Cat's Pajamas (20 page)

“In matters metaphysical,” the blue monk said, “confusion and fear walk hand-in-hand with enlightenment and grace.”

“The ritual takes but an hour,” the yellow monk said. “We shall have you back at the Bellefleur in time for breakfast.”

“If you good friars were to lower your hoods,” Roger asked, “would I perhaps recognize amongst you a familiar face or two?”

The red monk dipped his head and said, “You would be astonished to learn who belongs to the Brotherhood of the Scales.”

The voyage was short and uneventful. For an hour or so the
Caveat
flew southward from the city, then dropped anchor near a feature that the red monk identified as Janus Island, a gloomy forested mass rising from the bay like the shell of an immense sea turtle. Torches were lit. Lanterns glowed to life. A longboat was lowered, hitting the water with a sound like a beaver's tail slapping a mud bank.

Six monks clustered around Roger. Their sweet aroma and polyphonic humming gratified his senses. They directed him down a swaying rope-ladder to the longboat and positioned him in the stern, all the while chanting a song so beautiful he found himself wondering whether humankind might have done better to remain in the Middle Ages. The monks seized the oaks and rowed for Janus Island, the synchronous strokes providing their polyphony with a supplemental rhythm.

Attaining the beach, Roger's sponsors again took him in hand, their skin exuding olfactory choruses of rose and lavender. As the party advanced inland, the terrain became preternaturally dense, the trees packed so tightly together as to make the forest seem a collection of concentric stockades. Chirps and peals and whirrs of every sort poured from the darkness, an insect symphony as pleasing as the monks' sonorous voices.

The moon shone down more brightly still, its shimmering beams spilling through the trees like molten silver from a crucible. Roger shuddered with an amalgam of dread and fascination. His every instinct told him to break free of his sponsors, dive into the bay, and swim to the safety of the Maryland shore, and yet his curiosity kept him on the path, fixed on a destination whose nature he could not divine.

They had marched barely a mile when Roger realized that he and the monks were not alone. A female figure in a flowing gossamer gown darted here and there amongst the trees. She suggested nothing so much as a pagan dryad—though a true dryad, he decided, would enjoy greater freedom than this thrice-hobbled creature, who was freighted not only with a broadsword but also a pair of brass balance-scales and, as if she were about to be executed by a firing squad, a blindfold.

The red monk had evidently noticed the visitor as well, for he now turned to Roger and said, “No, Judge Taney, you are not going mad.”

“Nor are you seeing a ghost,” the white monk said.

The dryad awakened in Roger's soul a timeless and unfathomable yearning. Her hair was a miracle. The long undulating tresses emitted a light of their own, a golden glow that mingled with the moonbeams to form a halo about her head.

“This island is surely of the Chesapeake Bay variety,” he said, “and yet it would seem we've landed in the Cyclades.”

“You are most prescient, sir, for the creature in question is in fact the Greek deity Themis,” the green monk said.

Even as Roger apprehended the visitor in all her splendor, radiant locks and ample hips and full bosom, she melted into the shadows. Themis? Truly? Themis herself, given flesh and essence through a power that only God and his monks could control?

“The ritual is simple, though burdened with a certain ambiguity,” the red monk said. “Before dawn you will perform on Dame Themis an act of raw concupiscence.”

“I don't understand,” Roger said.

“You will subject the goddess to a vigorous carnal embrace,” the orange monk said.

Revulsion coursed through Roger's frame like a wave of nausea. “I am determined to become the paragon of my profession,” he said, his tone vibrant with incredulity and outrage, “but I shan't commit the sin of fornication to attain that goal.”

“Fear not, novitiate,” the white monk said. “Just as Christ is forever married to his Church, so are you now wed to Dame Themis, though for an interval considerably short of eternity.”

“Nay, good friar, I am not married to anyone, as my dear Caroline passed away three years ago.”

“We know all about it,” the orange monk said.

“A bone in the throat,” the green monk said.

“Your second wedding occurred last night,” the red monk insisted. “The fact that you were nearly asleep at the time does not annul the marriage.”

“I find all this most unpersuasive,” Roger said, though he had to admit that the thought of conjugal congress with the dryad did not displease him.

“Perhaps you would care to see the relevant document,” the green monk said.

From his robe he produced a small leather valise, then flipped it open and retrieved a paper that in the combined light of moon and lantern appeared to indeed consecrate a circumscribed marriage between Roger Taney of Baltimore and Dame Themis of Athens. Their union had commenced twenty-four hours earlier and would terminate at cockcrow. Roger's signature featured his characteristic curlicues. The goddess's handwriting was likewise ornate, a marvel of loops and serifs.

“I am entirely astonished,” Roger said.

“In metaphysics all things are possible,” the yellow monk said.

“So this is in fact my wedding night?”

The red monk nodded. “Your bride awaits you.”

For the remainder of the journey Roger fixed his eyes on that nebulous zone where the glow of the torches and the light of the moon shaded to black. He scrutinized the shadows, studied the breaching roots, fixed on the wisps of fog. Dame Themis was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she had retired to her private quarters, that she might prepare for the coming consummation.

A shot-tower loomed out of the darkness, a crumbling pile of stone whose calculated verticality had probably not cooled a cannonball since the War of Independence. Roger's sponsors led him inside, then guided him up a helical staircase that curled along the inner wall like a viper lying dormant in a hollow tree. A door of oak and iron presented itself. The red monk pushed it open.

Never before had the Chief Justice beheld so sumptuous a bedchamber, its windows occluded by velvet curtains, its walls hung with tapestries depicting hunting scenes, its floor covered with an Oriental carpet as thick and soft as Irish moss. Dame Themis's sword of justice stood upright in the far corner. The brass balance-scales rested on the window ledge, one carriage holding a daisy-chain, the other a garland of lilies.

Roger's bride was utterly naked, stripped of both her blindfold and her gown. She lay supine on the mattress, her luminous hair flowing across the pillow, her concavity beckoning like a portal to Paradise, whilst east of Eden her firm and noble breasts canted in opposite directions, one north, the other south. Her eyes, unhanded now, were as large and golden as Spanish doubloons.

What most caught Roger's attention was neither his bride's face, nor even her form, but rather the way the monks had presumed to compromise her powers of speech with a silken gag and constrain her limbs through an elaborate network of shackles, chains, and locks held fast to the floor by iron cleats.

The Chief Justice was quick to bring a complaint before his sponsors.

“We can assure you that the chains are essential,” the red monk replied.

“In the throes of passion, Dame Themis is known to grasp her lover's windpipe and squeeze,” the blue monk elaborated. “Your strangulation would be no less deadly for being unintended.”

“And the silken kerchief—likewise necessary?” Roger said.

“Before we added it to the ritual, Dame Themis's ardor would often drive her to bite off her lover's ear,” the orange monk said.

“Good friars, I am appalled,” Roger said. “How can you imagine I would assent to know my wife in so barbaric a manner?”

“For many centuries the Brotherhood sought a gentler method of instructing its novitiates,” the blue monk said. “Alas, they discovered that a certain theatricality is the
sine qua non
of a proper initiation.”

“Tonight you will learn exactly how it feels to violate justice,” the red monk said, “so that you will never commit such a transgression in the future.”

“I would never have a woman against her will,” Roger asserted.

“Against her will?” the red monk said in an amused tone. “As you set about acquiring this carnal knowledge, your bride may indeed groan and whimper in apparent distress. Please know that these noises are all for show, the better to impress the event on your psyche.”

“For show?” Roger said.

“Dame Themis is a consummate actress,” the white monk said.

“My conscience rebels at this arrangement,” Roger said.

“And now we leave you to your lesson,” the red monk said, resting an affirming hand on Roger's shoulder for the second time that night. “We are confident you will learn it well.”

Against all odds and defying his every expectation, the monks were but five minutes gone when Roger found himself in a condition of acute arousal. He fixed his gaze on the object of his desire. His mute bride bucked against the mattress, her chains clanking together with a discordant but oddly affecting music.

He got undressed as quickly as he could, his breeches snagging briefly on his manhood.

The evening unfolded as the monks had foretold, Dame Themis issuing unhappy sounds and muffled protests throughout the ritual. Roger closed his eyes and concentrated on the lesson, and when at last the spasm arrived he understood his seed to be a great gift, a numinous filament from Arachne's loom, perhaps, or a segment of the thread by which Theseus had solved the Labyrinth of Minos. Justice deserved no less.

It was only with the approach of dawn, as the
Caveat
blew back up the Potomac in thrall to a violent tempest, that Roger felt prepared to put his wedding night into words. Sitting with the red monk and the white in their private cabin, imbibing their wine and reveling in their conversation, he attempted to narrate his recent liaison in all its cryptic beauty.

“It truly seemed that my bride did not reciprocate my passion.” Roger took a generous swallow from his goblet.

“Dame Themis plays her part with great skill,” the red monk said.

“Her bleating still echoes in my ears,” he said, recalling her impersonation of agony. “I am hoping this wine might silence it.”

“If not the wine, then the passage of time,” the white monk said.

The red monk stiffened his index finger and plunged it into the shadowy depths of his cowl, presumably to relieve an itching nose. “What matters is that you have absorbed every sensation that attends the abuse of Dame Themis. In the decades to come, whenever you begin to render a brutish opinion, the erotic fire you experienced last night will start coursing through your flesh.”

“Whereupon you will summon all your inner strength and bank those terrible flames,” the white monk said.

“With God as my witness, such a conflagration will never again prosper in my loins.” Roger inhaled deeply, sucking in the orchid glory of the red monk, the honeysuckle elegance of the white. “I shall resist the enticements of injustice with every fiber of my being.”

The white monk filled his third goblet of the evening. “But, ah, such felicitous enticements—yes?”

Roger heaved a sigh. “Felicitous. Yes.”

“You can see how easily a jurist might become addicted to iniquity,” the white monk said.

“I would never have expected it,” said Roger. “I am not so well educated a man as I thought.”

“Metaphysics can be as subtle as the serpent,” the red monk said. “Welcome to the Brotherhood of the Scales.”

In the interval stretching from his first Supreme Court case to the outbreak of the Civil War, Roger Brooke Taney made four separate journeys across the Chesapeake Bay in search of the place where he and Dame Themis had consummated their mayfly marriage. He never found the shot-tower—indeed, he never even found Janus Island. And yet he did not for an instant doubt that the Brotherhood of the Scales existed, or that the friars had sponsored his membership in that arcane organization, or that he had connected with a dryad sometime after midnight on April 23, 1836.

To his infinite satisfaction, not one of the opinions Roger wrote during the first twenty-two years of his career was accompanied by the concupiscent symptoms that the friars had taught him to recognize. Had the despoilment of Dame Themis wrought a cure so complete as to purge pettiness and ignorance from his psyche forever? Or was his congenital sense of justice so acute that he'd never needed the ritual in the first place? In any event, it seemed clear that the name of Taney would be handed down to history as a synonym for integrity, an antonym for malice, and the very definition of fairness.

There were two cases in particular for which he believed he might be revered. The first traced to a suit brought by the Charles River Bridge Company, which charged travelers a small fee to cross its eponymous bridge, against a nascent competitor, who permitted pedestrians, horsemen, and carriages to pass over the same watercourse for free. The plaintiffs contended that their original charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had granted them a monopoly, but the Taney Court took a different view. The charter in question, noted the majority, did not use the word “monopoly.” Ergo, the ambiguity would be resolved in favor of the public. Roger Taney: man of the people, guardian of toll-free bridges.

Then there was the controversial and distasteful business of the Negro. Dred Scott was a black African slave whose peripatetic master, an army surgeon named John Emerson, had moved first from Missouri to Illinois, and thence to Fort Snelling in the Wisconsin Territory, and finally back to Missouri. In 1846 Dr. Emerson died, whereupon Dred Scott sued Irene Emerson, the doctor's widow, for his freedom. Because Illinois had always been a free state, ran the plaintiff's specious and naïve logic, and because slavery had been banned from the Wisconsin Territory under the Missouri Compromise, he had spent much of his life in a condition other than bondage, and therefore he could no longer be regarded as chattel. For some perverse reason Dred Scott had won his suit in a lower St. Louis court, but then the Missouri State Supreme Court had wisely overturned the earlier decision.