The Devil Amongst the Lawyers by Sharyn Mccrumb

Author:Sharyn Mccrumb [Mccrumb, Sharyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429921206
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

AT THE LITTLE OAK TABLE before the dark fireplace, Henry was tired but not sleepy. Tomorrow morning the trial would begin, so he must be sure to wake up before the hour of the dragon. It would be a long day, and probably a tedious one. In his experience, trials usually were. They were as ritualistic as tea ceremonies, but considerably lacking in elegance.

Wrapped in his black juban of tsumugi silk, Henry sat hunched over his notepad, staring at a half full tumbler of the clear mountain whiskey he had brought with him from Abingdon, in case this remote hamlet should turn out to be a “dry” county. Henry could endure much in the way of bad food, but he drew the line at abstaining from tea and alcohol. The taste of the Abingdon brew made his stomach burn—or perhaps it had been the salty ham that unsettled his digestion. Perhaps he should have had tea instead.

The case.

It was no use putting it off any longer, and, thanks to that mountain child in Pound, his reverie about his youth in Japan had ceased for now to be a comforting memory.

Sugar eye, the child had said.

She would probably never hear another word of Japanese as long as she lived, but she had done a creditable job of pronouncing that one. Perhaps the old priest at the jinja had not seen a shugorei behind him all those years ago, but the little Virginia mountain girl had seen it, describing the vision so well that he recognized it. Ishi. He did not want to remember Ishi, because then the dreams would come, and they always ended the same way: with the world in flames.

To the job at hand, then.

His editor would expect a telegram tomorrow, sent in time to run a story in the next day’s morning edition. Henry needed to think about ways to frame this trial into the classic Jernigan style of high tragedy. He had learned nothing today, though. He saw the little town, and met that strange reticent child who saw too much, but he had found no fresh way of looking at the sordid little story of a dead father and his beautiful prison-pent daughter. Seeing the town had provided him with the background imagery, but he could have spun that out of whole cloth without ever having set foot in the place.

He uncapped his gold-nibbed fountain pen, and read over his notes in the leather-bound journal in which he roughed out the preliminaries of his stories. Consider the beautiful defendant, Erma Morton. Who was Erma, what was she?

He searched for a literary parallel. Not Juliet. Not Desdemona. There was no lover in the offing. Not a victim. A murderer, or at least accused of being one. But not Medea, not Clytemnestra, killers of children and spouse respectively. Lady Macbeth? No, this was no political assassination, nor was it done for gain.

Erma Morton did not kill the deceased—at least, not the way Henry intended to fashion the tale—and strict accuracy meant as little to Henry Jernigan as it had to Shakespeare and Homer.

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