Free The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch Page B

growth on my personality, but when that desire had been channeled into mountaineering it had formed a cancer. I did recover but not before the cancer had been cut out of my life. I gave up mountaineering.
    “I shall never come back here,” I said to the doctor who attended me in the hospital at Fort William when I lay recuperating from the accident that had killed my three best friends. “I shall never go climbing again.”
    “They all say that,” said the doctor, “and they all come back in the end.”
    But I was certain I could stay away; there was a void in my life but I thought I could see how to fill it. I had to fight the opponent I had discovered on the mountains, the one opponent who consistently mesmerized me. It was Death. Death had won my three friends; Death had almost won me. But now I was the one who was going to win—and I was going to win by outwitting Death over and over again.
    I then had to decide on the arena best suited for my battles. I toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor but decided it would involve me in the study of too many subjects which I found tedious. I was interested in death, not disease. Then I considered the law, and the law, I saw at once, had considerable advantages. It not only blended with my classical education but it was a profession that could ease my way into public life, and since I knew my father dreamed that I might enter Parliament I thought I could see how both our ambitions might be satisfied.
    As the eldest son I was heir to Oxmoon but my father’s youth and the likelihood of him living until I myself was far advanced in middle age made it imperative that I had some occupation while I waited for my inheritance. I also had a very natural desire to be financially independent, and no one denied there was money at the bar for a young man who was determined to reach the summit of the profession.
    I won my double first at Oxford in Greats and Law and was called to the bar of the Middle Temple in 1906. To my family I pretended it was sheer chance that I became involved with criminal law; I did not disclose how I had engineered a meeting with a famous K.C. and more or less hypnotized him into engaging me as his “devil”; I did not disclose that I had selected him as my master because a number of his clients ran the risk, in the formal words of the death sentence, of being hanged by the neck until they were dead. While I deviled for him I met the important solicitors and soon I was acquiring a few briefs of my own. Unlike many barristers I did not have to endure briefless years at the bar. I grabbed every opportunity I could and when there was no opportunity I created one. My career began to gather in momentum.
    Of course I said it was pure coincidence that I ended up defending murderers who had no hope of acquittal, but the truth was I deliberately sought out the hopeless cases because there was more pleasure in winning a hard victory over Death than an easy one. I pretended to be nonchalant, claiming murder trials were somewhat tedious, but in my heart I loved every minute I spent fighting in court. I loved the excitement and the drama and the perpetual shadow of the gallows; I loved the jousts with Death; I loved the victory of saving people who would have died but for my skill. To compete with Death, as I had discovered on the mountains, was to know one was alive.
    It made no difference that sometimes, inevitably, Death won. Some of my clients died on the gallows just as my three friends had died on the mountain, but that only made the next battle fiercer and enhanced my satisfaction when the lucky clients were saved.
    My work became an obsession. Although I tried to deny it to myself I was suffering from cancer of the personality again, and gradually I became aware of the familiar symptoms appearing: the fanatical dedication, the withdrawal from other pursuits, the loss of interest in carnal pleasure, the isolation of the soul. I even found myself postponing my entry