The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 35

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