afraid to take him out of the air—”
I listened with my ears only after this; my mind was running through what I could remember of the witnesses. Miss Manette was talking about how the prisoner helped her shelter her father from the wind and weather, how kind and gentle he was, how yes, she had seen him conferring with two Frenchmen over papers, but she had no way of knowing what those papers were.
Her father was Dr. Alexandre Manette, I recalled; her name was Lucie Manette. The doctor had been coming to England for refuge, having been a prisoner in the Bastille for almost eighteen years. That was why Mr. Lorry had been with them, to help bring him across: he had been a friend of the family, and had brought Miss Manette herself to England when she was ten years old. Dr. Manette had been out of his mind after his captivity, and would remember nothing of the voyage. Barsad had been all but discredited, and Mr. Lorry had nothing to say. The case for the prosecution, then, now rested with Miss Manette. If my changeling was to die, it would be Ivy’s who would hang him. She knew this, clearly, and just as clearly wanted no part in it.
“Did he say anything about America, Miss Manette? Be particular.”
“He tried to explain to me how that quarrel had arisen, and he had said that, so far as he could judge, it was a wrong and foolish one on England’s part. He added, in a jesting way, that perhaps George Washington might gain almost as great a name in history as George III. But there was no harm in his way of saying this: it was said laughingly, and to pass the time.”
I wondered in a welcome flash of amusement how she thought a spy might say such a thing: with a sinister glare, perhaps, whilst throwing darts at a portrait of the king? Stryver didn’t take it as calmly as me. He caught his breath, and let it out with a muttered expletive.
“That’s done it,” he whispered to me. “I think he’s a spy, now.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” I scoffed. “A pretty poor spy that goes around telling strange ladies that he admires George Washington. He’d deserve hanging.”
“The jury may well agree with you on that point,” Stryver shot back, and I had to concede it.
“Thank you, Miss Manette,” the judge said. “You may be seated. Is there anyone else to be heard?”
There was. The prosecution, trying to prove that on that night four years ago Darnay had doubled back and collected information to take home to France, had maps and diagrams depicting a journey that would quite frankly be ludicrous, even for a spy. The reason for this became obvious when the next witness called swore that at the time required, he had seen the accused in the coffee-room of a house in Chatham, talking to a suspicious man. The crowds murmured appreciatively. It was just the kind of unlikely thing they would believe. People, I’ve discovered since coming to the mortal world, like to think life works like a parlour trick. God knows why.
Stryver was beginning to sweat.
“Do something,” he whispered to me as he stood to cross-examine.
Just like that, an idea occurred to me. I could save my changeling—or, at least, I could give him a chance. I knew how. The question was, did I want to?
Ivy’s changeling and my own, in the same room, with the life of one hanging in the balance and the other the knife that may cut the thread—everything in my experience told me this was fairy-made. If they planned for Darnay to die, then they would not appreciate my interfering. Of course, they may equally have planned for him to live. I had no way of knowing, and no instructions. The safest thing was just to let it lie.
With the rush of relief that came after that thought, I knew that I did not want Darnay to live. He had no right to his life. It was mine, and he stole it. It was no fault of his, he had no idea what he was, but it made no difference. I’d always hated the thought that he was in the world. I wanted him out.
So it surprised me more than anyone when I stole a sheet of Stryver’s paper, wrote a few words on it, screwed it up into a ball, and threw it at him.
Stryver caught it on reflex, and his eyebrows raised as he read. He looked to me, then to the prisoner with growing interest, and then back to me.
“You say again you are quite sure that it was the prisoner?” he said to the witness abruptly, turning to face him.
The witness twitched like a nervous rat. “Yes,” he said. “I’m quite sure.”
“Did you ever see anybody very like the prisoner?”
“Not so like,” the witness said, “as that I could be mistaken.”
Stryver paused for full effect. “Look well upon that gentleman, my learned friend there,” he said, gesturing towards me, “and then look well upon the prisoner. How say you? Are they very like each other?”
Just for once, I straightened in my chair, and murmurs rippled across the room. The courtroom, of course, didn’t know that what was really surprising was that we were at all different. To them, we were most astoundingly alike. The same face, the same hair, the same form, separated only by our differing positions in the courtroom and the fact that I probably looked like I’d fallen out of bed after a night of debauchery. (Not true. I never went to bed last night.)
“Mr. Carton, can you remove your wig?” Stryver prompted, and I did so, a little annoyed at him for pressing his point too far. The renewed murmurs, however, told me that in fact I’d underestimated the effect of our likeness. I wondered if a changeling and its original had ever been seen side by side before. Certainly not in an English courtroom.
“Mr. Stryver,” the judge said dryly, “are we next to try Mr. Carton here for treason?”
I thought about pointing out that I would not be caught dead in a coffeehouse in Chatham, but did not.
“No, my lord,” Stryver replied, laughing with the rest of the court. “But I will ask the witness to tell me if what happened once, might happen twice; whether he would have been so confident if he had seen this illustration of his rashness sooner; and whether he would be so confident now, having seen it.”
The witness stared at the prisoner with most satisfying confusion. “I—I don’t know,” he said uncertainly. “Perhaps.”
That, of course, was the crack forming. It didn’t take much to shatter him to pieces. Despite everything, it made me feel a little better. I might have been in hell, but at least I’d had some amusement out of it.
Charles Darnay was the only one who didn’t seem to notice or care. Whenever I dared to look across at him, he was looking at Miss Manette.
CHAPTER 2
BELONGING TO THE WORLD
THE JURY were deliberating. Even from where I sat, eyes half closed and hands in my pockets, I could tell that they were going to ask to leave the room. There was a particular cadence to the rise and fall of their voices, barely audible beneath the raging of the crowds, that said they were not in agreement.
Stryver shuffled his papers. “That went rather well,” he said. “A chance, I think.”
The trial had lasted all day. Outside, the lamps were being lit.
“That was rather a rare point, Sydney, that you brought to bear upon the identification. When did it strike you?”
“I thought he was rather a handsome fellow,” I said, “and I thought that I should have been much the same type of fellow, if I had any luck.”
He gave the hearty laugh I particularly hated. “You and your luck! A bit of effort and charm might serve you better.”
“Well, as always I cede to your expert opinion on all things involving effort and charm,” I began, when something caught my eye. Actually, if I was honest, it had my eye the entire time. I never really stopped looking at Miss Manette. Now, I saw her lock eyes with my changeling, with Charles Darnay, and I saw the colour leach from her face and her body sway. I didn’t realise I was calling out until I heard my own voice, and for a second I thought it was Darnay I heard.
“Officer! Look to that young lady. Help the gentleman take her out. Don’t you see she’ll fall?”
There was a rush of movement and sympathy, and Miss Manette and her father were quickly helped from the room into the air outside. The doctor looked considerably shaken himself, and I had the impression that Mr. Lorry, at his side, was supporting him as much as his daughter. Eighteen years in the Bastille. I didn’t know much about the Bastille, but I’d had a taste of fairy prison, and my imagination could supply the rest.
I saw Stryver looking at me sharply, malicious amusement in his eyes, but fortunately the jury turned to the judge before he could comment on my sudden attack of gallantry. As I predicted, they wished to retire and deliberate further, and the judge granted it to them with a hint of surprise. I think we lost him at the George Washington comment.
“Good sign,” Stryver said, as the spectators began to break up. “Good timing too: time for a decent bite to eat.”
“That’s what the flies up there will be thinking.” I nodded to the gallery. “They’re swarming already. You won’t find a quiet table for miles.”
I stood and stretched; partly to show my unconcern, partly because sitting in one nonchalant position all day was actually very uncomfortable. I’d seen Mr. Lorry coming back, and I wanted to talk to him.
“How is the young lady?” I asked him, after touching his arm to get his attention.
“She is greatly distressed,” he said, “but her father is comforting her, and she feels the better for being out of the court.”
I should have left it at that. I should, to be perfectly honest, have left the room. But instead I opened my mouth, and heard myself say instead: “I’ll tell the prisoner so. It won’t do for a respectable bank gentleman like you to be seen speaking to him publicly, you know.”
From the way his kind face reddened, the thought had occurred to him, and I let myself smile before I turned to work my way towards the bar, and Charles Darnay.
I had to. I had wondered about him my entire life; we had been in the same room all day. Perhaps a sensible person could have gone without speaking to him, but that person would probably also be better dressed and more frequently sober, and in the end I was not that person.
He’d turned away from me, and I had to swallow a few times before I worked up the voice to call, “Mr. Darnay!” The sight of my own face turning in anxious enquiry made me feel as though I, too, could do with being taken outside for some air.
“You will naturally be anxious to hear of the witness, Miss Manette.” I leaned my elbow against the bar, and spoke as carelessly as I could. I probably looked careless enough to border on insolence. It would serve me right if someone came along and punched me in the face. “She will do very well. You have seen the worst of her agitation.”
“I am deeply sorry to have been the cause of it.” I wondered if he meant more than he said, but I didn’t think so. Darnay had no idea what he was, or what lay behind the effect he and Miss Manette seemed to be having on each other. “Could you tell her so from me, with my fervent acknowledgements?”
“Yes, I could.” If my heart was hammering suddenly at the thought of approaching Ivy’s changeling, I chose not to notice. “I will, if you ask it.”
“I do ask it. Accept my cordial thanks.”
“What,” I asked, still not quite looking at him, “do you expect, Mr. Darnay?”
“The worst,” he said evenly.
“It’s the wisest thing to expect, and the likeliest. But I think their withdrawing is in your favour.” I hadn’t meant to add that last. I wanted him to suffer, though I didn’t quite know why. None of it was his fault.
“I’ll speak to Miss Manette,” I said.
* * *
THE AIR was cool outside; after the fetid heat of the courtroom, it was like a splash of water across my face. For a moment, I relaxed and let it steady me. My temples throbbed, and I felt not a little light-headed. I might have leaned against the stone wall for a moment, had I not already caught sight of Miss Manette and her father.
Mr. Lorry had rejoined them, and was talking to them in a low voice. Miss Manette had her father’s arm, but she was certainly supporting him now rather than the reverse. She stood straight and tall, and her golden hair captured the light spilling through the courthouse door. To my surprise, she not only caught my eye as I approached, but detached herself from the party and came to meet me across the yard.
“Mr. Carton, isn’t it?” she said, to my further surprise. I hadn’t expected her to remember.
“Yes,” I said, and immediately forgot what I came out to tell her. She looked at me expectantly, which made matters worse. “I’m glad to see that you’re recovered.”
“Oh, yes.” She looked embarrassed; gracefully so, of course. “I’m sorry for the disturbance. I’ve never fainted before in my life.”
“It can be a very long day in there,” I said. “The crowds make it worse. I intend to faint myself one day, just to make a point.”
“It wasn’t that,” she said, though she smiled. It was Ivy’s smile, for the first time, crooked and hiding half a secret. God. “No, it was just … Looking at that gentleman in the docks, I knew him somehow. Beyond that brief acquaintance on the ship, I mean. It was dark then; it was my first opportunity to see him in full light. And it felt … I don’t quite know. But I had an unaccountable sense that we’d met somewhere before, somewhere I can’t quite remember, in a dream or before we were born.”
“You and Mr. Darnay.”
“Yes.” Was it my imagination, or did she hesitate before answering? She laughed immediately afterwards, so perhaps it was merely discomfort. “Forgive me, I can’t imagine why I’m telling you this.”
