Free The Evangeline by D. W. Buffa Page A

a doctor, had a better opportunity to observe the mental condition they were in at that time than you had?’
    ‘Yes, of course.’
    ‘So when he said that they were all nearly dead and that some of them were quite deranged, you would not contradict that?’
    ‘No, I would not.’
    ‘And finally, Dr Steinberg, let me ask you about the one person you examined that Mr Roberts did not ask about. What was the condition of Vincent Marlowe when he first arrived?’
    ‘Physically exhausted, emotionally spent. He had lost more weight than any of the others. He had a broken shoulder and two broken fingers. He was the one I was most concerned about. I knew the others would all survive. I was not sure about him.’
    ‘Because of his physical state?’
    ‘No, because I don’t think he wanted to survive; I think he wanted to die.’

Chapter Eight
    T HE PROSECUTION, AS IT WAS REQUIRED TO DO, had given the defence a list of the witnesses it intended to call. Darnell knew the names, but could only guess at the order in which they would be summoned to the stand. He had guessed correctly so far, but that had not been difficult. In selecting his first three witnesses, Michael Roberts had followed a strict chronology. He had led with Benjamin Whitfield for the obvious reason that it had all started with the owner of the Evangeline . The voyage had been his idea, and the boat had been built to his specifications. Who better to give the jury a sense of the enormous contrast between what was expected at the beginning and what had happened at the end?
    The second witness, Thomas Balfour, was the logical sequel to the first. Whitfield had seen them off, the smiling passengers and crew, on a sun-drenched morning in Nice; Balfour had seen them next, or rather what was left of them, the six survivors he rescued from the windswept ravages of the south Atlantic. He had found them all half dead, some of them out of their minds. The third witness, Joshua Steinberg, was able to establish that those who survived were now all well enough to be in command of their senses—whatever may have happened to them during their forty-day ordeal—perfectly capable of telling what they knew.
    Those three witnesses had been enough for Roberts to give the jury a broad outline of the story. A sailing vessel, the most advanced of its kind, had left for a luxury voyage around Africa. The boat had gone down in a storm so violent that there had been no chance to communicate with the outside world and very little time for even one lifeboat to get away. Only fourteen people out of twenty-seven had managed to escape the Evangeline , and forty days later only six of them were left alive. Without food, without water, they had travelled nearly a thousand miles in an open boat, six people barely alive and what was left of one dead body. But the only thing the testimony of those three witnesses had proved was that the Evangeline had left Nice in the third week of June with twenty-seven people on board and that six of them had been found a thousand miles east of Brazil at the end of July. There were only six people who could be called to testify about what had happened after the Evangeline went down, and one of them, Vincent Marlowe, could not be forced to say anything unless he chose to testify for the defence. That left five witnesses, and until the day the trial started, only one of them had agreed to talk to anyone connected with the case.
    ‘There were five other people in that lifeboat and none of them will talk to me. Five witnesses and only one of them has spoken to anyone. Why? Was there some agreement made before you were rescued—or while you were on the White Rose —that you would all maintain your silence, that none of you would reveal what happened out there? Has Trevelyn now broken that agreement, broken his word to save himself?’
    William Darnell leaned back in his leather chair. He had spent so much of his life in it that it fitted him like a well-worn