The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 36

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.

I cast off well before 10:00 p.m. in a cold drizzle and choppy water. Otter Ransom had procured ten liters of fuel from the police yards, so I was able to motor us into the harbor. Grandfather’s Angel of Death answered to her helm smartly—an elegant, well-built, seventy-six-foot schooner, carrying a jibsail, foresail, mainsail, with spruce masts, an oak keel, a mahogany cabin, registered at sixty tons. I had an exhausted, untried crew—three Americans, three Furores, three Turks, three Swedes, a Ukrainian, and four dogs—and a precious supercargo: Molly, her baby, my father’s fate. I set Babe and Otter Ransom at the bow to man one of Thord’s fixed automatic weapons and our light. I set Wild Drumrul and Orlando the Black in Black Crane, which we towed close behind. I set my hand on the Fiddle Bible.

We anchored a half mile off the island. Grandfather wanted me and four others—I chose Guy and Earle; Lazarus chose himself and Babe—to approach in Black Crane. For appearances, we were relatives come to claim a corpse. We were not alone; there was a cluster of small craft just off the floodlit pier, held back by sweeping searchlights and the presence of a company of the Evangelical Brigade. The procedure began with a name called on the megaphone. A boat then bobbed toward the floating raft below the pier, as several chained convicts emerged from the portal at the base of the prison tower abutting the pier. They were hauling a body bag down to the raft.