Birds of Prey - Smith Wilbur (полная версия книги .TXT) 📗
"Not yet. Van de Velde has gone to guzzle at his trough." "You must pray that he values labour for his walls more than revenge. That way you might still slip through Slow John's fingers. Is there anything you are hiding from them? Anything they want from you to betray a comrade, perhaps?" Althuda asked. "If there is not, then you might still escape the little room under the armoury where Slow John does his work."
"We are hiding nothing," Sir Francis said. "Are we, Hal?" "Nothing," Hal agreed loyally.
"But," Sir Francis went on, "van de Velde believes that we are."
"Then all I can say, my friend, is may Almighty Allah have pity on you."
Those last hours together went too swiftly for Hal. He and his father spent the time talking softly together. Every so often Sir Francis broke off in a fit of coughing. His eyes glittered feverishly in the dim light, and when Hal touched his skin it was hot and clammy. Sir Francis spoke of High Weald like a man who knows he will never see his home again. When he described the river and the hill, Hal dimly remembered them and the salmon coming upstream in the spring and the stags roaring in the rut. When he spoke-of his wife, Hal tried to recall his mother's face, but saw only the woman in the miniature painting he had left buried at Elephant Lagoon, and not the real live person.
"These last years she has faded in my own memory," Sir Francis admitted. "But now her face comes back to me vividly, as young and fresh and sweet as she ever was. I wonder, is it because soon we will be together again? is she waiting for me?"
"I know she is, Father." Hal gave him the reassurance he needed. "But I need you most and I know that we will be together many more years before you go to my mother."
Sir Francis smiled regretfully, and looked up at the tiny window set high in the stone wall. "Last night I climbed up and looked through the bars, and the red comet was still in the sign of Virgo. It seemed closer and fiercer, for its fiery tail had altogether obliterated my star."
They heard the tramp of the guards approaching and the clash of keys in the iron door. Sir Francis turned to Hal. "For the last time let me kiss you, my son."
His father's lips were dry and hot with the fever in his blood. The contact was brief, then the door to the cell was thrown open.
"Don't keep the Governor and Slow John waiting now," said Sergeant Manseer jovially. "Out with the pair of you." The atmosphere among the spectators in the court room was like that at the cockpit just before the spurred birds are released to tear into each other in a cloud of flying feathers. Sir Francis and Hal led in the long file of prisoners and, before he could prevent himself, Hal looked quickly towards the railed-off area at the far end of the hall. Katinka sat in her place in the centre of the front row with Zelda directly behind her. The maid leered viciously at Hal, but there was a soft contented smile on Katinka's face, and her eyes sparkled with violet lights that seemed to light the dim recesses of the room.
Hal looked away quickly, startled by the sudden hot hatred that had replaced the adoration he had so recently felt for her. How could it have happened so quickly, he wondered, and knew that if he had a sword in his hand he would not hesitate to drive the point between the peaks of her soft white breasts.
As he sank into his seat he felt compelled to look up again into the pack of spectators. This time he went cold as he saw another pair of eyes, pale and watchful as those of a leopard, fastened on his father's face.
Slow John sat in the front row of the gallery. He looked like a preacher in his puritanical black suit, the wide, brimmed Hat set squarely upon his head.
"Do not look at him," Sir Francis said softly, and Hal realized that his father, too, was intensely aware of the scrutiny of those strange, faded eyes.
As soon as the hall had settled into an expectant silence, van de Velde appeared through the door of the audience chamber beyond. When he lowered himself into his seat his smile was expansive and his wig was just the slightest bit awry. He belched softly, for clearly he had eaten well. Then he looked down on the prisoners with such a benign expression that Hal felt an unwarranted surge of hope for the outcome.
"I have considered the evidence that has been laid before this court," the Governor began, without preamble, "and I want to say right at the outset that I was impressed with the manner in which both the advocates presented their cases. Colonel Schreuder was a paradigm of succinctness-" He stumbled over both of the longer words, then belched again. Hal fancied that he detected a whiff of cumin and garlic on the warm air that reached him a few seconds later.
Next van de Velde turned a paternal eye on Jacobus Hop. "The advocate for the defence behaved admirably and made a good job of a hopeless case, and I shall make a note to that effect in his Company file." Hop bobbed his head and coloured with gratification.
"However!" He now looked squarely at the benches of the prisoners. "While considering the evidence, I have given much thought to the defence raised by Mijnheer Hop, namely that the pirates were operating under a Letter of Marque issued by the King of England, and that when they attacked the Company galleon, the Standvastigheid, they were unaware of the cessation of hostilities between the belligerents in the recent war. I have been forced by irrefutable evidence to the contrary to reject this line of defence in its entirety. Accordingly, I find all twenty-four of the accused persons guilty of piracy on the high seas, of robbery and abduction and murder."
The seamen on the benches stared at him in pale silence.
"Is there anything you wish to say before I pass sentence upon you?" van de Velde asked, and opened his silver snuff box.
Sir Francis spoke out, in a voice that rang the length and breadth of the hall. "We are prisoners of war. You do not have the right to chain us like slaves. Neither do you have the right to try us nor to pass sentence upon us."
