The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 90
Longfaeroe called a prayer service to sing for Lena’s recovery. Fergus Moog, the old crank who had accused Lazarus of being responsible for the original knife fight, stood up to say that no sane man would have “hacked up” poor Lena. His inference was clear, and he was not alone in his leap to vigilante justice. Some of the young Rose boys had already dragged Robby to Lena’s bedside in hospital. She was said to have been shaken awake, to have looked at Robby and screamed. Robby screamed back and tried to run. Christian Rose was summoned and took Robby to the Rose camp, as he said, “in the name of the Volunteers.” Elephant Frazer heard about this through Jane Gaunt, and sent a message to the Hospidar, commander of the Volunteers, to intervene. The Hospidar would not reply. Elephant Frazer took several Volunteers the next morning to the Rose camp and arrested Robby “in the name of the governor-general.” Motherwell accompanied Elephant Frazer, had to wrestle one of the Roses to the ground. There were hard words before Christian Rose relented. By the next day, the whole of Gaunttown knew several versions of the confrontation. The Roses, to save face, demanded blood vengeance.
Elephant Frazer ordered me to call an Assembly. Nature then tried to help us calm tempers by serving up a raging storm that delayed the affair several days. It was not until a week after the attack that the Assembly met. By then, factions and counterfactions had formed. The meeting was chaos, all the anxieties of defeat, plague, the ice pack, and the rationing washing together to spill on this one concrete tragedy—Lena’s desecration. Elephant Frazer refused to come inside the hall until I gained order. In the meantime, that night, he had Motherwell remove Robby from the governor-general’s office above the helper pub, where he had been kept for fear the hospital was too vulnerable to mischief, to the Frazer camp. It is my memory that no man of sense at that Assembly thought Robby guilty. It did not seem to pertain. Reason was in eclipse. The meeting became a mob, and a motion was moved to force Elephant Frazer to present Robby to answer accusations. Lazarus decried this as a “rape of civil rights,” a terrible choice of words. Lazarus and I were hooted from the podium; a fight broke out between the Rose boys and the Gaunts, who were divided between Christian Rose and Elephant Frazer. Worse, one of the hags, the very one, Jane told me, who had stood over her and kicked her in the stomach, burst into the hall to announce, falsely, that Lena was dead, that the Frazers had hidden her body, and that Lena’s ghost had appeared to her to demand “an eye for an eye.” Jane and Abigail then took the podium and denounced the Assembly as a “Pattie disgrace.”
“Shame!” said Jane, in a rage. “Lena be alive. I left her tonight. Shame! Poor Robby fought for us, a brave Volunteer. Ye have no proof again’ him. Ye care more for yerr low ways than for poor Lena. Robby lays up there, terrible grieved, thinkin’ his Lena dyin’. It ain’t so! Shame! Get ye home and pray forgiveness, as I’ll be doin’, prayin’ for poor Lena and for the man, whoever he be, what did this black deed.”
Abigail was angrier than Jane. She reminded them that Robby had been beaten by the Roses; she used the word torture. She said Robby was in her care until this matter was settled to her satisfaction, and it had better be peacefully, and that any bullies that might come along would find her a harder adversary than a lame simpleton. She added, too tendentiously, “I won’t be the one to name Lena’s persecutor. I can name Robby’s. He’s bad sick now, his face all swollen and ripped, though it’s been a week. Let Christian Rose and his brave brothers answer for Robby.”
Over the following weeks, the people of Gaunttown, stirred up by the shamed Roses and the conniving Hospidar, turned against Elephant Frazer. Where before they had blamed the Patties, the beasties, the British, the “Divil cold,” they came to fault Elephant Frazer, and for great and small things, what can go wrong in periods of long siege—bad water, lost sheep, miscarriages, and an outbreak of pneumonia in the beastie camp that spread to Gaunttown. Most of the time, the dissension was too mixed with heartfelt calls for justice for Lena for one to be sure who was seditious and who was outraged. Elephant Frazer had no resources with which to do detective work. It was hoped that the real criminal would confess, or that Lena would name her attacker.
Meanwhile, Robby Oldmizzen remained at the Frazer camp, where he became sullen and timid, heavily dependent upon Abigail. She mothered him, made him like one of her children, so that he played with Samson’s two sons, Gabe and Adam, and rocked my Sam to sleep. I visited when I could, though I was not good about my time. Lazarus drove the both of us to finish the constitutional draft for the spring; he directed me to visit the families with drafts, like an itinerant evangelist. I was not usually welcome and spent much of my visits in the kitchens arguing with the women and old men about the beasties, the Frazers and Gaunts and Roses and, above all, Robby. No one would dare to say openly that Robby was guilty. They were angry and suspicious, because Elephant Frazer continued to protect Robby from questions. One old man, a Lindfir, surprised me when he used Lazarus’s vocabulary, saying it was “the bloody will of the people” that Robby be brought up on charges.
Winter ebbed, the ice did loosen. Lena recovered