6. THE PRISONER'S TALE

A newcomer arrives with a new tale to tell

“Now this,” murmured Dingleboot, Undecided Deity of Somewhere, “might interest you. Look down there.”

His pupil looked into the thick terrestrial atmosphere, and this is what he saw.

The door of the private room in the Westminster Arms flew open and a ragged individual clad in torn clothes and with a badly-shaven chin stood there, piercing eyes surveying the scene.

“So this is where you are,” he hissed. He gave the sort of impression that he always hissed instead of speaking, as if somewhere along the line during his life his vocal chords had been suffocated.

“Who are you?” demanded the Judge.

“Who am I?” hissed the newcomer, “who do you think I am, Judge? You should know, after all … was it not you who incarcerated me for fifteen years behind iron bars for something I hadn’t done?”

“I would never do anything of the sort!” blustered the Judge.

The newcomer sat down in a spare chair that had somehow appeared, it seemed, from nowhere and he placed a foaming pint of mild ale on the table in front of himself.

“Then I will jog your memory,” he wheezed, “let me cast your mind back to a time when you were sitting in judgement on a young man who had been accused by an ignorant judicial system of arson.”

“I … I remember … at least I think I remember...” muttered the judge, “you burned a house down, and it was only good fortune that saved the life of the woman who was sleeping there...”

“I burned nothing down, and the woman was Edna Tomkins whilst the house owner, the gentleman whose home it was, died in the blaze,” hissed the prisoner. “Look here, my fellow pilgrims...”

“We’re not that!” reacted the prostitute, “at least I’m not. Pilgrims sounds too religious to me and my only god is pleasure. And flesh. My only gods are pleasure and flesh...”

“I’m not religious freak either,” grinned the prisoner, his mouth suddenly twisting until he looked almost pleasant. “It happened like this, if you’ll beg my pardon for intruding like this.”

He cleared his throat before continuing, but it did no good.

“I was a student of the arts,” he said in his uncleared hiss, “at the college in the county town, and I was studying the effects of moonlight on various natural things, and painting images of them for my portfolio. I loved doing that: being out at the dead of night on moonlit excursions going on my own to the wildest and most beautiful of places. It does the soul good to know that it is small against the hugeness of space and time...”

“I’ve heard all this nonsense before, a long time ago!” blustered the judge.

“You may have heard it, but you didn’t listen to it,” hissed the prisoner, “so listen now, old judge.

“There was a stream running over water-worn rocks through a pasture, and wherever the water leapt and gurgled the moonlight caught it, sparkling and free. And the music it made as it did so, and bear in mind that there were no human sounds interfering with its natural cadences, together with all the sights and the sounds filled my heart with a yearning to be just as free. But that kind of freedom might be intensely desirable but it’s just as intensely unobtainable. Yet a man might dream. I know that I might, and did then. I sat there with a pad of paper and some paints, a child’s paint box for it was night and I was only creating a sketch that would be worked on later.

“As I was there, maybe whistling to myself, a little melody to accompany the symphony of the stream, a woman came along. Now, let me set the time for you: it was around three in the morning and nobody with the exception of myself should have been anywhere near that spot at such an hour. But she came along, rushing, it seemed to me, and almost stumbling in the near dark of a moonlit night.

“Then I noticed what she seemed to be fleeing from. Butting onto the pasture was a large garden, and it belonged to the biggest house in the neighbourhood and I happened to know that it was the home of the Member of Parliament for the town. He was a popular man who had inherited considerable wealth and who used some of that wealth to alleviate the hardships of others. I had never heard anyone say an unkind word about him, and you must know how rare that is! Nobody inclined to speak against a politician!”

“’Out of my way, fool!’ screeched the woman, and I knew that voice. It was the young up and coming local councillor, Edna Tomkins, she who went on to become Minister of Publicity within five years of that meeting, and positively the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. So I turned to find out what she might be running from, maybe so that I could defend her from it, and saw straight away that tongues of fire were leaping out of the windows of the big house.

“’Fire!’ I shouted, and ran towards what was becoming an ever more powerful blaze, and meanwhile the woman, the Tomkins woman, disappeared into the darkness and somehow managed to get a young man with ambition to say that the two of them spent that night together, between the sheets, doing what couples do when they are roused by passion.”

“Sleep, you mean?” asked the librarian.

“That’s not what she called it,” hissed the prisoner, “she said that she and the young man, who confirmed every word she spoke even when she gave two varying accounts under questioning, were at it like rabbits at three o’clock that particular morning, as they had been at two o’clock and would be at four o’clock.

“Surely you can see where my account is going? As I ran to rescue anyone who might be surviving the blaze in the big house, the Tomkins woman slipped and fell, landing full on her bottom on a sharp stone sticking like a weapon out of the trickling stream, and it cut through her clothing, which was flimsy at best, and cut her backside. But I was too concerned with the fire to take much notice and didn’t know that she had been injured in her fall until next day I was arrested for assaulting her much earlier in the evening and setting fire to the house of her political opponent.”

“So you said in court!” snapped the Judge, “and may I say, so you lied! We had a witness who places you there, at the site of the fire, as the house burned to ashes, and she was a very reliable witness indeed! I remember it well now that you’ve jogged my memory. The witness had visited the housekeeper, had even had drinks with him...”

“And that witness?” asked the prisoner, his face smiling in the twisted sort of way that a face might when it has been pummelled by vicious fists behind ancient prison bars.

“Why, it was the future Minister of Publicity, and a very cogent witness she was. She made it quite clear...”

“Yes: that she was perfectly capable of being in three places at the same time,” sighed the prisoner, “that she was sitting in a stream with a bleeding bottom whilst being in bed with a young lover miles away, and to add conviction to her prowess, managing to see me setting light to a house I had no idea in the darkness that I was anywhere near.

“But you believed her account, Judge. Yet I bear you no ill will, for she was a most convincing teller of falsehoods and you, being a fool, were besotted by her...”

“I was no such thing!” bellowed the judge.

“Then pray tell me how it was you chose to disregard three totally conflicting accounts of a single hour on a single night and not accept the patent truth that I was telling…?”

“Because...” blustered the Judge, “because … it was your attorney, young man, who might have, should have...”

“Who did,” sighed the prisoner, “and now, fifteen years later?”

“Guilty!” rapped the Judge, “Guilty as Hell!”

© Peter Rogerson 25.09.18