“Sir,” said Sir Magnus, “this noble young stripling who, as you kindly pointed out, is not on trial, against whom, as yet, no proof of guilt has been offered, is, should my friends the police have their way, to be incarcerated, cut off from friends and family, cut off from the gay hurlyburly of life, cut off indeed from that magnificent dumb creature who, in times of stress, is his only consolation, cut off I might say . . .”
“Sir Magnus,” said the magistrate sharply, “I would be grateful if you would get to the point. What is it you wish?”
“Bail, sir,” said Sir Magnus profoundly. He made a grandiloquent gesture which inadvertently scattered half an ounce of snuff over the table in front of him.
“My client, sir,” he said, “is not a vagrant, a vagabond, a gypsy, a tramp, nor is he a mountebank . . .”
The magistrate was by now beginning to lose his temper.
“Sir Magnus,” he said, “we are not gathered here to construct a dictionary of synonyms.”
“In short,” continued Sir Magnus, not in any way put out, “I would say that my client is a man of substance, perfectly able—indeed I would say willing—to stand bail, so that, for however brief a period, he may return to the outside world.”
“Spare us,” said the magistrate acidly. “I have grasped your point.”
He sat back and surveyed Adrian briefly with a cold stare.
“It is not customary in cases like this for us to go against the recommendation of the police. However, this is a case which appears to have many unusual features, so I will grant your client bail in his own recognisance in the sum of fifty pounds.”
“I am deeply grateful to you, sir,” said Sir Magnus, bowing low. And then, opening his snuff box with great care, he brushed all the snuff on the table back into the box, to the accompaniment of “God Save the Queen.” Adrian by now was completely confused and was, indeed, under the firm impression that by some miracle he was being discharged, having suffered no greater penalty than the loss of fifty pounds. The Clerk of the Court fixed him with a puppeteer’s eye.
“Stand up, Rookwhistle,” he said.
Adrian rose somewhat shakily to his feet.
“Adrian Rookwhistle, you are bound in the sum of fifty pounds, in your own recognisance, to appear before the magistrates in this court on Tuesday next. Do you understand?” the magistrate said.
“Yes, sir,” Adrian replied.
Adrian left the court in a daze of delight. He was free, Rosy was free, and with a bit of luck he would be seeing Samantha very shortly. After all the ghastly experiences to which he had been subjected, this was a moment of triumph to be savoured to the full. As they reached the pavement, he seized Sir Magnus Ramping Fumitory’s hand and pumped it up and down.
“My dear Sir Magnus,” he said, “how can I thank you? To think that you, with your brilliant mind, should have come to my rescue in this fashion, and saved me and Rosy from what would assuredly have been a terrible fate. I Cannot thank you enough.”
Sir Magnus, with the long-suffering air of one extracting himself from the exuberant gambols of a puppy, disengaged his hand from Adrian’s and stepped back.
“What?” he said, glowering from under his eyebrows, “are you talking about?”
“Why, the verdict,” said Adrian.
“What verdict?” enquired Sir Magnus.
“But . . . they let me loose,” said Adrian. “They only fined me fifty pounds.”
Sir Magnus closed his eyes as though in pain and took a short walk up and down the pavement. Then he came up to Adrian and glowered into his face, tapping him on the chest with his snuff box.
“Endeavour,” he said bitingly, “not to be as cretinous as the forces of law and other. I have merely got you out on bail. In a week’s time you will have to appear before the magistrates and they will send you to the Assizes, and it’s at the Assizes that you will stand or fall.”
“Oh,” said Adrian dismally, “I didn’t realise.”
His bright cloud of happiness had suddenly evaporated and he was back with his nightmares of Rosy being shot at dawn and Samantha making an unsuitable alliance.
“Well,” he said dolefully, “what do I do now?”
“Do!” said Sir Magnus reddening and starting to twitch like an indignant turkey. “You will fetch Rosy and come to a tiny place I have not far from here, and there, if you show a little spirit, we will prepare your defence.”
“Do you know,” said Adrian helplessly, “I don’t think I understand quite how the law functions.”
“You can’t expect to,” said Sir Magnus crisply. “After all, we who administer it don’t understand how it functions, so one can hardly hope you to.”
“It is rather like getting on a train,” said Adrian, “without knowing how to drive it.”
Sir Magnus took a pinch of snuff and sniffed violently. “I shouldn’t worry,” he said. “On a train journey the vital thing is to get out at the right station.”
Sir Magnus’s “tiny place” turned out to be a fairly newly erected mansion, done in the Tudor style, set in its own grounds up on top of the cliffs just outside the town. Rosy was installed in a large shed in the stable yard, and Adrian took up residence with Sir Magnus.
Sir Magnus was, to say the least, an exacting host. To begin with he had a deep and abiding passion for cherry brandy which he consumed (and insisted that Adrian consume) in vast quantities. With the cherry brandy he played a sort of chess game by mixing it with various other substances to see what effects he could achieve. After a couple of days Adrian’s stomach was suffering from the endless permutations that Sir Magnus managed to achieve, and he had definitely decided that cherry brandy mixed with stout and milk and consumed out of a tankard was not really his drink at all.
Sir Magnus also appeared to be able to exist without any sleep. For the first three days he insisted that Adrian tell him the story of his adventures over and over again, while he paced up and down his study or stood at the table mixing a new variation on the cherry brandy theme. At two or three in the morning Adrian would stagger to bed, more dead than alive, and no sooner had his head touched the pillow than Sir Magnus—in a fascinating nightshirt constructed of broderie anglaise—would be standing by his bed shaking him awake to get him to repeat a certain portion of his story.
On the fourth morning Adrian dragged himself down to breakfast, his head throbbing and ringing with the chimes of cherry brandy and his eyelids glued together with lack of sleep. He found Sir Magnus, looking as perky as though he had just returned from a long and luxurious holiday, consuming a mammoth omelette.
“Now,” said Sir Magnus, as though the conversation of the previous night had not ceased, “what we have got to do is this. We have got to get everybody, but everybody connected with this trail of carnage that you have left, as witnesses.”
“I really don’t see what good that is going to do,” said Adrian dispiritedly.
“Think,” said Sir Magnus, scattering a handful of black pepper on a forkful of omelette and shoving it into his mouth. “Think of the jury, dear boy.”
Adrian, toying in a slightly nauseated fashion with a lightly boiled egg, was in no condition to think of the jury.
“What about them?” he asked.
Sir Magnus leant back in his chair, wiped his mouth with a damask napkin, pulled out his snuff box, applied snuff to his nostrils, sneezed volcanically and then blew his nose.
“The beauty of the English legal system,” he said, voice growing rich and fruity, “is that it is built up upon two completely illogical maxims. Firstly, everyone imagines that they are tried by a jury, and this of course Is ridiculous. In fact, you are tried by a judge who instructs jury. Now, let us take the jury themselves. Working on the extraordinary system that twelve men are better than two or six or four, nobody takes into consideration that twelve imbeciles might be more dangerous than two. In my experience all judges and all juries are imbeciles. Therefore the average honest-to-god criminal hasn’t got a chance and the innocent man is doomed before he even steps into the dock.”
Adrian was puzzled.
“I thought it was a very fair system,” he said.
“It’s about as fair as a particularly savage rugby match,” said Sir Magnus coolly.
“I still don’t see,” said Adrian, “how dragging a lot of people from all over the country to this case is going to help me.”
Sir Magnus took another pinch of snuff and sneezed. “That, my dear boy, is because you don’t apply your mind to the problem,” he said. “Now, imagine that I am a sheep dog.” He leaned forward and glared at Adrian under his eyebrows, looking if anything more like a malevolent cairn terrier than a sheep dog. However, Adrian dutifully tried to imagine him as a sheep dog.
“And imagine,” continued Sir Magnus, waving a finger at him, “that the jury are a flock of sheep, and when I say a flock of sheep I am putting their collective intelligence at a much higher level than they normally display.”