The Inheritance (34 page)

“Guilty,” he said. Just one word and Stephen’s fate was decided.

The judge nodded. It was almost imperceptible, but it conveyed all the steely satisfaction that Murdoch felt inside. He looked straight into the eyes of the broken young man in the dock, and he felt no pity at all.

“Stephen Cade,” he said in a harsh voice that filled the courtroom. “Have you anything to say why sentence of death should not now be pronounced upon you?”

Stephen tried to speak, but the words stuck in his throat. It was too dry, and there was no time.

“Because I am innocent,” he eventually managed to say in a hoarse whisper. “I didn’t kill my father.”

“You are not innocent,” said the judge flatly. “You have been convicted by this jury of a heinous crime. The sentence is prescribed bylaw.”

A tall thin man in a frock coat stepped out from behind the judge’s chair. There was something in his hands. A small square of black silk. Delicately he placed it on top of the judge’s wig and then stepped back into the shadows, leaving Murdoch to speak the final words.

“Stephen Cade, you are sentenced to be taken hence to the prison in which you were last confined, and from there to a place of execution where you will suffer death by hanging, and thereafter your body shall be buried within the precincts of the prison, and may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.”

The judge spoke the words slowly and deliberately. It was at these moments he felt most alive. He became the law in all its cold majesty. He personified it.

But Stephen didn’t hear his sentence. His legs gave way beneath him, and the prison officers on either side had to support him until the judge had left the courtroom, and it was time to stumble down the stairs at the back of the dock and begin his journey into oblivion.

Sasha visited her father six times during the two weeks after she first brought him the Marjean codex and Cade’s sheet of mysterious numbers. The visits were not a success. He didn’t have any answers to give her, and she found it almost impossible to contain her frustration. And her eagerness to crack the code alarmed him. He feared what would happen to her if she went after St. Peter’s cross. Cade’s search had ended with a bullet. Why should Sasha fare any better? And yet Andrew Blayne could not resist the lure of the codex for very long. It was such a beautiful thing, and in his heart he wanted to know its secret as much as his daughter did. It was as if the monk who had painted the Latin words on to the calfskin all those hundreds of years before was trying to talk to him across time, trying to make him understand. Alone in his attic room, Blayne stayed up night after night, poring over the Gospel of St. Luke, using up all his reserves of physical energy until he looked like a ghost of himself. His hands shook more than ever, and there was a white pallor to his face that Sasha was too preoccupied to notice.

On her last visit, Blayne had become angry with his daughter. It was unlike him, and the experience shook her. She had taken the codex away to the sofa and was trying in vain to make some connection between Cade’s list of numbers and the Latin text in front of her when, without warning, Blayne came up behind her and snatched the book out of her hands.

“Why don’t you leave me alone, Sasha?” he shouted. “You’re in my way. Can’t you see that? How can I work when you’re in my way?”

Sasha
had
left him alone after that. He had her address, and she felt confident he would get in touch when he had something to tell her. She felt angry too, bruised by the change in her father. And the need to break the code blinded her to almost every other consideration. If leaving him alone was the way to get what she wanted, then she would do just that. She didn’t go back to see her father for a week, and when she did, he was gone.

She realised something was wrong as soon as she got to the top of the stairs and found the door to his room ajar. It was quite late in the evening, and she could feel the force of the cold air even before she went inside. The window over the bed had blown open, and her breath hung in the air like so much white smoke.

Her father wasn’t in the room, and yet he never went out after dark. Fighting down the mounting panic that she felt inside, Sasha ran down to the antiquated bathroom on the half landing below. But it was empty except for her father’s shaving kit and his old green toothbrush planted in a white enamel mug above the discoloured sink. The sight of it made her cry out her father’s name, even though she knew inside that he was nowhere in the house, and the noise brought the tenant of the bed-sit on the floor below to her door. She was a young woman with a wrinkled face, whom Sasha dimly remembered from several previous encounters on the stairs. A baby was crying somewhere in the background.

“Are you all right?” asked the woman, looking up at Sasha, who nodded, unable to speak for a moment because of a sob that was stuck in her throat.

“You’re his daughter, aren’t you? I’ve seen you here before.”

“Yes. Do you know where he’s gone?”

“They took him to hospital this morning. I was the one who went for the ambulance. He was out on the landing when I was going out to buy my milk, and he called down to me. It gave me quite a shock, I can tell you.”

“Why did he call down to you? What was wrong with him?” asked Sasha, hanging on to the stair rail for support as the woman’s words sank into her consciousness.

“Some sort of stroke is what they said. Meant he couldn’t get down the stairs. Strokes do that, you know.”

“Do what?”

“Paralyse you all down one side. I reckon that’s what happened to your dad.”

“You don’t know that,” said Sasha, suddenly angry at the woman’s morbid assumption of the worst. “It might just be something temporary, for all you know.”

“Well, I know he couldn’t hardly move himself,” said the woman defiantly. “He’s been overdoing it, if you ask me, and that’s what’s brought this on. I’ve heard him every night this week, pacing up and down, and he’s looked awful. But you wouldn’t know, of course. You haven’t been round here for a while, have you?”

Sasha swallowed hard, refusing to rise to the woman’s spiteful challenge.

“Which hospital did he go to?” she asked. “Do you know that?”

“Radcliffe Infirmary. That’s what they said.”

“Thank you,” said Sasha. “And thank you for calling the ambulance.” But the woman had already closed her door, leaving Sasha alone on the landing in the semidarkness.

Outside the front door Sasha remembered the codex. But she didn’t go back. She felt clutched by a terrible guilt. The woman was right. She
had
neglected her father—set him a task that was always going to be beyond his powers, and then left him to it. Alone in a cold attic room with no coal for the fire and no food in the fridge. She’d pretended that her search for the codex and the cross was for his benefit, but that had been a lie, an excuse for neglecting him when he was too old and sick to look after himself. The search was a curse. She’d sacrificed Stephen and now perhaps her father to its demands, and all it had given her in return was an old painted book and a dead man’s list of meaningless numbers.

All these thoughts and more rushed through Sasha’s mind as she headed across Oxford in the back of a taxi. And then at the hospital she had to sit in a cavernous reception area on the ground floor, crossing and uncrossing her legs for what seemed like hours, before a young Indian doctor appeared as if out of nowhere and told her that, yes, her father was still alive but that he couldn’t offer her what she wanted to hear. He couldn’t offer her any hope at all.

He said it was something called a hemorrhagic stroke. A blood vessel had burst somewhere in her father’s brain some time during the previous night
and now the blood was seeping slowly but surely through the cerebral lobes, shutting her father down little by little, like he was a machine. He was still conscious, but for how much longer the doctor couldn’t say.

A strange calm descended over Sasha as she followed the doctor down the hospital corridors, turning this way and that until they arrived at a door marked “intensive care.” Perhaps it was a reaction to the roller-coaster of emotions that she had been riding during the previous hour, but now she felt a soft sadness settling down on her like an invisible dust.

Her father was lying in the hollow of two hospital pillows, connected to a myriad of tubes and machines, and his slow death was being charted on two grey screens positioned on trolleys behind his head. He smiled when he saw his daughter and reached out his right hand for her to hold. His left hand and arm lay stretched out motionless on the white sheet, and Sasha knew without being told that he wouldn’t be moving them anymore.

“How are you, Dad?” she asked, regretting the inane question as soon as it was out of her mouth.

“Dying,” he answered succinctly, with a trace of a smile hovering around his pale lips. “Apparently it all started on the right side of my brain, but it’s my left side I can’t move. Mysteries of the organism, Sasha. Incomprehensible to the likes of you and me.”

“Yes, Dad,” said Sasha, trying her best to return her father’s smile. She’d read somewhere that humour was the language of the brave. Only now did she realise the essential truth of the observation.

“They’ve been very kind, you know,” Andrew Blayne went on after a moment. “One of the doctors explained it all to me when I asked. I’m like a submarine after the water’s come in. The crew are battening down the hatches, but there are no iron walls in my brain, I’m afraid. And blood is thicker than water. Unfortunately.”

Sasha understood her father’s need for irony to face his situation, but try as she might, she could no longer keep her emotions in check. “I’m so sorry, Dad,” she said through her tears. “I’m just so sorry.”

“About what?” Andrew Blayne sounded genuinely puzzled.

“About everything. About leaving you alone. About not looking after you properly all these years.” The words caught in Sasha’s throat, and she turned her head away.

“It’s not true, Sasha. Do you hear me? You mustn’t blame yourself.” Suddenly there was urgency in Andrew Blayne’s weakened voice, and he squeezed his daughter’s hand, commanding her attention. “You’re everything I could’ve asked for. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”

“I shouldn’t have given you that book,” cried Sasha, refusing to listen to her father. “It’s cursed. It’s all my own bloody fault.”

“No, it’s not. It’s a beautiful book. One of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. And I’m happy that I lived to see it. I never thought I would. But I did. And that’s down to you, Sasha.”

The effort to speak obviously cost Blayne a great deal, and he laid his head back on the pillow as soon as he had finished and half closed his eyes.

“I should go,” said Sasha, uncertain of what to do. “They said you had to rest, and I’m not helping.” But her father kept hold of her hand, and she stayed where she was.

Neither of them said anything for a little while, and Sasha fought hard to control herself. She hadn’t cried for years, and these tears had been torn from her body, leaving her with a sense of rupture that she couldn’t erase. She didn’t hear her father the first time that he spoke, and he had to squeeze her hand to get her attention.

“I solved it, Sasha,” he said in a whisper. “It was last night I understood. Just before all this happened. It was so simple. I should have seen it straightaway. But that’s always the way of it, isn’t it? Everything is easy once you have the answer.”

Sasha’s heart raced. She felt excited and guilty about being excited all at the same time. She remembered how she had stood wavering outside her father’s door less than two hours earlier, uncertain of whether to go back for the codex, before she’d turned away and made for the hospital. And she remembered the years she had spent searching for St. Peter’s cross while she took instructions from the man she hated most in the whole world or sat in cold deserted libraries searching through the lumber rooms of the past, looking for the key that her father now held in the palm of his hand.

“I don’t know whether to tell you,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen to you if I do. I don’t know what is right.”

Sasha heard the uncertainty in her father’s voice, but she was tongue-tied, unable to help him make up his mind. Irrationally it seemed to her that
demanding to know the secret from her father on his deathbed would be to acknowledge that the codex mattered more to her than he did. And yet telling him to stay silent meant giving up all that she had worked for and dreamt about. Unable to make a choice, she said nothing, leaving it to her father to decide.

“You’ll carry on searching whatever I do, won’t you, Sasha?” he said sadly. It was almost as if he was talking to himself. “It’s in your blood, just like it’s in mine. Looking backward, searching for secrets in dusty places. It’s no life for a beautiful young woman.”

“I don’t care about being beautiful or young or a woman,” said Sasha passionately, and then stopped, biting her tongue. She had no right thinking of herself while her father was dying in front of her eyes.

“I care about secrets,” she said quietly after a moment. “And about the past. You taught me that. I suppose I believe that dead men sometimes still speak.”

“Like the monks of Marjean spoke to me last night, you mean,” said Blayne. “Yes, you’re right. In the end that is what matters. The voices of the dead. And the soon-to-be dead,” he added with a weak smile.