The Trial of Callista Blake

NOTE: All characters in this novel are fictitious, not intended to resemble any actual persons living or dead. The locale is semifictitious: for "New Essex" read "almost any of the northeastern States within a 300-mile radius of New York City."

E.P.

THE TRIAL OF CALLISTA BLAKE

1

Now laws maintain their credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority: they have no other.

MONTAIGNE, Of Experience

I

Doves wheeled above the city's winter morning, vanishing by a turn of wings, reappearing in a silent explosion of light. Judge Terence Mann saw smoke rising through windless cold from a thousand chimneys, and saw, beyond a bleak acreage of city roofs, the apartment house that contained his bachelor burrow; further on, the Veterans Hospital shone not as a temple of sickness but a shaft of splendor in the sun. His eyes smarted as he turned away from the brightness. That was partly from a lack of sleep. The Judge remembered that, like this robing-room, the detention cells also looked up across the long rise of land where, for something like three hundred years, the city had been haphazardly expanding, fattening on river commerce, and becoming--in the American sense--old.

Some day, should the small gods in the state capital approve, the city of Winchester would own a Civic Center near that hospital, with a new county courthouse. Judge Mann had seen an architect's dream picture in the Egypto-lavatory style, a kind of streamlined cake of soap--optimistic in a time when Winchester's population of 80,000 was remaining constant while suburbs oozed in heedless growth over the once magnificent countryside. In any case this late-Victorian-Gothic firetrap downtown would have to serve for the ordeal of The People vs. Blake.

He shoved the black sleeve clear of his wrist watch: 10:10. Short, slight, his temples silvering at forty-seven; few wrinkles yet; a thin flexible mouth suggesting kindness; in his square forehead the pucker of certain chronic doubts. He checked his pockets for reading glasses and aspirin while his attendant Joe Bass brushed at imaginary lint.

"Mr. Delehanty says there's quite a crowd, Judge."

"Do they need more bailiffs out there?"

"I wouldn't think so--just noisy. They all want in." Pink-faced, lightly wrinkled, Joe could shift at will from a glorified valet to a literate old man. "Maybe the rumors about the girl's deformity make them curious, same as if she were a Hollywood dish."

"Oh, I understand her deformity's pretty slight. It's just the radio and papers--sensationalism--public wants a circus. Well, I'm late."

"Technically, sir, you are. But after three years on the bench, you know it isn't ten o'clock till you pass through that door."

"Uh-huh--Joshua never had it so good. Well, here we go ..."

"All rise!" Mr. Delehanty's tenor burbled the lusciousness of a clarinet. "The Honorable Judge of the Court of General Sessions in and for the County of Winchester!" Judge Mann saw them rise, for what the tradition said he must be and therefore was. "All persons having business before this honorable court draw near, give your attention, and you shall be heard!" Seating himself with a twinge of annoyance at pomp and circumstance, Mann observed a virgin scratch-pad beside his minute-book. He suspected Mr. Delehanty of rescuing judicial doodles from the wastebasket: to Mr. Delehanty any new judge was a potential Great Man till the bloom wore off. "This court is now in session."